Continues Discussions Regarding GSC Pay
By SIENNA REINDERS NEWS EDITOR
Fordham University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) is currently undergoing discussions with Fordham’s Graduate Student Workers Union (FGSW) regarding compensation for the Graduate Student Council (GSC) president and vice president positions, according to Justin Bell, vice president of Marketing and Communications at Fordham. The ongoing conversation has delayed GSC operations and created financial issues for the current GSC president, Anya Wang GSAS ’26.
The discussion surrounds the question of whether the positions should be defined as work or service to the university. Bell provided The Fordham Ram with a fact sheet regarding “claims of the CWA or their members,” which was last updated on Sept. 12. The document defines “service” as a position that provides
The Fordham Ram
Fordham Launches Student Volunteer Corps
By ANDREW MASSIE & SIDNEY BLASCO
The Student Volunteer Corps, a new program launching this fall, will aim to connect Fordham University students with the local Bronx community through long-term volunteer opportunities.
Created by Fordham’s Office of External Affairs, the Corps aims to expand service opportunities for undergraduates beyond Urban Plunge — a three-day pre-orientation program where first-years volunteer in New York City neighborhoods. It will foster ongoing engagement in areas like food security, housing and environmental justice, while also maintaining relationships between the university and community partners.
“The Fordham Volunteer Corps is a brand new program that's really designed to connect students with projects that are both guided by local means and our local community partners,”
Fordham’s Evolved Brand is Divisive; Admin Remains Confident it’s the Right Decision
By ANDREW MASSIE FEATURES EDITOR
On move-in weekend, first-years threaded through piles of duffel bags and minifridges toward the campus bookstore, where the newest Fordham University gear had just hit the shelves.
“As our new incoming class arrived for orientation, they started to get new swag,” Justin Bell, the university’s vice
By JACK MCDONALD ADVERTISING DIRECTOR
was shared with members of the
university on Sept. 3 via an email by President Tania Tetlow. Jacobs began his role at Fordham University in the summer of 2019. He previously served as Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Santa Clara University, a Jesuit institution in California.
For his nearly 40-year career in Catholic education, Jacobs has been a professor of chemistry, in addition to his roles in academic administration.
Tetlow expressed gratitude for Jacobs’ commitment to Fordham and his navigation of the SEE JACOBS, PAGE 5
president for marketing and communications, said in an interview with The Fordham Ram. “We had it in the bookstore … when students are moving in and their families are shopping, they could actually find that new merchandise.”
The logo on the new gear is no longer the block “F” that generations before have worn, but a new
Gothic “F.” This change is the visible edge of a university-wide strategy which prioritizes a clearer, more consistent identity that can narrow awareness gaps, increase prestige and steady the story Fordham tells about itself.
Why the Change Matters Bell says the new visual
By EMMA LEONARDI ASST. NEWS EDITOR
This article serves as a continuation of The Fordham Ram’s previous story covering the new robot delivery service on the Fordham University Rose Hill campus.
As previously mentioned, the delivery robots currently service five on-campus food establishments: Bronx Bagel Company, Così, Dagger John’s, The Grotto and Urban Kitchen. The robots function during the
hours of 7:30 a.m. to 9 p.m. and deliver from each location during the hours that align with both the establishment’s normal hours of operation as well as the delivery hours.
At the time of publishing, the robots only allow for payment through dining dollars or credit card and require a delivery fee of $3.49 regardless of the dining location or specific order.
“[The robots] make deliveries to 32 locations on campus, including Walsh Library, all
PAGE 5
COURTESY OF SANTA CLARA UNIVERSITY
Provost Jacobs brought 31 years of experience in Catholic higher education when he was appointed.
Fordham recently updated its light post banners to reflect the new Gothic “F.”
Fordham University’s Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Dennis C. Jacobs, Ph.D., will be retiring at the end of the 2025-26 academic year. The news
ANDREW MASSIE/THE FORDHAM RAM
PUBLIC SAFETY BRIEFS
Off Campus
Sept. 13
2:09 p.m.
On Saturday, a student reported while in front of 570 E Fordham Road, two offenders threw a glass bottle at the reporter and then assaulted the reporter. The supervisor responded. The student suffered pain to their head, a bloody lip and scrapes on their legs. FUEMS responded and transported the reporter to St. Barnabas Hospital. The reporter declined the NYPD. The supervisor contacted the Resident Director on duty.
Dealy Hall Sept. 12
4:45 p.m.
On Friday, there was a fire alarm at Dealy Hall, the supervisor and FDNY responded. The investigation revealed a minor smoke condition inside of Starbucks triggered the alarm. The supervisor ventilated the area and reset the alarm.
Fordham Plaza Sept. 12
5:30 a.m.
On Sunday, there was a water leak on the ninth floor of Fordham Plaza. The supervisor responded. The investigation revealed a water heater inside a cabinet in the kitchen area caused the leak. The supervisor notified facilities to respond and repair the leak.
Off Campus
Sept. 12
8:47 p.m.
On Friday, a community member reported the theft of property from their car which was parked on Southern Boulevard. The supervisor responded. The reporter said they parked their car on Southern Boulevard at 6 p.m. When they returned the passenger side window was smashed and property was taken. The supervisor called the NYPD to respond and prepare a report.
Off Campus
Sept. 12
8:47 p.m.
On Friday, there was a stuck occupied elevator in the McShane Center. The supervisor responded and notified the elevator company. A technician responded and freed the occupants.
Wednesday Sept. 17
STEM Career Fair
Great Hall in McShane 1 p.m.
The fair open to all STEM industries and is designed to provide the opportunity to meet employers looking for students and potential interns from a variety of areas within the STEM field.
Get Paid to Show Your Dorm through this Campus Job
By JORDAN DONEGAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Flyers have recently been seen around Edwards Parade advertising a Dorm Room Ambassador position in the Office of Undergraduate Admissions.
The position, intended primarily for first-years, allows students to showcase their dorm rooms to prospective students and families, according to Patricia Peek, senior associate vice president and Dean of Admissions.
According to Peek, the position has been in place for “a few” admissions cycles and pays $16.50 an hour for 10 to 15 hours a week.
Peek described the position as “exciting” in an email to The Fordham Ram. “It is
an opportunity for current students to assist the admissions office in showcasing our residential life options to visitors,” Peek said. “It’s an opportunity for students to show pride in the way they’ve decorated their rooms; provide visitors with the opportunity to see the layout and amenities of our rooms; as well as to get prospective students excited about decorating their own rooms when the time comes.”
The job primarily requires students to be in their dorm rooms during tours for prospective or admitted students and families, but students may be given additional responsibilities such as virtual assignments or office work, according to the flyer.
When asked, Peek shared that the program is aimed
mainly at first-year students because prospective families want to see the first-year residential life experience at Fordham University.
She says that while giving tours of their dorms, students will explain how the roommate selection process works, the programs offered through residential life and how housing on campus has “helped them find community at Fordham.”
“This program is one of many ways students either work for or volunteer with the Office of Admission,” Peek said. “The structure of this position allows us to find students who are interested in showcasing their rooms and whose schedules align with our tour times.”
Peek said that the position
was developed through a partnership between the Office of Undergraduate Admissions and the Office of Student Employment. It is targeted at students who wish to interact with prospective families and are excited to share what their experience living in Fordham’s housing has been like.
While all of the Dorm Room Ambassador job positions have been filled for the 202526 academic school year, Peek reinforces both the impact of the position as a featured aspect of Fordham’s admission tours as well as the appealing nature of the job to students.
“The structure of this position allows us to find students who are interested in showcasing their rooms and whose schedules align with our tour times,” she said.
This Week at Fordham
Thursday Sept. 18 Humanities Day McShane Campus Center 311 4 p.m. Connect with Fordham alumni and employers who have relied on their humanities education to overcome the inevitable challenges and setbacks that accompany meaningful career growth! Friday Sept. 19 Internship Workshop
Run through the essentials of applying to internships, discussing everything from resumes to crafting your application game plan with members of the Career Center for your internship hunt.
Wednesday Sept. 17 Guacamole Guide
Ram Café 2 p.m.
Chef Andrew Bell will lead a class teaching you how to make 3 types of guacamole: Classic, Charred Corn and Bacon and Mango and Dried Chili. Space is limited so RSVP today. Saturday Sept. 20
Stewardship
River House 10 a.m. This reflective, non-denominational journey will include stops along the river for readings, reflections, and performances. The walk ends at Soundview Park with a community celebration.
Mobile App Updates Intend to Improve User Experience
By SIENNA REINDERS & RISHIKA LINGAMDINNE
Fordham University recently launched a redesigned mobile app on Sept. 1. The updates give the app a cleaner layout and new features designed to improve app usage by students, faculty and staff, according to CharlesHenri Sanson, associate vice president of DevOps.
“The new layout makes it easier for users to accomplish tasks and take action while onthe-go,” Sanson said.
The update was motivated by several goals, including making the app more useful in daily life and adding features requested by the Fordham community.
The designers also aligned the app’s user interface with Fordham’s new evolved brand identity. Planning for the update began in March, and after five months of work, the redesign was released to coincide with the unveiling of the university’s refreshed brand, according to Sanson.
The project was completed internally by teams from the departments of Information Technology (IT), the Office of
the Provost and Marketing and Communications. It was led by Marlyn Soto-Pichardo, director of Application Services for DevOps, Sara Sapienza, digital campus experience manager in the Office of the Provost, Matt Vincent, senior director of Online Engagement for Marketing and Communications and Bobby Espiritu, assistant director of DevOps. Aside from staff time, the redesign did not create any additional costs to the university, according to Sanson.
In conducting the redesign, designers considered student feedback regarding how the app could be improved. The most notable addition is access to class schedules, complete with building and room numbers, a feature that students had consistently asked for, according to Sanson.
Some other noteable updates to the Fordham app include longer login sessions, the ability to customize your dashboard, more specific and personalized content based on your role at the university, integration of enrollment and account details and custom event-centered notifications
such as a reminder for advising appointments.
Student input was central to the redesign, with Sapienza frequently collecting feedback through student surveys and testing sessions on campus.
“I really like the redesign. I didn’t find the app very useful last year and I barely even used it because it was hard to use and didn’t
have very many beneficial features,” said Sierra Rock, FCRH ’28. “But now, I love being able to see my class schedule with all of the class details neatly laid out. I use the app almost every day now.”
Looking ahead, Fordham plans to continue to update the app with features for both students and employees.
“We intend to build on this [update] throughout the semester,” said the Office of Information Technology. “We’re excited to keep enhancing the app with new features and functionality in the weeks ahead.”
Community members are invited to get involved in user research through emailing dcx@fordham.edu.
Students Have to Qualify for Physical Identification Cards
By JORDAN DONEGAN STAFF WRITER
The Fordham University spokesperson Jennifer Petra said physical ID cards remain available for students who do not have access to a “compatible” mobile device. She confirmed that electronic ID cards are going to be the default for incoming firstyear and transfer students.
Last week, The Fordham
Ram reported that physical ID cards were now only available upon request. However, in a recent email to The Fordham Ram, Petra said that students have to “qualify” to receive a physical ID card, highlighting that almost all of Fordham’s first-year students have received an electronic ID.
“The electronic ID is the default for incoming students, and only a small
number of students have requested to receive a physical ID,” Petra said in an email responding to The Fordham Ram.
“Almost all of our 4700+ first-year graduate and undergraduate students have eIDs and have been utilizing them to access campus resources.”
Petra said that students who do not have access to
a mobile device must submit a form to request a physical ID card, and that each request is reviewed “thoroughly” before a physical ID can be issued.
“Students who do not have a compatible mobile device can submit a request form online for a physical ID card,” Petra said in an email. “Each request is thoroughly reviewed, and anyone who qualifies will be contacted to
schedule an appointment to pick up a physical card.”
Petra noted that a few students have reached out to Fordham’s IT Service Desk requesting help troubleshooting their electronic ID. She said that the IT staff has provided assistance for these students to resolve their issues.
Petra encourages students to visit Fordham’s eID web page for more information about the electronic ID.
USG Awards Orientation Rose Hill Club of the Month
By SOFIA SEMPER COLUMNIST
The Fordham Rose Hill United Student Government (USG) met on Thursday, Sept. 11, to discuss upcoming events and public concerns.
Executive President Lucas Hjertberg, FCRH ’26, and Executive Vice President Andrew McDonald, FCRH ’26, began the meeting by presenting the Orientation Rose Hill Club with the award for August Club of the Month. Hjertberg then reiterated that the Club of the Month nomination form can be found on the USG website, so the student body can give their input.
McDonald reminded USG members that their retreat is scheduled for Sept. 20, and that they are still working on finalizing the retreat activities.
Vice President of Student Life Luc Angus, FCRH ’26, announced that the upcoming Keating Steps is
scheduled for Friday, Sept. 26.
He then presented a budget request for funding for raffle prizes, which include a Ninja CREAMi, a JBL Speaker and “The Lion King” Broadway tickets, among other things. The budget will also fund ice cream novelties for the event. Both budget requests were approved by USG.
The USG Vice President of Operations Tina Pathak, GSB ’27, presented the New Club Process Spreadsheet for this academic year so that all USG members will better understand the new club application process and will be more prepared to answer students’ questions in general. She then showed the steps students need to follow to create a new club — after her committee updates the USG website, students will be able to access the form through the USG or Operations Committee website. The submitted form will then go directly to the Operations Committee. Pathak explained that she hopes to
improve the club process and create an overall more efficient system regarding new club approvals.
Vice President of Fordham College Rose Hill (FCRH) Mary Hawthorn, FCRH ’26, said that the FCRH Dean’s Council had their first meeting, which consisted only of returning members, and that they have created their meeting schedule for the semester. Applications for any and all new members closed on Sunday, Sept. 14. Hawthorn also announced that she is still planning Donuts with the Dean — an event where students can talk with administrators and learn more about the FCRH Dean’s Council — tentatively scheduled for early October. She also brought up two public concerns that arose during the Dean’s Council meeting. The first concern raised was students requesting clearer information about
the new Pre-Law advising system, to which Hawthorn responded that she plans to create an Instagram post explaining the new changes. The second concern was about who FCRH seniors should contact for advising questions while the current dean is on maternity leave. She explained that multiple students have brought up this concern, specifically with worries about spring course registration and for getting advisor holds removed. Angus said that he recently reached out to the Dean’s Office with this concern and was told that Senior Executive Secretary Katherine Brooks is in charge of checking the FCRH Senior Dean email inbox and will be helping students.
Vice President of Gabelli School of Business (GSB) Hunter Gholson, GSB ’26, said that he had his first GSB Dean’s Council meeting last week and that they
are welcoming many new members into the committee. He also announced that they have two events coming up — an alumni event called “Rams to Riches” and their annual GSB Club Fair on Sept. 22. The Vice President of Sustainability Ayden Johnson, FCRH ’27, announced that his committee welcomed 32 new members and that he is looking for a larger meeting space to accommodate the increase. Johnson recently met with his e-board, who decided that they want to host a sustainability panel during Sustainability Week.
Vice President of Dining and Facilities Maddie Ando, FCRH ’27, announced that she is working on reconstructing the work order system so that students can check the progress of their work order requests.
USG will meet again for their weekly meetings in Bepler Commons Sept. 18.
The new Fordham mobile app redesign launched on Sept. 1.
MARY HAWTHORN/ THE FORDHAM RAM
Fordham’ s New Visual Identity Fosters Discussions
identity grew from the university’s most extensive audience research to date and a stark finding close to home. “Within the tri-state in our backyard, 16% … have never heard of Fordham. 21% has heard of Fordham, but couldn’t tell you that it’s a university,” he said.
Testing the old block F, the research “found less than 17% of New Yorkers could actually identify the block ‘F’ as Fordham.” Bell added that even by adding the ram to the logo, the number of New Yorkers who could identify the logo as Fordham only grew to 20%.
Yield and prestige were among other reasons for the rebranding. Fordham hovers around a 10% yield annually, meaning among all of the students that are admitted to Fordham, 10% will enroll.
Among the prospective undergraduates, 21% of those already in Fordham’s marketing funnel believe Fordham is very prestigious, compared with 39% of unaffiliated prospects, according to a slide deck shared by Bell with The Ram. “A strong, consistent brand should shift this so that as you get closer to the brand, prestige doesn’t suffer,” he added.
The purpose of the new font is as much verbal as visual. Bell describes four brand pillars, “depth, community, spirit and action,” and a campaign line meant to make Jesuit values legible to Generation Z. “That’s what ‘For What Matters’ is,” he said. “Our tagline, ‘The Jesuit University of New York,’ remains the same.”
The university’s Brand FAQ echoes that distinction: “Fordham will always be
‘The Jesuit University of New York,” the FAQ page says. “However, the tagline will no longer be locked up as part of Fordham’s visual identity … ‘For What Matters’ is a campaign slogan.”
The University’s Case
The university says the new letterform is not a break from history but a distillation of it. The FAQ says the Gothic letter “directly connects to Fordham’s distinctive architecture … providing a sense of historical continuity and timelessness.”
Bell points to the mark’s hidden references. “We do have Easter eggs … influenced by our traditions, who we are and our architecture,” he said, down to “two vertical pillars” that are supposed to resemble McKeon Hall and the Leon Lowenstein Center at the Lincoln Center campus.
He also stresses that this is bigger than a logo. “A brand is a living, breathing thing … What we’ve done is we’ve evolved it, we’ve polished it,” Bell said, adding that a brand health platform will track how the identity performs “quarter by quarter, year over year.”
Early readouts, he said, are encouraging: “Since the launch, we’re sitting about 87% positive sentiment in the marketplace,” based on social listening and message analysis.
Tradition and Taste Collide
For some students, the change lands like a shift in atmosphere. “[It] feels like Fordham has been stripped of its tradition with the minimalism aesthetic,” said Grace Chen, FCRH ’29, in response to an Instagram Story by The Ram.
“The new logo looks cheap and blended in with the thousand other minimalist / corporate logos,” Cleo Sellers, FCLC ’28, also said in response
to the Instagram Story.
The evolved visual identity was announced through an Instagram post by Fordham’s official Instagram page on July 31. Responses by students and alumni came rolling in quickly after the university updates were released.
Georgia Bernhard, FCLC ’28, launched a petition to “Preserve Fordham’s Emblem” the day of the announcement, expecting perhaps a few hundred signatures as “some sort of funnel for the dissent.”
“There should be something at least somewhat tangible to show how many people are in opposition to it, and I had no
idea it would spread as widely as it did,” she said. Her critique goes beyond aesthetics. “Essentially, I think it unfairly effaces the history of the school,” she said in an interview with The Ram. “The aesthetic legacy the school has cultivated throughout time.”
Bernhard and a co-signer took their argument directly to Bell. “We communicated our points as to why we think the new branding isn’t fitting Fordham, that it doesn’t properly center its history and its legacy, and it puts those things in a backseat in favor of optimizing its marketing,” she said. “I think it’s good to try … At the very least, it’s good that they are being made aware that many people in Fordham’s community are against it.”
Bell calls that kind of friction inevitable. “Change is hard,” he said. “The most complex brand evolutions are professional sports teams and universities because there’s an emotional connection to the brand.”
Alumni and identity
John Choy, FCRH ’12, had a similar initial reaction to many students. However, after looking further into the new brand initiative, he understood the university’s choices.
“I remember looking on Instagram,” Choy said. “It kind of came as a shock to me.”
After watching the symbolism video, he remained skeptical that viewers would notice the “Easter eggs.” “As an outside viewer, I think it’s hard to actually believe that all of those things were intentional … Without having seen that video or having read the website, people don’t know what each curve and point mean,” he said.
He also offered a blunt assessment of the old lettermark, something that research from the University
also found. “The old F looks like a high school logo,” Choy said. “It’s not really unique. It’s iconic to really only Fordham students.”
Choy said the refresh could be the kind of jolt Fordham needs in a city where New York University and Columbia dominate people’s minds; after that, the choices often seem arbitrary. “It should be Fordham,” he said. “It always should have been Fordham. I think this rebrand will help push us back up there.”
Looking Forward
While some changes will roll out over time, according to Bell, many changes can already be seen on campus. Aside from the new merchandise in the bookstore, Keating Hall has a new banner portraying the Gothic “F.” Lightpost flags have also been changed to reflect the new logo. Athletics will transition to the new “F” beginning in spring 2026, while keeping the ram head.
Other pieces will arrive in phases: channels like marketing material will change first, then the long-run work of uniforms, facilities and fields.
“We’re not racing to change everything overnight,” Bell said, citing budget and lifecycle realities. “Where we are prioritizing is in the channels that we own. Website, social media, digital boards, [and] updating all of our materials for the new undergraduate recruitment cycle.”
Internally, the team will gauge awareness and perceptions across audiences as the new logo and message settle in.
For skeptics, the new logo remains something to be felt rather than decoded. For advocates, its promise rests in consistency and clarity. Between them lies the work of persuasion: showing, not telling, what a Gothic “F” can carry.
ANDREW MASSIE/THE FORDHAM RAM
A new hat which was given to first-year students at orientation on Justin Bell’s desk.
SOPHIE MASELLI/THE FORDHAM RAM
After Fordham announced the rebranding, they put up a new banne r outside of Keating Hall.
Fordham Says Farewell to Provost Dennis Jacobs
FROM JACOBS, PAGE 1
COVID-19 pandemic. “He has worked tirelessly on behalf of our faculty and students, helping us navigate the challenges of the pandemic, strengthening our academic programs, launching new degrees both in-person and online, and leading an ambitious vision for the sciences that secured the largest gift in
Fordham’s history,” Tetlow said in her email announcement.
Tetlow also thanked the provost for giving the university nearly a full year to launch a nationwide search for the next administrator to fill his role. “He [Jacobs] will continue to serve fully in his role this coming year, focused on bringing
to life the next steps of our strategic plan,” she said.
University spokesperson Bob Howe provided The Fordham Ram with a statement from Tetlow. “Dennis Jacobs brought visionary leadership to Fordham, emphasizing academic excellence and student success,” Tetlow said. “We all wish him a
happy, productive, and long retirement.”
Jacobs said he discussed this decision with his family and put a lot of thought into this next step in his life. “Since 2019, it has been my honor and privilege to serve as Fordham’s chief academic officer,” Jacobs said. He reaffirmed his particular commitment to university
life and success during the pandemic, which was stated in Tetlow’s email. He also noted the launch of online and inperson degree programs and the hiring of a new Dean of Arts and Sciences. Jacobs plans to return to the Midwest to reunite with his family following retirement to celebrate his 40th wedding anniversary.
Food Delivery Robots Continue to Serve Fordham Students
FROM ROBOTS, PAGE 1
residence halls and Edwards Parade,” Orla Fitzsimons, director of Dining Business Operations and Contract Management, said in an email. “We are currently reviewing the scope and possibility to expand to other locations on campus. Robots have the ability to deliver within the Fordham campus but not to outside locations.”
Ram Hospitality workers and student employees work together to run these robots during delivery hours, with the former fulfilling the orders and the latter acting as managers.
Fitzsimons could not share the overall cost of the robots for Ram Hospitality, as the installation was managed and executed by Aramark through their connections with Grubhub and Starship Technologies. However, she noted that the integration did not cost Fordham Information Technology (IT) anything, and
that, “ongoing, the $3.49 delivery fee will cover student worker costs, maintenance and replacement costs.”
When asked about the potential for theft, Fitzsimons said that there are measures in place to deter any potential issues. “All robots have cameras at multiple angles which serves as a theft deterrent. All robots are locked away in a secure location at the end of each day. Additionally, all robots are GPS monitored and the Starship team can always see the exact location and remotely take control, when needed,” she said.
The robots are also weatherproof and will operate year-round in accordance with the university. “After routine snow removal managed by Fordham facilities crews the robots can navigate the sidewalks,” Fitzsimons said.
Fitzsimons also provided a statement on how the idea for the robots was introduced, as
well as a brief explanation behind the implementation of the system on Fordham’s Rose Hill campus.
“Ram Hospitality presented the idea to USG who were enthusiastic and supported the idea,” she wrote. “The
concept is student centric, introduces new technologies to campus and provides student employment.”
New Volunteer Corps Aims to Connect Students To Local Communities
FROM CORPS, PAGE 1
said Amanda Caputo, FCRH ’23, an External Affairs Division employee. “It’s really about building authentic relationships with New York City communities while also living out Fordham’s mission of community engagement and solidarity.”
Travis Proulx, vice president for external affairs at Fordham, said the goal is for every student to graduate with “some type of real-world experience as part of their broader Fordham experience.”
Another incentive for creating the program was to
expand student involvement.
“According to survey data, about 90% of Fordham students are already graduating with some type of experiential learning under their belt,” Proulx said.
This program differs from other CCEL opportunities, as students will have the opportunity to see tangible impacts of their work in the community. “Students can continue their engagements, build relationships with the community partners that we're connecting them with,” Caputo said. “I think it’s also an opportunity for students
to make friends … grow as leaders, strengthen career skills.”
This program will also connect students from Rose Hill and Lincoln Center, strengthening “relationships with community partners and to really support and be responsive to the needs of our local community organizations,” according to Caputo.
Caputo said her own service work at Fordham shaped her professional path. “It’s why I decided to stay at Fordham for my career and do work like this,” she said. “I love community work, I love working with students, so it really has more of an impact than folks might think.”
Elspeth Fraser, GSB ’28, said she enjoys the volunteer programs that Fordham has to offer. “With Urban Plunge, I also did community service at a block party where we helped hand out food,” Fraser said, adding that she enjoyed being able to interact with the Bronx community.
But an issue that Fraser experienced with Urban Plunge was the lack of scheduling availability. “It’s tough because it might not line up with your schedule.
And like POTS [Part of the Solution], it’s harder to get a shift because everyone from Fordham is volunteering there,” Fraser said. According to Proulx, the Corps aims to address this scheduling issue through its design.
One of its first initiatives will include a partnership with New York City Parks on the 2025 tree count, where student volunteers will identify and measure trees across the city.
Other projects “might focus on education, food security, housing, environmental justice, advocacy …” Proulx said.
The Corps will be funded through support from Urban Plunge alumni and the Office of External Affairs, though the exact funding amount is currently undecided, as it depends on student participation.
Proulx said that as of Sept. 15, there were 150 students signed up for the Sept. 16 information session.
“The goal is to launch in November and by the end of this academic year, to hopefully have about 500 students signed up for the first year,” Proulx said.
Eva Verstegen, FCRH ’28, attended the Tuesday information session. As a transfer student, she didn’t have
the opportunity to participate in Urban Plunge, so this initiative interested her. She hopes it will hold her accountable to “show up for the [Bronx] community,” and will be “something stable and … recurring” in her Fordham experience.
The corps also has partnerships with other universities, which will “offset the costs associated with the institution,” Proulx said. “Sometimes you have major donors or alumni or foundations that ultimately provide resources to be able to deliver upon projects.”
The corps is “sending out campus-wide emails and giving people an opportunity to actually meet with us oneon-one,” according to Proulx. A social media account is in the works, as well as a page on the Fordham website. Students who want to get involved can email communityaffairs@fordham. edu.
“We want to create an opportunity that every student at Fordham feels comfortable pursuing,” Proulx said. “It’s really why we are here, to be able to help create that connective tissue and those opportunities with the community for students.”
COURTESY OF @STARSHIPROBOTS
Fordham has several robots on campus that are used to deliver food to students.
COURTESY OF @FORDHAMCCEL Fordham ’s volunteer corps connects students with volunteer work.
GSAS Administration Considers Changes to GSC Officer’ s Compensation
“service to the GSAS student community” and “work” as a position that provides “work for the University.”
GSAS began discussing the distinction in the fall of 2024, and has since come to the conclusion that the positions constitute service, not work, according to Bell. However, this opinion differs from that of the FGSW, a chapter of the Communication Workers of America (CWA).
The fact sheet asserted that while the positions do not constitute work, the administration still believes they should be compensated. According to the fact sheet, the university does not believe the positions should be compensated as a Graduate Assistantship (GA), as they currently are — according to the Fordham website, a GA is a position that provides graduate students with employment in a specific department while also providing financial support. Typical GA duties include faculty assistance, tutoring and teaching — however, conversations regarding what this compensation should look like are ongoing, according to Bell.
“While GSAS maintains that the GSC officer roles constitute service rather than work, GSAS has always been willing to remunerate this service,” the fact sheet said. “It has been GSAS’ position that compensation should take the form of a flatrate stipend, rather than a Graduate Assistantship, because the duties of GSC leadership positions differ significantly from other GA work assignments. Many universities provide some form of remuneration for serving on a student council; however, it is not common to treat these leadership positions as “employment.” It should be noted that in the GSC constitution, department and program representatives are similarly compensated with a stipend payment for the year in recognition of their service.”
Historically, the GSC president and vice president have been compensated according to the GSC constitution, which states, “For services rendered to the GSC, Officers shall receive a stipend for both the summer and academic year, which shall be fixed at the May budget meeting each year, but which shall be no less than the lowest full stipend of any graduate student worker and no higher than the highest full stipend of any graduate student worker in the GSAS.”
Previously, their wages have been equal to the “Teaching Fellowship” stipend, meaning they received $37,000 distributed bi-weekly over a
nine-month period, according to Wang. During the summer, students in these positions were also awarded a $5,000 Graduate Assistantship to cover the work that needed to be done during the summer break, Wang said.
In a meeting with thenGSAS Dean Ann Gaylin at the beginning of the 2025 spring semester, Wang, the then vice president of GSC, and Preston Carter, GSAS ’26, the then GSC president, were informed of the ongoing discussion regarding compensation for their positions, according to Wang. The officers were also given written confirmation about the possible changes in March 2025, according to Bell.
In an interview with The Fordham Ram, Wang said that the GSC has experienced operational difficulties as a result of the ongoing conversation about the president and vice president positions.
While Wang had already been elected as the 202526 president, the GSC was unable to elect a vice president at the end of the spring semester, according to Wang. Wang said that the GSAS administration had not provided an updated job description for the role, resulting in them not being able to send out applications.
“The GSAS has further harmed the functioning of the GSAS by all-but-removing the Vice President Position,” Wang said in a letter that was sent to students and faculty on Aug. 22 titled: GSC Weekly, Issue 0.
As a result of not electing a vice president, Wang said she was expected to do the work of the vice president and the president over the summer, both of which include an 18hour per week employment, while still receiving the same summer stipend amount.
“In sum, the university’s offer—curiously, against their legal counsel’s own position that my work was not to be compensated—was for me to do double the work for pay that barely covered my costof-living, which would also have a high chance of not taking its intended effect due to not being able to elect a VP or representative body, since there was no job description of that position forthcoming,” Wang said in the letter.
In response to the GSC’s claims regarding the GSAS’s role in a vice president not being elected, the fact sheet said, “Given that the University and the CWA have not yet reached an agreement about the status of the GSC officers and the nature of their responsibilities, no job description can be provided.” The fact sheet further stated, “In May, GSC
informed GSAS that they had decided to postpone holding elections for a VP or other department representatives until the status of the GSC officer positions is resolved.”
Bell provided a statement from the administration regarding the inability of the GSC to elect representatives, who are compensated with a yearly stipend. “Moreover, GSAS’s request to receive a list of elected representatives has gone unanswered,” the statement said. “To ensure that representatives will be paid in a timely fashion, GSAS has reached out directly to departments and former reps to construct a list of elected representatives, and is committed to paying them the stipend for their service earlier this year than has been the past practice.”
The statement also said that communication with GSC regarding elections for representatives has been difficult.
“The communications from GSC have been confusing and contradictory since May,” the statement said. “Some communications and conversations have indicated that there have been no elections. Others have said that they have been held. Efforts by GSAS to receive written confirmation of the elections and the names of the electees were unsuccessful until Sep. 9. Even then, the list was only partial and did not reflect the full array of elections carried out at the departmental level.”
During an interview, Wang also said that she has faced personal financial challenges as a result of the conversations regarding her compensation and administrative oversight.
During the meeting with Gaylin, Wang said she learned that she would still receive the summer assistantship stipend, which had been previously guaranteed through her labor contract when she accepted the position as GSC president for the 2025-26 academic year, according to Wang. She said she was not informed at that time about the future of her wages for the nine-month academic year.
Proposed condensed version Wang needed to use her summer stipend award letter as proof of income, however, she said she received the letter late. Wang sent an email to Gaylin, Seoyoon Chang, assistant dean of student professional development and GSAS and Meredith Nelson, Ph.D., director of Academic Admissions and Support at GSAS, when she still had not received the award letter as of May 9. Wang was set to start her summer position on May 28, and according to the labor contract she was supposed
to receive the letter within 30 days prior to the start of her summer working period.
In the email, Wang informed the administrators that, as a result of receiving her award letter late and due to the absence of a vice president, she would be unable to accept the summer assistantship and therefore would not be able to continue her presidential duties over the summer.
According to the email exchange, Nelson and Gaylin both thought the other had sent the letter, resulting in it not being sent. Both parties offered their apologies to Wang and offered to send the letter at that time.
Wang said in a followup email that failure in administrative processes resulted in detrimental impacts on her mental health, and that she felt the administration had not taken the necessary action to acknowledge this.
“However, the fact that I was promised this very meager stipend and repeatedly ignored (that is, until I resigned from the position)— is disrespectful to me and my work,” Wang said in the email. “You have yet to acknowledge that—whether due to errors, neglect, or sundry other factors, I have struggled for a long time to live because of the risk in not having this letter. You were aware of this fact (and I have said even more in private to you), and nothing has changed as a result of my pleading.”
Wang said she has yet to receive any further emails from Nelson regarding the stipend.
In the interview, Wang further said that by not sending the letter at least 30 days prior to the start of her summer position, the GSAS administration had violated the labor contract.
Because Wang did not hold the president position over the summer, agenda items that typically would have been conducted over the summer were not able to be completed, such as preparing the GSC budget, according to Wang. Wang also said that because the budget was not approved over the summer, certain resources, like the Student Support Grants, which fund graduate student research and are processed and approved by GSC, are not able to be funded.
Wang said she entered a series of grievance meetings with the administration starting on July 10, in which she began advocating for the reinstatement of her wages. She has had three meetings, but so far, she said the administration and GSC have yet to reach an agreement.
According to the “Graduate Assistant, Teaching Fellow,
and Senior Teaching Fellow Pay Cycle,” Wang was set to receive her first paycheck as part of the fall 2025 teaching fellowship stipend on Aug. 8. However, she said the paycheck did not come and that she has yet to receive any form of payment from the administration.
According to Wang, her GSC position previously constituted her income. But now that she is no longer being compensated, she said she no longer has an income. As a result, Wang said she has had to rely on friends to help her pay rent and purchase food, as well as make a fundraising page.
Wang said it is important for the GSC president and vice president positions to be compensated.
“The symbolism of what this position not being paid represents is really significant, and we should be looking at that, and from where I’m standing, I just disagree with the position of the university,” Wang said. “I think it’s enough work that it should be paid, it’s valuable enough that it should be paid.”
However, according to the statement provided by Bell, the administration agrees that the GSC president and vice president should be paid positions.
“The amount of the compensation will be dependent on whether or not these positions are determined to be work. No matter what the determination is, the students serving in these positions will receive remuneration; that has never been in question,” he wrote.
In response to the claim that the “GSAS has ‘terminated’ the officer positions and therefore ‘destroyed’ the GSC,” the fact sheet said. “It was never the intention of GSAS to ‘destroy' the GSC but rather to ensure that collected funds are being directed to as many students as possible and to offer more robust support to the entire student body. The intention was: 1) to preserve more of the GSC budget for all students, rather than just two individuals; 2) to increase the total amount of money available to the student body; 3) to distribute funds more equitably; and 4) to enable those students who might not apply for research- and conference-related grants to access GSC financial resources for activities and opportunities that interest them.”
The statement from Bell further said that an agreement has yet to be reached, but that the university and graduate student union are continuing the conversation: “The University is engaged in discussions with the union about how to structure the positions so that they would actually constitute ‘work.’ These discussions are ongoing.”
USG Hosts a 9/11 Memorial Beautification Ceremony
By EMMA LEONARDI ASST. NEWS EDITOR
The Fordham University's United Student Government (USG) organized and hosted an event to plant flowers in remembrance of the lives lost in the 9/11 tragedy at the on-campus memorial across from Finlay Hall.
USG Executive President Lucas Hjertberg, FCRH ’26, alongside Senator Ava Cascella, FCRH ’26, led the event which was hosted on Wednesday, Sept. 10.
The ceremony began with a presentation from the Fordham Reserve Officers’ Training Corps’ (ROTC) cadet color guard and a hearing of the national anthem. Cascella and Hjertberg each then gave a speech to thank attendees for coming and to recognize the tragedy.
“We stand here today in remembrance, solidarity and respect for the victims who lost their lives in this senseless tragedy,” Cascella said. “As the next generation of storytellers, we are tasked with never forgetting this tragedy and ensuring that the legacy of these victims is honored for generations to come. By being here, you join in the promise of remembering and honoring those lost and those who risked their lives trying to save others.”
Cascella worked with USG as well as the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum, which is where Cascella is
currently interning, to put together this event.
“My manager at the museum, Caitlin Best, helped me plan the event in terms of major logistics,” Cascella said. “I knew I wanted ROTC to be a part of the event to uphold the military connection and display a commitment to service. I also thought it would be beneficial to include USG to embed student leadership into a student-led event.”
Cascella also pushed for students to visit the actual museum in Manhattan. “I encourage everyone to visit the museum. The tour guides are excellent, and they give you a complete breakdown of everything that happened,” she said.
The technical name of the flowers planted is Garden Chrysanthemum Plant Orange Shades, and despite not being strictly annual, they will most likely bloom again next year, depending on the weather.
There were also several students in attendance as well. Jenny Hong, FCRH ’28, and Quinn van der Hoeven, GSB ’28, are both a part of HEART 9/11, an organization that was established by first responders such as the New York City Police Department and the New York City Fire Department.
The nonprofit was made to remember the tragedy through rescue work to prevent another from happening. Hong and van der Hoeven expressed gratitude for USG and also the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum
for putting such an event together specifically on Fordham, citing attempts to do so themselves.
When asked about the importance of remembering the event, both shared similar sentiments. “It’s a tragedy, but it’s also something that we should remember … we haven’t experienced 9/11, but it’s something that we need to just kind of keep remembering because so many lives were lost,” van der Hoeven said.
Another student who was in attendance was Julia del Pino, FCRH ’26. In response to the same
question, del Pino shared that, “I just wanted to come out and support [the event] because even though I don’t know anyone personally who was impacted … I just wanted to be here.”
Cascella also noted the importance of continuing to remember this tragedy, no matter how many years pass. “How do we keep these stories alive and how do we continue to tell these stories to the next generation?” she asked. “A big part of that is through education and through people like us coming here today and learning and remembering
this day,” Cascella added. She is still working towards remembering the tragedy, not just on Sept. 11, but every day. “As a government and community affairs intern, I work to strengthen the relationship between various museum stakeholders and the museum itself,” Cascella said, commenting on her work. “Currently, I am working to receive cosponsorships from members of Congress to pass a commemorative coin bill. This bill [would authorize] the U.S. Department of the Treasury to mint commemorative coins for the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.”
PHOTOS BY PATRICK VEREL FOR THE FORDHAM RAM
Students, cadets and administrators gather at Fordham’ s 9/11 memorial, located on the Rose Hill campus across from Finlay Hall.
A student plants flowers at the on-campus memorial.
A cadet and a student plant flowers together to honor the victims of the 9/11 tragedy.
PATRICK VEREL FOR THE FORDHAM RAM
OPINION
Serving the Fordham University campus and community since 1918
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Editorial | Graphic Photos
Blood-Spattered Feeds: Violence on Social Media
What might it mean for one to consume media that shows other humans suffering or in agonizing pain? What might be the ethical or social significance of becoming a spectator to calamity, to anguish or even to death? For whom and to what end does man choose to look under the veil of death and stare directly upon its cold face? These are the cutting, incisive questions that Susan Sontag proffered up in her seminal essay, “Regarding the Pain of Others,” in which she examined humanity’s relationship to visual and artistic representations of violence. And while this masterwork of hers was published nearly two decades ago, these framing questions might just be the right ones to ask in our present moment.
This feeling of relevancy comes, of course, in the wake of the reality that millions of people last week watched on social media, either willingly or unwillingly, one of the dozens of videos that showed the brutal killing of Charlie Kirk in shocking detail and clarity. The following editorial is not here to ask questions about the contextual dynamics and sociopolitical afterlifes of this assassination, but rather question the proliferation of its gore and horror online. In other words, should social media have allowed people to watch it? Or, perhaps more broadly, should the general public be allowed to interact online with any of the numerous available videos that depict real people torn apart
I’ve been thinking a lot about the passing of time lately. Maybe it’s because it’s the first weeks of my final year in college, or perhaps it’s that time has lost its linear nature it once seemed to have. We spend so much of college being told to “make the most of it” or that “it goes by so quickly.” In some sense, I agree. The first year of college feels like three weeks ago, but memories I have of the people and places from that time feel so distant. What is it about time that can seem so familiar, yet simultaneously never touchable again?
The value of time isn’t measured by how efficiently we spend it or how much we do; for me, time can only really be appreciated when we slow down and recognize the time and space we’re in and everything before then that got us here. To avoid the risk of sounding like I fell out of a coconut tree, I will try to be more specific about what I mean when I say this — no promises, though.
As I’m sure we’ve all learned at this point in our lives, time is irreplaceable. Although in college we tend to spend it worrying about grades, achievements or money, that’s
by bullets and knives, disfigured by disaster and war or victimized by systemic violence and hate?
On the one hand, watching any sort of gory video is bound to have a whole host of detrimental consequences for everyone involved. Perhaps most intuitive amongst these consequences is the fact that witnessing graphic violence has a profound capacity to traumatize viewers, potentially leaving individuals with deeply anti-social impulses (i.e., an inability to feel safe in any sort of public setting) as well as lasting sleep problems, behavioral changes, anxiety or headaches as a result of their inability to “unsee” or “not picture” the explicit gore they have just witnessed. However, there is also an element to which the loved ones of the victims involved in the violent incident may be traumatized by its proliferation online. Not only do they run the risk of coming across clear and vivid depictions of the suffering and dehumanization their family member or close friend, but they simultaneously have to deal with the painful and potentially humiliating reality that the public has the unfettered ability to voyeuristically rewatch the final, often violent, moments of their loved one’s life whenever they so choose. And, of course, it must also be noted that witnessing violence online often only begets more violence, as engagement with the gory and dehumanizing not only
really more about ensuring that we can survive in a world built around success being how much money we make or how busy we appear. Isn’t it the mundane parts of life that really matter? Life would be so dull if all we ever did was work towards being the most productive version of ourselves, in a capital sense.
Value and success should be measured in the unplanned moments — late-night conversations with friends, wandering around aimlessly or even watching mindless sitcoms when you should be doing homework. When was the last time you noticed joy in something so simple, rather than letting joy be dictated by other people’s idea of success? These moments cannot be recreated, which is why time isn’t something that should be managed or maximized, but something that should be noticed and cherished before it becomes a memory.
Part of this challenge is that college prepares us for a world where time is measured by productivity. Grades, internships, networking and future career goals are constantly competing for our attention. Yet, in the middle of
de-sensitizes individuals to the very real and very harmful consequences of violent acts, but also potentially encourages online spectators to commit atrocities of their own — either in the name of capturing similar levels of social media glory or for the purpose of retaliation. However, one cannot simply make the blanket statement that the proliferation of such graphic media only has negative consequences, as there is indeed something to be said about the manner in which graphic and violent videos have purpose in raising awareness about human rights issues. In other words, to see a video or picture of violence and suffering is to, almost inherently, be forced to recognize its existence. Take, for instance, the significance of the terrible images coming out of the genocide currently unfolding in Gaza. As hard as it may be to gaze upon a body that has been torn to shreds by bullets and shrapnel, as nauseating as it is to look at children reduced to skin and bones by a manufactured famine, the fact that these images can appear in front of a viewer renders it impossible for one to ignore the Gazans’ suffering or to wistfully push it away into the realm of the abstract. Instead, the Gazan plight, staring directly at you in all its unfathomable horror and ghastliness, becomes an issue of personal substance — an issue where passive neutrality becomes an impossibility and succumbs to action.
However, even after fully considering these divergent viewpoints, the initial question still remains: how should social media companies, or perhaps even legislators, proceed when it comes to the issue of allowing the public to proliferate graphic and violent content? It is the opinion of this Editorial Board of The Fordham Ram that while there is ultimately no easy or clear answer to such a complex question, there nevertheless appears to be a need to fix the current laissez-faire approach to content moderation. To return once again to the example that opened this article — that of Charlie Kirk’s assassination — it is immediately apparent, and perhaps morally intuitive, that nobody should have been forced to watch his brutal death because of the shortcomings of a system that often allows videos to “autoplay” without user consent and that uses automated systems which intentionally work to “catch less bad stuff.” The trauma generated from seeing his insanely violent death in high definition and from a dozen different angles is simply not worth any benefit it may bring to the public good. And while there certainly must be room for nuanced approaches to moderation in situations pertaining to the proliferation of the images of mass human rights violations, at the end of the day, it is apparent that we need to move away from the current “post-contentmoderation” world.
all this, we often forget how to spend time doing “nothing.” These moments aren’t flashy or impressive, but their impermanence makes them so powerful. College will end. Friendships will change. Our daily lives will continue to look different in every phase that follows. The places and people that define these years will never exist in the same way again, and if we let it, these moments will be blurred by the distraction of becoming adults, even though it seems like many people (including myself) don’t even know what that entails.
That’s why slowing down matters. Even in the phases of life that people tell us to “prepare for,” the truth is we rarely know exactly what we’re supposed to be doing,
even when we are doing it. College is supposed to prepare us for the future. Still, even three years and some change later, I can tell you that I feel about the same level of preparedness for entering the adult world as I did walking in as a firstyear, just with more hours of reading under my belt. I’m not saying that to be cynical; I think college has taught me a lot both academically and socially, but it has also reminded me that no amount of preparation or studying can take away the uncertainty of life.
Maybe the best way to prepare for life isn’t to obsess over what is supposed to come next, but to treasure all the confusion and unpredictability that makes this time worth remembering.
Senior Year: Now With 100% More Existential Crises
From the Desk | Mia Tero
OPINION
When Will We Wake Up: A Response to Charlie Kirk’s Assassination
By ABIGAIL ADAMS ASST. OPINION EDITOR
What an awful beginning to the school year. Last week, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was assassinated. School shootings fill the headlines, with two children killed during a mass at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Minnesota two weeks ago, and two students wounded at Evergreen High School. In August, a Ukrainian refugee was stabbed to death by a man with 14 arrests while bystanders on the Charlotte, North Carolina light rail stood silent. This desecration of human life is overwhelming.
Yet some people reacted to Charlie Kirk’s death with malice, not empathy. The number of tweets, Instagram stories and conversations of people gleeful about his murder seems endless. Democrat lawmakers refused a moment of silence after hearing news of his assassination, instead shouting expletives regarding the tragedy. A prominent young journalist posted to her 200k Instagram followers her article “The Shooting of Charlie Kirk is not a choice between celebration and condemnation,” in which she says that “violence is sometimes necessary” and she “is glad Charlie Kirk will no longer spread his extremist messaging.” We shouldn’t be surprised.
The left has a long history of violence, especially towards the religious. It often becomes political violence. From priests and nuns’ bodies being dug up and publicly displayed in Spain by the communist affiliated Republican party, to the wholesale desecration of churches in Soviet Russia, this calculated hostility to faith has played out over and over again. Even now, the Annunciation school shooter target practiced on images of a crucified Jesus.
Leftist regimes don’t end well. They usually end with thousands of innocent lives lost. I would provide further citations, but I encourage you to pick up any history book about Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Fidel Castro and many more. When I ponder the spread of this evil, I often recall the startling photos of Sept. 11. Burning buildings in the Big Apple. Catastrophe in the capital of the world. The juxtaposition stirs something in my heart and my head. New York is considered the city of progress, of development, of prosperity, but we were paralyzed in a clash of civilizations on Sept. 11, 2001. We failed to recognize that we could be harmed, that we were, in fact, not invincible. We were drunk off our own success and apathetic towards our
tradition and our future. Fast forward 24 years, and this indifference continues all around us.
The right side of social media was enraged at Kirk’s assassination, but life seemed to carry on as usual. The frequent tragedies have numbed us. We are rightfully moved by things far and away, yet fail to see the same symptoms of evil creeping into our own everyday experiences. People walk by the 9/11 memorial near Finlay Hall without a glance, even as bells rang throughout campus marking each time the planes struck the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Why have our hearts become desensitized?
This indifference continues in the subtleties of life, too. Students walk around campus with their heads buried in smartphones. No one holds the door for the girl walking out of the McShane Campus Center with her packages back to her dorm. Students tune in when the professor is saying something important, but numb their minds with Wordle for the remainder of the class. I often fall victim to this indifference as I rapidly press the close elevator button, praying no one approaches to walk in. When will we wake from our sleep?
As I drove onto campus around noon on Opening
Day, I greeted the man directing traffic into Fordham University told me, “I’ve been here since 6 a.m. and not a single person asked me ‘how are you’ until just now.”
We post to Instagram about injustices throughout the world, but ignore the lack of love literally right in front of us. A lack of charity that we are all complicit in. I see it in myself as I rush into my dorm, exhausted from a long day, failing to greet my own beloved roommates. When will we start caring about humans, rather than solely humanity?
It is almost wild how antithetical this apathy is to our Jesuit mission. Vice President for Mission Integration and Ministry, Fr. John J. Cecero S.J., spoke with integrity as he exclaimed our institutional priority towards “reconciliation and justice” at the Mass of the Holy Spirit on Wednesday. I feel this desire deeply in my bones, as I know many of my Fordham compatriots do as well. But why do we often fail so deeply?
We need to remove the blindfold that prevents us from seeing our own inconsistencies. We need to be rooted in a real why — not just empty platitudes. We need to feel our Jesuit mission deeply in our bones and live it out loud.
In an age of apathy, intolerance and disconnection,
we must herald authenticity. Fordham University can do this by promoting free speech. Classrooms and print publications must not be places of uniformity. We all know, Fordham’s free speech exclamations are rarely worth much. But do our campus institutions created to protect free speech do much to promote diversity of thought? We are often absorbed in that same uniformity that desensitizes us to violence and prevents us from seeing our own culpability. Charlie Kirk’s murder signifies an America that has forgotten her roots. His assassination was an attack on the American ideal. He died with a microphone in his hand. He was exercising the pinnacle of our American experiment: the free exchange of ideas. If universities are now places of rigid thought, authentically tolerant discourse is unlikely to happen. Without a dialogue like this, we cannot claim to be free. Breaking the spell of complacency requires true curiosity and gratitude. Let us strive to become captivated by our neighbors and become men and women for others — not just in service, but in discourse, compassion and courage.
Abigail Adams, FCRH ’26, is a philosophy major from Alexandria, Virginia.
You Don’t Have to Condone Charlie Kirk’s Work to Condemn His Murder
By ANDREW MCDONALD STAFF WRITER
I’ve realized I’ve spent the past decade hate-watching Charlie Kirk. Like a lot of young people who grew up in a culture of youth political activism and “debate culture” that was dominated by Kirk, his ilk and imitators, popular videos of Kirk were omnipresent, smug, shallow, designed more to clip to humiliate for an audience far more often than to persuade. I do not think Charlie Kirk “practiced politics the right way,” but for the past decade, you’d be hardpressed to go a week engaging with politics without listening to Kirk or his rhetoric. He was someone whose politics I found often repugnant for as long as I knew of him. And yet, going online to find that Kirk had been shot to death while speaking on Utah Valley University’s (UVU) campus at the age of 31 on Sept. 10 felt very surreal. To see such a domineering force in American conservative politics vanish in an instant has left me unsettled, and so has the reaction to his murder.
He was killed mid-debate at the beginning of Kirk’s “Prove Me Wrong” segment, which was part of the first campus stop on Turning Point USA’s American Comeback Tour. Immediately before his death, Kirk was asked how many
mass shooters there had been in America over the past decade. He replied: “Counting or not counting gang violence?” Seconds later, a bullet tore through his neck.
Kirk had spent his political career justifying America’s deadly gun culture, and he died while defending it. This was the same man who once said, “I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That’s a prudent deal. It is rational.”
This ironic fact does not justify his assassination in my mind, but it makes it unsurprising to see that his death was immediately met with ridicule, memes and celebration from people who viewed Kirk as just a political opponent. I can’t tell you how to feel or react, and I won’t. I personally believe, though, that at the end of the day, Charlie Kirk at UVU and the two victims at Annunciation Catholic School did not deserve to die. No one on Earth, no matter who they are, deserves to die at 31 while their wife and kids watch on the same screens as us, and no one deserves to get shot or bombed in front of their classmates. Every life is sacred; if you disagree, whatever, I will only ask you to
look inward as to why.
Unlike Kirk, I think gun control is obviously the answer to gun violence, but I’m cynical. If hundreds of classrooms of dead children won’t, if several presidents and politicians shot dead or otherwise won’t, I know these deaths won’t move the needle. America has more deaths from gun violence than any other developed country, but our conditioning to carnage is not limited to our guns at home. For decades, the powers that be and the American government have justified their violence abroad, from drone strikes in Yemen and Syria, to wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to our financial support for Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. When our leaders, media and politicians all insist for decades that some lives are expendable or innately evil, or barbarous or nothing more than “human shields,” that learned apathy directly primes us to relinquish our humanity and accept violence against those we’ve independently deemed “evil” at home.
And Kirk himself trafficked in that logic. He called Martin Luther King Jr. “awful” and denounced the Civil Rights Act as a “huge mistake.” Kirk said that Islam “is not compatible with Western civilization,” he called George Floyd a “scumbag,” he declared abortion “worse than the holocaust”
and said even a 10-year-old raped child should be forced to give birth. He even mocked the very concept of empathy itself as “a made-up New Age term.” Even if I disagree with this kind of reaction, it should not surprise us that many Americans were heartless when he was killed, because he spent so much of his career arguing against that “madeup” empathy for so many, in a country so desensitized to violence and increasingly extreme political rhetoric. This assassination does not erase what Kirk did to our discourse, nor does it reduce him to just another online talking head, as many in the online peanut gallery have reduced him to. Kirk was not merely a podcaster with a large following; he was one of President Donald Trump’s most influential allies. After co-founding Turning Point USA (TPUSA) in 2012, Kirk built it into the premier conservative youth organization, spreading across nearly 800 colleges in the U.S. Trump himself credited Kirk and TPUSA for helping him win the 2024 election by mobilizing young conservatives. Vice President JD Vance admitted, following his death, that Kirk had helped staff much of the second Trump administration. Kirk was not an afterthought in American politics at all; among younger Republicans
today, he was an architect of conservatism’s current shape. TPUSA and Kirk’s politics will outlive him, likely galvanized by his martyrdom. His murder will be weaponized, framed as proof that conservatives are under imminent deadly attack wholesale, which will fuel more division and suspicion. His death does not wash away any damage he’s caused, but it doesn’t erase his humanity. Kirk’s assassination should still be condemned, and if we start deciding that people are expendable, we embrace a further rejection of democracy and a worldview where this kind of violence is deemed as the preferable tool to prove that your political opposition is wrong. I don’t think I, or anyone else, is insane for not wanting to live in a country that promotes assassination attempts, diminishes school shootings and sends bombs to kill people en masse. You are not insane for not wanting to live in the only country in the developed world that has people use, have unrestricted access to and glorifies the grotesque use of violence to settle political disputes and kill children. Kirk’s death is yet another reminder of how deeply violence defines American life, and how desperately that needs to change, even if there’s little hope that it will.
Andrew McDonald, FCRH ’26, is a history and political science major from Sacramento, California.
OPINION
Charlie Kirk’s Impact on One Person
By MICHAEL DUKE CONTRIBUTING WRITER
On Wednesday, Sept. 10, I was writing up an assignment for one of my classes and decided to take a break to doomscroll for 10 minutes. Opening up Instagram, I was expecting to just see a post from one of my friends or a meme at the top of my feed. What I saw instead was something that rocked me to my core.
The very first post on my feed was a video recording from someone at Utah Valley University who was at the event when Charlie Kirk was shot in the neck by an assassin. Because I thought it had to be artificial intelligence, I opened up X and the first post on my feed was a separate video where you can graphically see Charlie being hit in the neck by a bullet.
Everyone has a view on his assassination. Some people are celebrating his death, others are mourning and scared. For
myself, Charlie’s death has hit me incredibly hard.
If you’ve read some of my other articles, have seen the commentary I’ve offered onair through appearances on media outlets or know me as a friend, you can put two and two together to figure out that I’m a conservative. However, I would not be where I am today if it was not for Charlie’s impact on my life.
On June 23, 2020, I went to a Turning Point USA event that was held in Phoenix, Arizona. I went because Erika Kirk, Charlie’s wife, had given my mother tickets for our family to attend the event because they had become acquainted through my mother’s work.
It was at that event that I became inspired.
Before then, I only cared about politics to a small extent. I was 17, and I was more focused on hockey, having the ability to tell you 150 different things that the Arizona
Coyotes needed to do in order to win the Stanley Cup.
However, that Turning Point USA event in 2020 changed a lot for me, including my passions. Hearing from politicians, the President and others who care about the future of our country had made me realize a lot about myself and my country. Specifically, it imposed an immediate level of gratefulness in me. It made me grateful that I’m American, that I fight on a level playing field and that if I want to, I can.
Just being present and hearing some of the speeches from that day made me grateful for how my father was so moved by the promise of the American Dream that he moved to the United States from Winnipeg, Manitoba in Canada. I realized he did it so my brother and I could have the opportunity to thrive in a country that promises returns on your hard work and grit.
The inspiration from that event carried over into everything I have done since.
Politics aside, Charlie’s work was beyond impressive. If you say the words “Turning Point USA” to someone, I’d argue that they likely know about the group and have some sort of view about it.
The fact that Charlie was able to accomplish this is striking.
For example, if you want to start a business, imagine the energy, motivation and hard work it takes to get name recognition, let alone succeed in your mission. Both are beyond difficult.
This sentiment is evident in Charlie’s work. Whether or not you agreed with Charlie’s opinions, he did something more than impressive by growing an idea that he had in 2012 into an unprecedented youth movement that has nearly 800 college chapters and over 1,000 high school chapters.
Charlie’s approach to politics was also unprecedented. He believed in political discourse so much that he would offer any student who either agreed or disagreed with him the opportunity to directly ask him questions, debate or just have a conversation.
Despite giving people this opportunity, especially for those who might have had a difference with him, he was murdered by an assassin’s bullet while exercising that belief.
You’re now probably wondering why I care so much about Charlie. To answer: I had met Charlie beyond that one event in 2020, and from my experiences and interactions with him, I have so much to say about him.
On the day Charlie was killed, I met up with one of my friends at 11 p.m. by the fountain outside of Hughes. My friend asked me what impression I had of Charlie, and the first thing I said was that he was tall. I said that partially because it’s not often that I meet someone who is much taller than me, but also because it was very hard for me to talk about Charlie.
I didn’t tell my friend then, but I was thinking about something Charlie had said to me in Florida back in 2023. I had asked Charlie what drives him. His response was that it was young people like me who motivated him to work hard.
I wish I could explain through words on this page what that meant to me, and how that inspired me, but words would not do the sentiment of how that made me feel any justice. A lot of people have someone in their life who they look up to and can confidently say is their north star, meaning: those people who motivate you. For me, that person was Charlie Kirk. I say this because amongst all the other ways that Charlie affected my life, he brought me closer to God. Outside of politics, Charlie preached the gospel and believed in the power of a relationship with God. When I needed that most, Charlie’s words and lessons helped bring me home.
I am praying for Charlie’s soul, his widow Erika and his two children. He didn’t deserve death, and his family deserves prayers.
In the spirit of what Charlie taught me, I offer this in closing: “The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?” (Psalm 27:1)
Michael Duke, GSB ’26, is a business adminstration major from Scottsdale, Arizona.
One Fordham: Bridging the Gap Between Rose Hill and Lincoln Center
By EMILY MITTON CONTRIBUTING WRITER
As a first-year student attending Fordham College at Rose Hill (FCRH), I have experienced the distinctions between both of Fordham University’s campuses: Rose Hill and Lincoln Center. In my opinion, there are various ways that Fordham can continue to integrate the two campuses, despite the two largely different atmospheres.
Fordham University can continue to integrate the two campuses, specifically with regards to student experience, by creating more co-campus events, joint clubs and student organizations and a platform for students from both campuses to meet and communicate on.
During my first week at the FCRH campus, which largely involved orientation events, Fordham hosted two events in particular, “Glow Rams” and “One Fordham,” that combined the two first-year classes and gave students the opportunity to meet one another. I feel that these orientation events were the best and most meaningful, as a firstyear student, because they allowed for more friendships and connections to be made
across the two campuses. Fordham University should provide more events like the ones above to continue giving students from both campuses the opportunity to connect.
Since we already have our handy form of transportation between campuses, the Ram Van, there is easy access between both boroughs daily. However, there is typically no reason to specifically travel from campus to campus unless you are attending a class at the other campus. By giving students a reason to visit the other campus, excluding classes, such as joint carnivals, guest/celebrity speaker events or even hosting more Fordham-specific events anywhere in New York City, peers will be able to form friendships and lifelong connections with others much easier than if these opportunities are not provided. Both of my roommates, Abril Gómez González, FCRH ’29, and Morgan Britt, GSB’29, have shared their interests in making more connections with students from Fordham College Lincoln Center (FCLC), especially wanting more opportunities to meet them outside of class.
Joint clubs or organizations
are another great way to unite both student populations between campuses. For example, creating a new branch of United Student Government (USG), since FCRH and FCLC each have their own, that combines students from both campuses would be a great way for students to meet, connect and find new ways for both campuses to interact. Having separate student governments to represent the colleges separately makes complete sense, but why not create a third USG representation to further intertwine both campuses? This way, students can represent not only their specific college, but Fordham as a whole, further uniting both campuses.
Finally, I believe a great way that students could connect with each other between campuses without physically going to the other campus would be via a social platform. With a direct messaging platform, specifically for Fordham University students, undergraduates from both the FCLC and FCRH campuses would easily be able to connect with each other, form friendships and more. For example, this direct messaging platform could have multiple different
opportunities within it, with a few ideas including the following: friendship portal, club portal and USG events announcements. As for the friendship portal, students could create a profile for themselves, likely describing their interests, hobbies and various characteristics and be matched with students from their opposite campus to talk to with matching interests. The club portal could be very straightforward: co-campus clubs could message easily to plan meeting times, locations and much more. Furthermore, the USG events portal could show peers different mixed campus events to meet each other, have fun and branch out! Overall, I believe that making a stronger effort to combine both campuses socially would only continue to improve and strengthen Fordham University as a whole.
During my first few weeks at Fordham University, I have closely observed the great opportunities that the school has provided for us students to connect from campus to campus. By providing or even creating more of these opportunities, such as a crosscampus USG representation or direct messaging platform, Fordham will only continue to advance further on its mission to unite both campuses. Just because us students attend college in separate boroughs, New York City unites us all. For that reason, I, along with many fellow undergraduates, would love to continue exploring and making connections between the campuses.
FCRH ’27, is a journalism major from Lisbon, New Hampshire.
Emily Mitton,
“One Fordham” brought together Rose Hill and Lincoln Center students.
MEGHAN CATTANI/THE FORDHAM RAM
COURTESY OF INSTAGRAM @TURNINGPOINTUSA Kirk founded the influential conservative organzation Turning Point USA.
OPINION
An Entirely Man-Made Famine Grips Gaza, UN Declares
By GABRIEL CAPELLAN STAFF WRITER
On Aug. 22, 2025, the United Nations (U.N.) published a report that declared famine is occurring in parts of the Gaza Strip. The report stated that if no action is taken, the entirety of Gaza would be in famine by the end of September. According to the report, this is a direct result of the constant bombing of Gaza and the forced displacement of the people there. “As this Famine is entirely manmade, it can be halted and reversed. The time for debate and hesitation has passed, starvation is present and is rapidly spreading,” the report’s Famine Review Committee concluded.
To take a quote from Fordham’s mission statement, “Fordham is committed to research and education that assist in the alleviation of poverty, the promotion of justice, the protection of human rights, and respect for the environment.”
Despite this claim in our mission statement, the university has remained disgustingly neutral about its stance on the famine; the same can’t be said about unofficial student groups such as the Fordham chapter of Students Justice for Palestine (SJP) or the Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP). While the official representatives of the university have remained silent on this issue, these groups have made independent efforts to try to get people on board with their message. This shouldn’t be the only thing that the Fordham community is doing; students
shouldn’t be on the front line without support from the institution and its administrators.
Dalia Ludquist, GSB ’28, who is a student activist, found her footing in supporting these movements through social media. She said, “It’s really through social media that you’ll find these like grassroots organizations, from reposts, some stories, and tags, and this is how you go out and do your community work.” In that same breath, she also added, “[A dean from Fordham Law School] spoke on international law and how Israel is violating this [inter] national law.” With someone on a higher level, such as a dean being able to speak up, it shows that the university isn’t entirely complicit in this matter but rather feels as if they’re being silenced. Look at Columbia University as an example.
Freedom of speech at Fordham is nonexistent, with the New York Police Department being called to shut down a protest in the Leon Lowenstein Center lobby in May of 2024, and the entire history of Fordham SJP with the institution. Furthermore, earlier this year, there was a petition to prevent Shai Davidai from speaking at Lowenstein, who was suspended from Columbia University for harassing students, which was ignored by Fordham’s administration.
Jake Schefer, GSS ’25, and leader of the JVP, said, in a written statement, “Fordham has no problem letting Shai
Davidai speak on campus, who was suspended by Columbia University for harassing Columbia staff … including their [Chief Operating Officer], and is known for harassing students as well who dare speak out for Palestine. We didn’t even attempt to formalize the JVP Fordham chapter as a Fordham University student group because of how they treated the SJP Fordham chapter before us.” Fordham’s lack of freedom of speech hinders its students and organizations from speaking out about these issues, leading to a default stance of silence from the Fordham community.
It speaks volumes to me that both groups at the university that advocate for Palestinians’ rights have been shot down. Fordham is trying to maintain a “neutral” stance when we need inclusivity and everyone’s voices to be heard during these moments. It’s off-putting that we’re choosing to be silent when additional lives are being lost every day. All of this is hypocritical of Fordham’s Jesuit identity and our focus on “the alleviation of poverty, the promotion of justice, the protection of human rights and respect for the environment” if we even still have that.
On the other hand, a Palestinian-American student, Jamili Helo, FCRH ’28, spent a week with immigrant children from Gaza through the nonprofit organization HEAL Palestine, where she tried to help them forget their prob-
lems for a second and let them be normal kids again. In an interview, she said, “seeing that there are people who are donating so much money and doing this, just out of the kindness of their hearts … taking time out of their schedules just to help other people is a really amazing thing to see.”
During this week, she said she saw hope for these kids who survived such trauma. Whereas the people currently in Palestine face a more dire future. With the severe lack of food, water, fuel, healthcare and sanitation and little clearance for aid workers to support Palestinians, international aid groups like the U.N. fall short.
With few other options, people turn to the Global Sumud Flotilla. The Flotilla is an international organization that is coordinating the largest coordinated civilian flotilla in history.
Over the summer, they sent multiple smaller shipbreak the Israeli maritime blockade and reach Palestinians faster. This is a more dangerous route, emphasized by the Israeli drone attack on the lead boat of the Flotilla while it was docked in Tunisia. Despite the danger, people are still determined to do this. They believe the risk they take is a small price to pay compared to the millions of Palestinians at increasingly greater risk of starvation with every day that passes.
So, if anyone reading this article wants to help, you can donate to the Flotilla or HEAL Palestine. Or alternatively, go to a protest nearby and spread some awareness; it appears that Fordham won’t do its part in this regard.
Gabriel Capellan, FCRH ’28, is a journalism major from the Bronx, New York.
Powering Up: Why We Need To Save New York’s Electrical Grid
By BRIDGETTE LEAHY STAFF WRITER
Living in a world of technology has become usual in modern society. Whether it’s owning a smartphone or a laptop for work or school or simply using the electricity in our homes, technology is everywhere. Of course, it gives us some incomparable advantages compared to centuries past. With these perks, of course, come the cons we must encounter. As such, we should be the most concerned about New York’s electrical grid. The electric grid, also known as the power grid, is a complex system designed to transport energy to homes, businesses and critical infrastructure. While living in a densely populated city of approximately 8.4 million individuals, New York City residents should be concerned about the electrical grid continuing to rise. The electrical system is the backbone of our economy.
According to studies, New York City’s energy demand is expected to rise dramatically by 2030. Governor Kathy Hochul has been in efforts to develop and construct a zeroemission advanced power plant in Upstate New York to support a reliable and affordable electrical grid. With these
efforts, a cleaner energy economy is the ultimate goal. Hochul, through the New York Power Authority (NYPA), has coordinated with the Department of Public Service, seeking to develop at least one nuclear energy facility with a combined capacity of no less than one gigawatt of electricity. This initiative furthers Hochul’s vision for power plants not reliant on fossil fuels. The addition will help limit harmful pollutants, reduce energy costs and bolster the middle class.
You’re probably wondering why people should care about this issue. A more efficient power grid will decrease electrical bills. As I mentioned earlier, we live in a world of advanced technology, including well-known artificially intelligent large language models, such as ChatGPT. Did you know that AI data centers have led to increased demand on the electrical grid? According to Schneider Electric, a digital automation and energy management company, reports indicate that all electrical demand will increase by 16% by 2029, primarily due to the growth of data centers. As AI continues to transform our electric grids, it ultimately drives up the price of electricity for all consumers. Between 2021 and 2024, data
centers doubled in number, with the largest concentrations now in Virginia, Texas and California. According to a study from the Electric Power Research Institute, AI searches use 10 times more electricity than regular searches. “AI is an increasing part of data centers and certainly responsible for increased electricity demand,” David Turk, former deputy secretary of the United States Department of Energy, told CBS MoneyWatch. Electricity prices nationwide have risen by 4.5% since last year, keeping in mind that we also have the costs of energy sources, including natural gas and vehicle fuel. Knowing this information, we have the power to make a change in our community. One way we can all help lower energy consumption rates is by reducing phantom energy consumption. Phantom energy consumption, also known as “vampire energy,” is energy loss that happens when devices are not in use but are still plugged in. AP News shares how, in the U.S., we are wasting $22 billion on phantom energy. Household energy waste contributes to a significant portion of America’s climate footprint. The household sector is responsible for 3540% of direct greenhouse gas
emissions in the U.S., which is larger than the industrial or commercial sector, according to Jonathan Gilligan, a professor at Vanderbilt University. What happens in our kitchens or garages is just as important as what happens in factories or power plants. When households make small but consistent changes, the impact is massive. If it’s turning off the lights or unplugging your phone charger, start today!
The question remains: Who does the burden to conserve energy and transition to clean energy fall on? The answer is everyone. Whether that’s government and policy makers, utilities and energy companies, business and industries or everyday New Yorkers, the transition must be equitable and just, meaning the state should
support those who are most vulnerable or least able to make changes on their own. Systemwide investments, technology upgrades and policy changes are necessary to make a significant impact. As a temporary fallback, New York could try to lean on fossil fuels more to ensure grid reliability and public safety. However, this should remain short-term and be limited. This would lead to several other issues for the globe, such as climate issues and rising emissions. The burden must be shared by society, as we, the government and individuals, are all in this vulnerable state, learning day by day how to advance our planet better.
Bridgette Leahy, FCRH ’27, is a journalism major from Basking Ridge,NewJersey.
The humanitarian crisis throughout the Gaza Strip intensifies as famine is declared. COURTESY OF @SAHER_ALGHORRA.
Electricity costs will likely rise in the future if no action is taken.
MEGHAN CATTANI/THE FORDHAM RAM
OPINION
The Body Knows the Way: Discernment on Pilgrimage in a Digital Age
By GABRIELLA CHINNICI CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Squeezed between millions of fellow pilgrims on the streets of Rome, sharing a meal at a table where I was the only English speaker and falling asleep in a room full of strangers: These were the kinds of experiences that shaped my summer. I had the rare gift of walking the Camino de Santiago with two of my closest high school friends and later joining Fordham University’s delegation at World Youth Day in Rome. To go on even one pilgrimage is a privilege that many never get in their lifetime, and I am profoundly grateful to have experienced two back-to-back. At first, I worried I would be so focused on taking care of myself and my friends that I’d have no room left for reflection or discernment. Yet I’ve come to realize that, especially in our digital age, the physicality of a pilgrimage is more important now than ever.
Pilgrimages reveal that the body is not separate from discernment but essential to it. The body is a vessel to help young people uncover their deepest desires and form genuine connections with others in a world saturated by digital distractions. To gain further insight into the Jesuit tradition of discernment, I spoke with the Vice President of Mission Integration and Ministry, Fr. John J. Cecero S.J., sharing with him my sentiment that it seems nowadays the youth are struggling to discern their desires for
Experiencing a pilgrimage profoundly effects one’s perception of their body, mind and soul.
the future and overlooking the importance of the body. He pointed me towards a central element of Saint Ignatius of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises: the “application of the senses. Ignatius insists on engaging sight, sound, touch, even smell, when praying with scripture, because it is through the imagination and the senses that we discover what we most deeply desire.” Pilgrimage embodies this truth. Walking for miles, sweating in the heat, carrying our tiredness and sharing meals along the way — all these physical realities force us to listen to our bodies and pay attention to our longings. In our current age, though, pilgrimages seem to be overlooked by the misconception that our devices allow us to reach the world at the palms of our hands. Yet,
this engagement becomes shallow, filtered and mediated. Think of how many of us miss even the quiet beauty of our own Rose Hill campus. The numerous spaces that cultivate peace and a sense of togetherness, through the simple beauties of life, are frequently ignored, even though they were created for us to not only notice but reflect upon. Pilgrimages counteract this trend by requiring participants to step away and fully immerse themselves in the present. With this in mind, I wanted to share a brief collection of voices from past pilgrims, reflecting on how stepping away from technology and into the physical world shaped their experiences.
My friend and co-Camino pal, Ali Sutton, who is a junior at Ohio University’s School of Nursing, shared, “While it
helped to have friends there, it was really me in my own head that got me through each day … getting out there and seeing the world through your own eyes and not over screens is something technology could never compete with.” Her words highlight how pilgrimage brings you face-to-face with yourself, something that can’t be outsourced to distraction or technology. Anna-Marie Pacione, FCRH ’26, reflected on her experience at World Youth Day in Lisbon saying, “being there with so many pilgrims, I began to understand the Body of Christ in the most expansive, vast way.” The Church is “so scattered and yet so tightly gathered together,” she said. Her reflection points to the embodied reality of faith, that simply showing up, shoulder to shoulder,
creates a sense of belonging that no online gathering can replicate. Lastly, Augustine Preziosi, FCRH ’23, MTS ’26, who went to the past two World Youth Day Pilgrimages, shared that “the physical demands of pilgrimage teach you patience, attentiveness and the way your body can lead your heart and mind toward reflection. I saw this same rhythm of embodied learning in both Lisbon and Rome, and it reminded me that true discernment isn’t only a matter of thought, it’s felt through every step you take.”
Finally, from my own experience, I have now come to believe that the beauty of pilgrimages is in the humility you will encounter. This virtue is one that is hard to find across the many digital platforms we have the choice of interacting with each day. Yet, to truly understand the deepest desires of oneself, especially when discerning career, vocation or relationships, the mind must lay down its pride and permit the body to become an active component. This allows us to fully feel and reflect on our exhaustion, attraction, joy and sorrows, seeing them embodied in the physical experience of a pilgrimage.
Fordham Reveals the Evolved Brand That No One Asked For
By CATHERINE PAYLEITNER CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Like most of our student body, I woke up on July 31, 2025, excited to continue preparing for move-in weekend. But when I opened Instagram, I was blindsided by the announcement of “Fordham University’s evolved brand.” With no warning and little dialogue, it felt like walking into a surprise exam in an 8:30 a.m. course. I had never considered Fordham to be a brand, and I still don’t. This place is my home, my school and my city. I, as a Fordham student, will never be a product to market. So many questions ran through my head, but mainly, “Who asked for this?” I may only be a sophomore here, but I can’t remember hearing any discourse on the likeability of our logo. In fact, I loved the simplicity of the old block-letter Fordham “F” and could be found proudly wearing my hat or shirt with it displayed. It felt incredibly collegiate. Now, I’m unsure what I should do with that merchandise. Do I continue to wear it and look out of place among the banners lining Edwards Parade, or should I donate it all and start over?
My confusion solidified into
frustration when I opened the comment section. Most of the reactions were similar to mine, but the university seemed to disregard our concerns. One commenter wrote, “As an alumni I am hugely disappointed that the University has stripped the crest of all of its meaning,” to which the university replied, “Fordham University is undertaking a brand evolution to sharpen its identity in an increasingly competitive higher education marketplace.”
This is a direct quote from the brand FAQ — a line so polished and rehearsed it could’ve been pulled straight from a corporate pitch deck. And while I appreciate the consistency in messaging, what’s glaringly absent is sincerity. The statement reads less like a conversation with the Fordham community and more like a press release aimed at outsiders who never walk through our gates, make the hike to Faculty Memorial Hall or dine in the McShane Campus Center.
Another comment under the post reads: “Horrible. Looks like some ambiguous app you forgot was on your phone.” This makes a good point: the rollout and implementation seem messy and uncoordinated. Why
adopt the new logo now if Fordham Athletics isn’t doing so until the spring? Why is there a need to “evolve” the seal? Again, what am I supposed to do with my old merch?
Seeking clarity, I contacted Justin Bell, vice president of marketing and communications for Fordham. His responses to my questions were more of the same corporate regurgitation. I asked what his reaction was to the almost 1,900 signatures on a Change. org petition calling for the preservation of Fordham’s emblem. Bell responded that he contacted the student, Georgia Bernhard, FCLC ’28. “We had about an hour-long conversation via Zoom, which was very productive. I was able to understand the concerns that surfaced after the launch, and I was able to share with her the broader body of work that informed the evolved brand,” Bell said in his email. I, along with many other students and faculty, would love to see this broader body of work. We’ve heard about the focus groups that were involved in the process, but since their participation was anonymous, there is very little insight we as a community have into this process.
In our conversation, Bell said that over 8,600 members of the Fordham community were involved in the process. Still, I’m finding it hard to locate someone who isn’t employed or otherwise directly affiliated with the university who believes this was a good idea. Students, alumni and faculty have all voiced their concerns. We’ve asked questions and offered perspectives rooted in tradition, identity and pride. But instead of meaningful engagement, we’ve been met with regurgitated, admin-approved soundbites. The phrase “brand evolution” might excite trustees, but it feels like a euphemism for erasure to those who live the Fordham experience every day. Universities must compete for attention in
a crowded marketplace, but branding should reflect community, not override it.
A university’s identity is built by classroom debates, dormroom conversations and alumni gatherings — not by logos designed in marketing suites. The people decide what it means to be a Fordham Ram. And when those people speak, they deserve more than a cookie-cutter justification. Until Fordham truly listens to its community, this rebrand remains a symbol of disconnect, not evolution. We deserve more than a new look and some robots. We deserve a voice.
Gabriella Chinnici FCRH ’27, is a history major from Naperville, Illinois.
COURTESY OF GABRIELLA CHINNICI
Catherine Payleitner FCRH ’28, is a political science and journalism major from Chicago, Illinois.
Fordham University ‘s evolved brand wasn’t received well by the community.
MEGHAN CATTANI/THE FORDHAM RAM
Why AI Needs the Humanities: Our Duty as Students in the Age of AI
By SEAN HUYNH CONTRIBUTING WRITER
These days, you can’t avoid seeing “AI” in every other news headline or LinkedIn post on your feed. Every academic and pundit has an opinion on artificial intelligence (AI), and the dizzying volume of utopian visions and doomsday predictions makes it impossible to know who to believe. In corporate industries, optimists herald the technology as a revolutionary tool that will automate workflow processes and enhance worker productivity. Yet across the humanities, skeptics lament these large language models as the death of creativity, critical thinking and perhaps humanity itself.
While nobody agrees on what an AI-augmented future looks like, few deny the disruptive changes this new age of intelligence will bring. As university students attempting to navigate this precarious landscape, we stand at the epicenter of AI’s current and future impacts. With industries looking to downsize and outsource entry-level work to AI, recent college graduates are first on the chopping block. The college-to-career pipeline is breaking down and many of us are rightfully panicking at the daunting prospect of such an uncertain future. But ignoring AI is not a solution, nor is simply cheating our way through college; we need an informed, unified policy to
address AI in universities and we need students — skeptics and enthusiasts alike — working together to lead the charge. Recently, the bombardment of AI-related content forced me to reckon with the potential effects of AI on my own life and career. After a summer spent mindlessly crunching numbers in Excel and using AI to write Structured Query Language queries, I’ve come to the sobering realization that I am replaceable. As a mathlete from a technical STEM background, I have divided my free time between chess tournaments and math competitions, and I pride myself on my ability to solve problems with both speed and precision. I was promised a lucrative, predictable career path growing up, so I opted to invest in these technical strengths, dismissing the humanities as a waste of time.
Today, with AI stripping away the value of the skills I’ve built my identity upon, I’m left naked and exposed to the reality of what’s really under my armor: an inattentive reader, a mediocre writer and an unoriginal thinker with little to contribute to society. And like many students around the country, I’m returning to my university campus unsure of how to cope with the paralyzing uncertainty of a world spinning faster each time OpenAI releases a new model of ChatGPT. If there’s no guarantee
that AI won’t take our jobs by the time we graduate, why are we even in college? What can we do?
But amidst all this doom and gloom about the future of humanity, AI affords us all — STEM, business, humanities and arts students alike — the opportunity to collectively slow down and rethink what it means to be human. D. Graham Burnett puts it best: “To be human is not to have answers. It is to have questions—and to live with them.”
In collectively obsessing over accelerating progress, we have become complacent as a species, forgetting to ask ourselves what values and goals humanity ought to pursue. Is it art and beauty? Love and emotion? Human connection? The Sisyphean effort to find purpose despite the awareness of our mortality?
It is precisely these questions that the humanities strive to answer. AI has immense potential to fundamentally transform the world we live in, but it must be led by people concerned with the right questions of the human experience. That’s why the liberal arts are even more crucial in an age where higher education faces its greatest uncertainty. We need our future tech bros, corporate executives and politicians to study the broader human implications of AI and build technological infrastructures
and policies that will contribute to human flourishing. But as much as we need technical minds building these models, we desperately need scholars in the humanities thinking and talking about AI; after all, they’re the ones who will ensure that technology serves humanity rather than the other way around.
I know too many friends studying the humanities who treat the topic of AI as taboo. Voices from humanities backgrounds are even more crucial to the AI conversation because we need them to shape the role of this technology in both our university and our shared society. As the generation with the most to lose, we cannot afford to defer decisions about AI to self-proclaimed “experts.” Nobody truly understands what occurs in the latent space of a Large Language Model or how exactly
GPT-5’s trillions of parameters are tuned. If we as students are to adapt to the challenges of AI, we must work together to take initiative in educating ourselves on the realities of this technology — what it is and how it works — and reevaluating how AI should fit into our futures. The path forward in an age of AI is full of uncertainty, but it starts with having conversations about AI across disciplines to bridge the gap between skeptics and enthusiasts. So, whether you love AI with a passion or despise it with all your heart, both perspectives are important. Let’s get together and talk about why.
Sean Huynh, FCRH ’27, is a math and computer science major from Charlotte,
‘Thunderbolts*’ and the Steady Decline in the Superhero Genre
By BOBBY SPENCER CONTRIBUTING WRITER
With a sunny summer release date of May 2, the Marvel brand and a stellar cast, “Thunderbolts*” weak if not embarrassing box office returns can be classified as anything but heroic. As Marvel gears towards its major blockbuster films in “Avengers: Doomsday” (2026) and “Avengers: Secret Wars,” (2027) the hiccup and reality of the franchise’s future appears rocky and unstable with their new title receiving little attention or monetary gain, regardless of critical appraisal and quality. Conversely, the factors and reasons for such a subpar return from theaters can be attributed to a cascade of several more alarming factors plaguing not only the Marvel and superhero franchises, but the larger industry of film as a whole. The superhero fatigue ramps up as evident with the releases of “Superman,” “The Fantastic Four: First Steps” and “Captain America: Brave New World,” all grossing $620 million or less; the years of billion dollar and reliable superhero box-offices no longer appear to be viable. Consequently, “Thunderbolts*” had little chance of making a splash, or a “hulk smash” if you will, given the competition of “Lilo and Stitch” at the time
as well as an awkward marketing campaign.
Unlike superhero flicks of the past, “Thunderbolts*” relied heavily on background and secondary superheroes. From the talents of Yelena Belova played by Florence Pugh, David Harbour’s role as Alexei Shostakov and Wyatt Russell’s portrayal of U.S. Agent, Sebastian Stan remained the most recognizable and note-worthy actor from the ensemble. Stuck as a sequel for various characters whilst offering an origin story for a complete new team, the film seemingly lacked identity or a clear goal or structure. This made it exceedingly hard to market, as various commercials or advertisements felt repetitive, stale or unoriginal. Regardless of such advertisements, the film itself offers a superb and grounded superhero story which differs from anything that has come before. It has some extremely emotional beats, alongside depth and nuance in its character and themes. However, after talking with fellow classmates and peers, only a fifth of them watched the movie and nearly half held no knowledge or understanding of its existence. Of those who had watched the film, it received only positive feedback and appreciation. It truly saddens me that on
my last commercial flight, I saw the film under the free movie section as it slowly fades away from public consciousness engulfed alongside lower-mediocre films. Among 2025’s other family and property titles with “A Minecraft Movie,” “Jurassic Park Rebirth” and “How to Train Your Dragon” representing pinnacles of financial moviemaking, the stagnation and inconsistent return in superhero films may appear baffling. However, the current situation superhero films find themselves in has been years in the making. Through the inconsistent and rough releases of “Eternals,” “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” “Thor: Love and Thunder,” “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” and “The Marvels,” Marvel’s recent trend in pumping out films constantly alongside their Disney+ releases has led to feelings of weariness and overstimulus in the genre. Combined with common releases across Prime Video in “The Boys” and “Invincible” alongside Sony and DC’s ongoing attempts to revitalize their respective superhero franchises, the entire landscape and environment of these films has become repetitive, unoriginal and outright tedious. All these factors and ongoing projects has created what people refer to as
superhero fatigue, a belief and sentiment that the genre needs to take a step back and necessary break in order to revitalize the Marvel and superhero brand similar to how the time between the Star Wars prequel trilogy and the sequel trilogy generated global appeal and hype leading to blockbuster hits regardless of their respective film quality or reception. In retrospect, the struggles and challenges the “Thunderbolts*” movie faces were not of their own making, rather the various choices and films made by Marvel combined with Hollywood has retracted and distanced fans from their brands. With a recent history of poor reception and overloaded release schedule, “Thunderbolts*”’ $382 million of worldwide box office revenue is a sign of a downward trend in a stagnated and repetitive industry. However, it is my belief that the superhero
genre will continue to proceed and churn out movies as enough audience awareness and demand remains.
With the rise of horror movie success as seen in “The Conjuring: Last Rites” explosive opening week, the stable and trending movie genre has pivoted. The question then becomes: How do industries shift their business practices in order to maximize profits and keep up with current patterns and consumer habits? I believe “Thunderbolts*” marks a change into more grounded, nuanced and differing storytelling in the industry that will lead to a more diverse franchise that can still entertain and bring in audiences. Now to what effect and what profit remains to be seen as the current reality is filled with instability and inconsistency.
Thunderbolts tickets in the box office didn’t break even.
COURTESY OF @MARVELSTUDIOS_
North Carolina.
GETTY IMAGES/THE FORDHAM RAM AI must work with the humanities to keep tech people-centered.
The Price of Retaliation: Sophie Cunningham’s Confrontational Playing Style
By LEAH RENSHAW CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham has recently become the hot topic up for debate in the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA). Her hard foul on Connecticut Sun rookie Jacy Sheldon, which was retaliation for earlier contact with Caitlin Clark, earned Cunningham an ejection, a surge of social media attention and the unofficial nickname “The Enforcer.” On one level, Cunningham’s instinct to stand up for a teammate is admirable. Athletes should support one another when the game gets physical or tensions rise. Yet her choice to do so through a deliberate, violent foul undermines both her team and the sport itself. The game of basketball is emotionally charged. Players get completely engrossed in the moments from play to play, and contact is inevitable. Cunningham went beyond competitive toughness into unsportsmanlike behavior when she chose to strike back. That foul did more than just end a play; it intensified the conflict and could have been dangerous. Retaliation rarely resolves conflicts; instead, it encourages more hostility, raises the possibility of injury and diverts players’ attention from winning the game. Like all professional leagues, the WNBA has regulations in place to stop this kind of escalation.
In addition to harming Sheldon, Cunningham’s violation of those regulations put her own team at a disadvantage for the rest of the game.
The aftermath of her actions proves the point. Cunningham’s ejection didn’t resolve any tensions; it fueled them. Months later, she suffered a seasonending knee injury, and some speculate it was payback for that earlier foul. Whether or not the injury was intentional, it highlights the cycle of retribution that retaliation naturally encourages. Instead of ensuring her teammates’ safety, Cunningham may have invited more danger for everyone on the court, including herself, due to acting on impulse and emotions.
Still, it would be unfair to dismiss the importance of loyalty and protection in team sports. Teammates should absolutely support one another, especially when they feel that referees are missing dangerous plays. No one wants to watch a star player like Clark take repeated hard hits with no response, but that response can take many forms. Rallying the team’s focus and morale, demanding tighter officiating or outplaying the opponent with skill and discipline are far more effective and mature ways to send a message.
Cunningham’s defenders pointed out her martial arts background and general toughness, qualities that clearly fuel her competitive spirit. ESPN host Pat McAfee even praised
her for “taking a foul to defend Clark,” suggesting that this risky violation is what proves her devotion. There’s no question that passion for your teammates is valuable. But in professional basketball, where players are role models and the stakes are high, passion must be balanced with control. Cunningham’s black belt in taekwondo may give her discipline in the dojo, but on the court, she chose to put on a show over restraint. Was this a show that people enjoyed?
Perhaps most striking is how Cunningham’s popularity skyrocketed after the incident. Within days, she had gained over 500,000 followers on TikTok and 300,000 on Instagram. Social media thrives on conflict, and Cunningham became a viral character: “The Enforcer,” the bold protector. That popularity says as much about our culture as it does about her. Fans often reward outrage and controversy with shares and likes, turning a dangerous foul into entertainment. But professional athletes cannot let social media dictate their behavior.
Players who chase online attention take the chance of letting public opinion overshadow their responsibility to their team and to the game itself. A hard foul that injures an opponent should never be a path to fame. Social media applause can be fleeting; injuries and suspensions can last far longer. Cunningham’s rising
follower count might boost her brand for now, but it doesn’t help the Fever win games or keep their players healthy.
Sports history shows that leadership and toughness don’t have to come from violence. Legends like Tamika Catchings or Sue Bird earned respect through consistency, strategic play and the ability to inspire teammates without cheap shots. They proved that you can defend your team’s dignity while honoring the sport’s integrity.
Cunningham herself once said in an interview, “I’ll always have my teammates’ backs, but you have to be smart about how you do it.” That sentiment is exactly right, and exactly what she failed to embody during that game against the Sun. Standing up for your teammates is essential, but true loyalty means keeping them out of harm’s way, not plunging them deeper into it.
In the end, the question isn’t whether professional basketball players should defend
their teammates; of course they should. The real question is, how?
Cunningham’s rise in social media popularity may tempt other athletes to court controversy for attention. But the WNBA’s future depends on players who choose skill over spectacle and restraint over retribution. Fans, too, have a role to play by rewarding excellence, not escalation.
Supporting teammates is non-negotiable. So is respecting the game. Cunningham’s decision to retaliate may have won her a wave of followers, but it cost her credibility as a professional and undermined the very principles that make team sports inspiring. True protection of a teammate is not about punishing an opponent; it’s about elevating your own play and proving, with every possession, that your team can win without crossing the line.
Another Unnecessary Excuse for Exclusion: Penn Station’s Hostile Architecture
By KATHRYN-ALEXANDRA
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Step into Penn Station, and you enter a world of motion, a cathedral of transit where millions of lives brush past each other daily. Yet amid the clamor and the echoing footsteps, something feels off. Something that doesn’t just ask you to move — it insists that you hurry, that you kiss the ring of the architecture itself, which preens itself on its sterility. The hostile architecture of Penn Station is filled with peculiar design choices, which are fundamentally just excuses for exclusion disguised as public policy, substituting the illusion of safety for real, human-centered design. Take the pyramids, ubiquitous in hostile architecture. Three jagged, brightly painted wooden structures perched atop steel bollards at the East End Gateway.
Aesthetically, they are odd, almost playful. Practically, they are cruel. Their purpose, we are told, is to “deter unauthorized activity.”
The translation: Don’t sit, don’t rest, don’t occupy this space in any way that suggests you belong. For travelers with aching feet, or those waiting endlessly for delayed trains, these pyramids are a physical reminder that comfortability is not permitted. For the homeless individuals who once used this corner as temporary refuge, the message is harsher: You are not welcome. The pyramids don’t protect anyone. They do nothing for safety, and they exist only to push bodies away. Crystal McFadden, a woman who once found brief solace in this corridor, called them exactly what they are: displacement disguised as safety.
Then there’s Moynihan
Train Hall, the city’s embarrassingly overpriced surrogate of a crown jewel. The atrium stretches high above, glass ceilings spilling sunlight onto polished floors. Onlookers might call it beautiful, monumental, even uplifting. But there is a catch: Seating is scarce, hidden and reserved for ticket-holding passengers. Outside these 320 spots, the hall feels empty in all the wrong ways: travelers lean against cold walls, perch precariously on luggage or crouch on the floor, trying to make a place for themselves in a design that refuses to accommodate them. I’ve done all three while waiting for the train, and have been accosted by the police for trying to be comfortable. The homeless, the exhausted commuter, the traveler delayed by circumstance, the tired tourist looking for a place to rest — they are all collateral damage in the pursuit of a perfectly curated space. Safety is the excuse, exclusion is the reality and spectacle is the order. And yet, the irony is profound. Commuters stumble over obstacles, wrestle with fatigue on cold floors or navigate spaces that have been deliberately stripped of comfort. The homeless still exist, instead lining the streets
around Madison Square Garden and Penn Station, only with amplified tension, discomfort and unease. Long-distance travellers like me must both stumble over obstacles and line the streets in discomfort or time their arrivals exactly down to the minute.
New York City’s public spaces should serve humans, not ideals of order or the illusion of safety. Benches, warm lighting, publicly accessible waiting areas — these are not luxuries, but rather necessities for a functional train station. Penn Station is by contrast, an aesthetic masquerade, replacing genuine purpose with cold, exclusionary gestures. The pyramids, the barren halls, the hidden seats, the pointless eye of the police — they are gestures not of safety but discomfort, nor of transit but alienation. Penn Station, in this sense, is a cautionary tale. Making a space inhospitable creates anxiety, not order. You do not protect the vulnerable; you erase them — but at the same time, make them feel more exposed than ever. You do not make commuters feel safe; you remind them that they are only tolerated while they move quickly enough, sit quietly enough, disperse
efficiently enough. And then, on top of all of that, you discourage people from actually using the space: Fewer people eat at the restaurants in the station and fewer people take the train. But, perhaps that is the point of all this. If the city does indeed desire — as it ought to — monumental public spaces that both serve its people and fill the onlooker with awe (in the way that the original Penn Station, with all of its flaws, actually did), it must retool hostile architecture, moving toward its elimination. It cannot end homelessness by hiding it, only by actually dealing with its root causes: through policies that actually support homeless people. Until that happens, Penn Station and Moynihan will be neither a crown jewel, nor a beckoning face of the city, but a monument to discomfort — where every step reminds us that, in the name of safety, the city has forgotten what it means to be human. It is a space that will remain as sterile and avoided as much as it is an embarrassment and insult to the city’s dignity.
Kathryn-Alexandra Rossi, FCRH ’27, is a philosophy and economics double major from Arlington, Virginia.
Sophie Cunningham came to the defense of teammate Caitlin Clark.
MEGHAN CATTANI/THE FORDHAM RAM
COURTESY OF HIRAM ALEJANDRO DURÁN/THE CITY The pyramids at Penn Station are one example of hostile architecture.
ROSSI
Leah Renshaw, FCRH ’27. is a film and television major from Oakland, New Jersey.
September 17, 2025
CULTURE
‘Twelfth Night,’ Fourth Row: A Shakespearean Miracle
By ELAINA GIBSON CONTRIBUTING WRITER
I have done some crazy things in my 18 years on this earth, but nothing quite compares to spending 15 hours in line for a single Shakespeare in the Park ticket.
As a new New York City resident, I am eager to do anything and everything the city has to offer. Attending a Shakespeare in the Park production has been at the top of my bucket list for as long as I can remember. With the reopening of the now renovated Delacorte Theater and a star-studded cast performing the “Twelfth Night,” I simply could not resist attempting to see it.
After reading countless articles on how to obtain the free tickets, I realized my best bet was to go to Central Park and join the line at 5 a.m. With that being said, I woke up at 4 a.m., got in my Lyft and was dropped off on the Upper West Side, W 81st St, Central Park entrance.
Stepping out of the vehicle, my backpack full of snacks and books, with a blanket in hand, I was confident in my preparation. But that self-assurance immediately vanished as the woman at the front of the line told me I should call my ride back because there was no way I would get tickets. Apparently, the truly committed had slept there overnight in tents, and the $60 I brought would not buy anyone off.
My stomach dropped, and my heart began to ache. I began to think to myself, had I done it all wrong? Why did the internet lie to me? Despite my inner conflicts, it was 5 a.m. — I barely knew where I was and did not want to spend another $50 on a Lyft without giving it a shot.
At that time, the end of the line snaked all the way down to 85th Street. I read online to form a group, so I struck up a conversation with two random guys, Eric and Chris. I
immediately knew I had found my community as, proof of the smallness of the world, Eric’s father used to be a professor at Fordham University, and Chris grew up down the street in the Bronx.
As the park opened at 6 a.m., the line began to move up. The two somewhat strangers and I threw down our blankets where we would sit for the next six hours before ticket distribution at 12 p.m..
I read for a little, but the conversation with Eric and Chris reignited as we made a list of all the quintessential New York experiences and restaurants I should go to. Since it’s a pretty vast city with never-ending things to do, this took up about five hours. Eric’s wife eventually met up with him in line, and we all exchanged laughs and utter shock at the ridiculousness of what we and others behind us were doing.
The theater’s employees, given the near-impossible task of managing the line and answering everyone’s questions, told our section that there was close to a zero percent chance we would get tickets due to the unusual number of people wanting to attend.
The people around me were veterans of the line with 15-30 years of experience, and they were astounded by the lack of tickets available.
Nevertheless, they were popping champagne over breakfast, sleeping on their cots and using their portable restrooms, unfazed by the bleak outlook.
Lack of entertainment was not an issue as a man in Shakespearean style clothing played a lute and another older gentleman committed his entire Saturday morning to playing Broadway tunes on his saxophone.
The line started to move closer to the ticket counter at 12 p.m., but with a half-mile long line ahead, I had serious doubts. With a hundred people
in front of me, the announcement came: no more tickets. I am genuinely surprised a riot did not break out.
Eric and Chris deserted me to go about their lives, and suddenly, I had to mourn the loss of my new friends and lack of tickets. But hope was not completely gone, as the standby line was a final resort.
I entered the standby line, which gets the tickets of people who cancel. This left 60 of the most immovable people in front of me. Two girls who already got their tickets urged me to wait. But this meant I would have to stay in line for another six hours.
I was met at a crossroads: did I give up now and go get lunch, or stick it out in the off chance enough people would cancel to give everyone in front of me two tickets and leave me just one? I decided to persevere.
As a believer in divine intervention, I credit God for getting me through those final hours. The weather was spectacular, the nice stranger in line lent me his portable charger, the concession stand had hot dogs and a beautiful oak tree provided shade for a marvelous, albeit well-deserved, nap. By no means did the next hours fly by, but the conditions were superb.
In this new line, I decided not to get so attached to the people sitting around me; at this point, it was every man for himself. When the family of four tried to cut in front of me as the line started to condense, I pushed them off their path, fully prepared to claw my way to the front.
Slowly but surely, people started getting tickets at 7:30 p.m., employees running back and forth to the stand to retrieve the unclaimed tickets and give them to the mob.
As we could hear the people cheer inside, we knew that the pre-performance introduction had started. With five people
in front of me, they ran out of tickets. Heart pounding, absolutely delirious at this point, I wondered if it really was all for nothing. But then a final set of tickets was rushed to the line, and I received the ultimate prize.
I by no means claim to be a good sport, so when the ticket was placed in my hand, there was nothing stopping me from screaming with joy that my blood, sweat and tears had achieved the unthinkable. I ran through the security check and was hastily led to my seats in the fourth row!
In a smaller outdoor theater like the Delacorte, there really is not a bad seat in the house, but section A, row D, seat 410 was spectacular. The simple stage was lit to a beautiful perfection as I began to watch “Twelfth Night.”
The performance was excellent with Sandra Oh in the role of Viola, Peter Dinklage playing Malvolio and Jesse Tyler Ferguson as Sir Andrew Aguecheek left me starstruck.
The hilariously placed comedic moments were blended perfectly with the serious gutwrenching drama of the characters’ heartbreak. The actor who played Antonio gave me goosebumps with their forceful performance of pain and suffering upon Sebastian’s rejection. Moses Sumney, who played Feste, has what I can only describe as the voice of an angel. Listening to his heavenly vocals made
the wait worth it. Compared to the line, the play went by in a blur, with a brief unplanned intermission where the police escorted a disruptive woman out of the theater.
The ending was truly spectacular with the full cast coming out for curtain call in grand, colorful gowns, sticking to the play’s theme of challenging gender roles.
In the end, I can only offer up the cliché line that it was more about the journey than the destination. It is hard to find a situation that tests your pure determination, faith and willpower more than a 15-hourlong line. But when I look back, it was about the moments where I could have easily given up and walked away, but instead persisted. People in line doubted me from the moment I got there; those passing by wished me luck as they scoffed at my mission, but I persisted! If you have a spare day and want to test your capabilities, I recommend marking your calendars for next year’s performance. Going early in the show’s run will give you a better chance of getting tickets and hopefully not make you the last one entering the theater, but I can say it does not hinder the experience.
Shakespeare in the Park is more than just a free ticket to great theater; it is being part of a wonderful community. And next time, I might even bring a tent.
Big Thief Travels Through Space and Time in ‘Double Infinity’
By LEO SCHECHTER CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Indie-folk rock darlings Big Thief’s newest record, “Double Infinity,” takes their fans’ feet from planted on the ground to a cosmic journey through the future, present and past. If you like folk-rock and shooting stars, this album is for you.
“Double Infinity” is Big Thief’s first album as a trio since bassist Max Olearchik left in 2024. Following the high praise of “Dragon New Warm Mountain I Believe in You,” many wondered where Big Thief would go next, especially with the band’s new lineup. Some songs, like my personal favorite, “Los Angeles,” echo the composition of prior Big Thief work, led by acoustic guitar. But on “Double Infinity,” the lead vocalist Adrianne Lenker, guitarist Buck Meek and drummer
James Krivchenia guide their sound into a happier, more psychedelic place than the band’s previous records. Lenker’s songwriting is as poised as ever, simplifying large ideas of nostalgia and love into bite-sized therapeutic lines. The first song and lead single for the album, “Incomprehensible,” is an especially strong track where Lenker comforts both the listener and herself as she faces the fear of aging: “In two days it’s my birthday and I’ll be 33 / That doesn’t really matter next to eternity.” She laments how our culture shrouds aging in negativity, and the idea that we don’t have enough time. “Incomprehensible” is vulnerable yet steady song, as Lenker basks in the freedom that comes with accepting who you are and who you will become. “So let gravity be
my sculptor, let the wind do my hair, let me dance in front of people without a care,” she wrote. Despite the impossibility of being fully prepared for the passage of time, she leans into the inevitable.
Both sonically and lyrically, Big Thief extrapolates a moment into a lifetime of meaning. Another stand-out track, “Grandmother,” describes the enduring nature of passion, even beyond time. In the first verse, Lenker reminisces on simple moments, “dancing at the bar, kissing in our car.” In the next, she discredits the desire to cling to these memories: “It’s alright, everything that happened, happened, so what’s the use of holding?” The instrumentals build over the course of the six-minute song, gradually adding heavier drums and shimmers of texture to take on a more atmospheric
sound. Featured artist Laraaji accompanies Lenker, singing and at times belting a melody that rolls in and out like the tide. The core of the song is Lenker’s refrain “Gonna turn it all into rock and roll.” Depositing the past firmly in the rearview mirror, Lenker is unwavering in her objective: to create and enjoy.
Only a few songs on this release follow a linear narrative and often have nearly nonsensical poetic lyrics.
“Double Infinity” is less directed than their other projects and may seem aimless at times, but the approach gives the album an almost endless feeling. Rhythmic acoustic guitar and drums backed by what sounds like crystals allow for an existential exploration. The songs are expansive and therapeutic without being prescriptive.
Big Thief, sonically at the crossroads of the universe, isn’t scared of the future.
ELAINA GIBSON FOR THE FORDHAM RAM Shakespeare in Central Park requires a commitment but is well worth the wait.
CULTURE
‘Little Women:’ An Internally Misogynistic Masterpiece
By EMMA LEONARDI ASST. NEWS EDITOR
When I was 16 years old, I was very emphatic about reading the biggest and most complex literature I could get my hands on. My mother, who has always supported my reading endeavors, suggested I read “Little Women” by Louisa May Alcott. I spent a month reading what was supposed to be an 800-word piece of feminist literature. By the time I turned the last page, I knew two things with absolute certainty: one, I hated the story, and two, this was without a doubt no work of feminism.
To prove to you exactly what I mean by this, I will be going through each of the March sisters and sharing moments from their stories that are decidedly misogynistic.
Let’s begin with the eldest March sister, Meg. One of the first times she has a significant role in the plot is in chapter three, where she twists her ankle at a dance. Laurie, the Marches’ neighbor and a boy of similar age to the sisters, is introduced for the first time when he swoops in and plays the role of a hero by offering his carriage to provide the sisters a way to get home. While this event is used as a plot device, it is also inherently unfeminist to imply that the sisters couldn’t get Meg home by themselves.
The next time Meg has her own feature is in chapter nine, when she gets invited to visit her wealthy friend Annie. Meg shows “female vanity” towards all of Annie’s “pretty things.” Despite their mother Marmee’s advice on the importance of happiness over wealth, Meg continues to show envy towards Annie’s ability to purchase nice dresses and jewelry. The desire for these types of objects is not misogynistic in and of itself, but having that longing be the only major personality trait of a female character is unfeminist.
The rest of Meg’s story revolves around a man, Mr. Brooke, whom she ends up marrying at the beginning of part two of the novel. After their wedding, the only time Meg is mentioned is in relation to Mr. Brooke. Now, one might argue that this is to be expected on either side, as once married, you are a packaged deal. However, when their marriage is mentioned, Meg’s wifely duties are always shown as either producing children or serving Mr. Brooke.
The singular chapter that gives an update on her showcases a fight between Mr. Brooke and her, in which Mr. Brooke brings his friend over without telling Meg in advance and expects her to stop her other activities and cater to his and his friend’s
needs. While I acknowledge that this kind of expectation was common in this time period, it does not mean it needs to be included in this supposedly feminist novel.
The second youngest March sister, Beth, acts in some individual plot points that are neutral in terms of misogyny. However, there is a part of Beth’s character that is unfeminist. Her grandest desire, as labeled so in chapter 13, is to stay home and care for her family. Some women desire to be homemakers, and I am in no way shaming that preference, with either Beth or Meg. The part that is unfeminist is when she projects this desire onto her sister Jo right before she (spoiler alert) dies in chapter 40. As Beth is on her deathbed, she tells Jo to set aside her writing endeavors as well as her craving to travel and see the world, and instead care for her parents. By actively shutting down another woman’s wishes to do things other than be a homemaker, she is being unfeminist.
Amy, the youngest March sister, does have desires outside of homemaking. She has a passion for art, and the majority of her storyline revolves around her growing from the brat she was as a girl and into a civilized young woman. In terms of feminism, I feel fine about how Amy is portrayed in
the novel. However, what I will absolutely not stand for is when people who have only seen the 2019 film adaptation by Greta Gerwig try to argue that Amy is the reason why the story is feminist, all because she has a monologue about women’s roles in society. As this is not included in the original novel, I will not tolerate this as a genuine argument. Amy is neutral at best in terms of her character’s projection of feminism.
And then there’s Jo, the second eldest March sister and arguably the main character. Jo aspires to be a writer and wants nothing to do with romance or other stereotypical female desires for most of the novel. Despite her mostly feminist character, she ruins it and,
controversially, the entire novel with her final few scenes. She meets a professor named Mr. Bhaer; after seeing two of her sisters marry and be happy, she decides she cannot be happy alone. They get married at the conclusion of the novel, and the last chapter sees them inheriting land from her aunt. I’m going to hold your hand while I tell you this next part. With that land, they decide to make an only boy’s school where Mr. Bhaer teaches the pupils, and Jo acts as a glorified maid, cooking and cleaning for her husband, her two sons and the rest of the boys.
And then I threw my beautiful Puffin Classic copy of the supposed masterpiece “Little Women” at the wall.
‘How to Train your Dragon’ at Central Park … or Was It?
By GABRIELA URIBE CONTRIBUTING WRITER
It seemed too good to be true. A movie in Central Park for free! Or maybe it’s actually accurate, and I’m just a first-year who doesn’t know the city all that well. I take every excuse that I can get to go into the city, so it was a no-brainer that I would be attending. Given that I am not well-versed on New York City subway routes, I grabbed my friend and after my math class, we sprinted to catch the Metro-North for our exciting expedition. After transferring to the R train, we set out for the short walk to the park while admiring all the beautiful architecture.
It was a cool Thursday night, and our bags were filled with Trader Joe’s snacks, candy and a picnic blanket to spread out our treats. We were itching to find where the movie would take place.
I was ecstatic to see “How to Train your Dragon” (2025). I’d never seen it, butI had heard from movie critics that it was one of the best live actions that has come out. The film fanatic in me was yearning to see what all the hype was about.
I guess I’ll never know. You might be confused, but imagine this: we made the trek to Central Park and walked over
to Wollman Rink, finding the perfect spot to set camp. It was a great environment — there was free popcorn and people walking around with their dogs. The evening quickly turned to night, and the skyline looked stunning from where we sat.
We scrolled through social media to pass the time, and I went on Letterboxd to get even more excited for the movie. Suddenly, I began to see the opening credits pop up. I froze. “Did Warner Bros. Make this movie? I thought it was Dreamworks…” I thought to myself. I assumed I was wrong.
Then I saw it. The undeniable sight of a creeper on the screen. And no, I don’t mean a weird or freaky person. I mean the creeper from the Mojang Studios video game “Minecraft.” I felt myself filling with dread but hey, a free movie is a free movie, and I’m not going to turn that down. We sat through the whole hour and 41 minutes of “A Minecraft Movie” (2025). Now keep in mind, I’ve already seen this movie and knew I didn’t like it, so this was quite a change in events. I won’t turn this into a film review, but there is a thin line between a movie that is supposed to be “bad” but in a “camp” way, and a movie that
FOR THE FORDHAM RAM
is supposed to be “bad” but is genuinely horrendous. This film is not my cup of tea, and I’ll leave it at that.
After the movie, we got up and discussed our respective opinions and were happy to realize that we felt the same way about the film. We decided to head to an Irish pub near the park after to enjoy the beauty that is pub fare. After, we walked to Grand Central and waited for the train back to Fordham after a long night. We reunited with our
friends and told them about our eventful evening. It brought in a lot of laughs, and I wondered, “why did the venue change the movie?” I decided to check the flyer again and realized that there was actually no reason for me to be upset because I quite literally just misread the Instagram post. It very clearly stated that Sept. 11 would be showing “A Minecraft Movie” (2025).
Free movies in Central Park are a lovely getaway from campus, even if you are not sure what you are going to see! thing to do with friends, and allows students to explore the city and appreciate it to its full advantage. I highly recommend bringing snacks and taking cute photos while laughing with your friends in the middle of Central Park which, frankly, you can’t do anywhere else. However, if you do choose to do this and are a somewhat snobby movie lover like me, I urge you to please triple check and make sure you like the movie you’re going to be watching!
So, would I recommend coming to this event? Yes! I think it’s a very fun and cheap
GABRIELA URIBE
COURTESY OF @LITTLEWOMENMOVIE
“Little Women” may not be as feminist as one would think.
CULTURE
‘private music:’ A Nu Metal Revival From Deftones
By SAMANTHA DIAZ STAFF WRITER
Deftones have finally made their return to the rock scene with their new album, “private music.”
“private music” marks the band’s 10th studio album and the release of new music for the first time in five years. Their fanbase has grown exponentially due to their virality on the social media platform TikTok. New fans, who are mainly Generation Z, have been eagerly waiting for the new material.
The album opens with one of the lead singles, “my mind is a mountain.” The single managed to earn the band their first number one hit, and it marks a powerful start to the album with sounds familiar to “Koi No Yokan,” specifically their highly beloved song, “Rosemary.”
“infinite source” is another highlight and perhaps one of the best songs in the band’s entire catalog. Lyrically, it is one of their most beautiful songs, and the meaning behind the song ranges from the band’s farewell to Chino Moreno talking about his sobriety. As a non-single, it is a significant track that could become another standout hit for the album.
As the longest song on the album, “souvenir” is an
interesting track with most of Moreno’s higher vocals along a rougher track. However, what makes it different from the rest is the calming outro that plays into “cXz.”
Marking the halfway point of the album, “cXz” is a nice bridge connecting the first half of the album to the second half. It’s a track that is easily overlooked on the album but an underrated gem. It’s another nostalgic piece, with a sound similar to what has been heard on “Saturday Night Wrist.”
The second single from the album, “milk of the madonna,” is similar to its previous single in terms of its sound. However, it’s a new approach for the band, as the lyrics signify a spiritual force in the song. While done in the band’s typical style, its sound has a different tone to it, leaning more towards a pop punk edge.
“~metal dream” comes towards the end of the album, but it is a dreamlike and rebellious track despite being one of the shortest. It fits in its placement on the album as the second to last track, signifying the end of the album is near and welcomes “departing the body” as the finale.
A personal favorite of mine in the whole album is “i think about you all the time,” which
is a bit of a calm before the storm that is “milk of the madonna.” It’s like a love ballad, the lyrics clearly directed to someone you can’t get out of your mind.
Overall, “private music” is a nostalgic but fresh album where Deftones pays homage to its nu metal origins, and will possibly continue leading its revival. While it’s something bigger for the newer fans, it is also enough for older fans to enjoy.
The band may be in the
running for a Grammy nomination this year. They were previously nominated for Best Metal Performance, winning one of their four nominations. Hopefully this time, we see “private music” nominated for Best Rock Album.
No Such Thing As ‘Normal People’
By ADISA BALIC CONTRIBUTING WRITER
I had little knowledge of what to expect when I initially picked up Sally Rooney’s “Normal People.” I was aware of all the hype surrounding it, with some praising it and others criticizing it as being overhyped. By the time I finished, I knew why it had sparked such strong and dividing feelings in so many people. There aren’t many dramatic occurrences or significant storyline twists in this novel; rather, it persists in the quiet intensity of a connection between two people who aren’t quite sure how they fit together or apart, in little moments. I found it to be incredibly moving due to that subtlety.
The narrative is surprisingly straightforward. It tracks two people as they grow up and transition from adolescence to maturity, leaving and entering each other’s lives through the years. The emotional tugof-war between them is what keeps you turning the pages, not any big surprises or overarching plots. Rooney has a talent for illustrating the complexity of intimacy and how one person may simultaneously be your savior and your
downfall. I became interested because I wanted to know how they would navigate one another, not because I was frantic to know what would happen.
Rooney’s writing requires some tweaking. She uses simple, nearly bare sentences and avoids using quotation marks. I initially believed it may be obtrusive, but it soon became inconspicuous, and I eventually recognized it added a certain rawness to the novel. It feels comparable to being inside someone’s head, rather than reading a conventional narrative; conversations flow naturally into inner thoughts. Her writing isn’t ostentatious, but it’s sharp — sometimes excruciatingly so. Frequently, I would pause after a straightforward line because it was so powerful, as it had taken me by surprise.
The issues that Rooney explores without ever preaching are what truly stuck with me. Class, for example, subtly permeates the narrative — how social background, wealth and privilege influence how you see yourself, as well as how other people perceive you. The protagonists’ journey across this barrier seemed quite authentic. The emphasis on communication — or, more frequently,
miscommunication — was equally noteworthy. The tension is mostly caused by what isn’t said rather than what is. Reading that made me painfully aware of how often relationships fail due to underlying issues and how frequently individuals expect others to read their minds. Then there is love itself, of course. The messy, infuriating and thrilling kind that most of us are familiar with in real life, not the tidy, happilyending one. Rooney portrays love as something that both enriches and complicates life, something that both can heal and wound.
Admittedly, there were times when I was annoyed by the characters. They occasionally injure each other in ways that seem preventable, like making blunders and saying inappropriate things. They felt so human, though, for the same reason. They’re not perfect; they had flaws that made me think of individuals I know and occasionally even myself. Although this realization is unsettling, it is also what makes the book so emotionally compelling. By the end, I felt as though I had actually seen something, rather than the satisfaction of a neatly wrapped-up plot.
Of course, not everyone will
enjoy “Normal People.” It may seem unimpressive to readers who like books with complex worldbuilding, fast-paced narratives or obvious conclusions. It additionally has a weight to it, not in a dramatic sense, but more in the quiet aching of how complex individuals can be. That honesty was what made it incredibly compelling for me, but I can see how it could be exhausting or even infuriating for others.
Would I suggest that somebody read this book given my experience? Yes, but not to all people or stages of life. It’s the type of book you should read when you want to reflect on your life; it invites you to sit with it instead of reading it
quickly. In addition to telling a story, the book asks you to consider your own life, including your past romantic relationships, blunders and silences. The way it made “normal” look anything but ordinary is what really impressed me. It served as a reminder that often the most potent stories are the ones that don’t seem like much at first glance, and that even the simplest interactions may have the most profound meaning.
When I closed the book, I didn’t feel a sense of finality. Instead, I felt as though Rooney had left me with an echo, one that kept resonating long after. And that, to me, is the mark of a novel worth reading.
MEGHAN CATTANI/THE FORDHAM RAM “Normal People” speaks to the emotional tug-of-war of the adolescent experience.
COURTESY OF INSTAGRAM @DEFTONES
Deftones’ new album, “private music,” was released on Aug. 22, 2025, the only album they have released in five years.
CULTURE
Snakes and Cannolis Line the Streets at the 2025 San Gennaro Festival
By ELIZABETH CORALLO CONTRIBUTING WRITER
Where else in the world can you find snakes and cannolis on the same block?
For the 99th year in a row, the San Gennaro Festival has taken over Mulberry Street in Manhattan’s Little Italy. The nine-day event, running from Sept. 11 to 21, celebrates Saint Januarius, a Benevento Bishop from the 200s. He is both the patron saint of Naples and of blood donors, and the festival is an annual tradition that remembers him, featuring Italian-American culture, good food, (overpriced) drinks and even … snakes?
As you stroll through the festival, you’ll see string lights with the colors of the Italian flag above your head and vendors with food, drinks, desserts and jewelry lining the streets. There’s also carnival games and rides with men in white tank tops cat-calling you to play.
The great scent of fried fish, savory pizza and even grilled corn will fill the air around you as an Italian man sings “That’s Amore” and “Sweet Caroline” on the stage at the festival’s entrance to a crowd of dancing veterans and older couples. And if that isn’t enticing enough, then just wait until you
By ANTHONY FARELL CONTRIBUTING WRITER
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) highlights artistic and cultural changes in modern times in the 1980s-Present Collection. The gallery is an impressive collection of mixed media creations containing recreations of bomb shelters, sculptures made from fMRI readings and chandeliers made of discarded stuffed animals. The focus of this article will be on the recently installed exhibit in the Contemporary Art Gallery. The first of 16 exhibits, “Destination Unknown,” starts a running motif throughout the entire gallery, fitting for the modern day: uncertainty and instability. This article covers two of the three paintings in detail, exploring the present change of ordinary life.
The centerpiece of this exhibit is the piece “Unknown Pleasures” (2019) by Matthew Wong. “Unknown Pleasures” depicts a lush field of blue grasses and plants. In the horizon line sits a lone snowcapped mountain piercing the sky. The background is an assortment of cool, rich blues and greens that paint the skyline, broken up by a single band of warm yellow running through the center. The central focus is a winding black road cutting through the field, headed to the mountain. The brushwork used for each of the individual pieces of the painting helps distinguish each set piece. The grass in the field, for example, is created from a
see the three men carrying giant boas and anacondas around their necks. Yes, you can stop and take a photo with them (for a small price, of course).
There’s wine, strong Aperol Spritz’s ($16 for one of those small plastic cups you get in doctors’ offices) and desserts ranging from the ever-delicious cannolis (both chocolate and plain) to cheesecake and fresh lemonade.
You can try anything at this festival, from Italian classics like arancini (rice balls) to Skinny Joey’s Cheesesteaks. For pizza, there are just about a dozen options to choose from, including “the original Prince Street pizza” with pepperoni slices, penne vodka slices and plain squares. For some, the amount of food options can be overwhelming (in a delicious way).
“I’m having choice anxiety,” said one patron about the food options at the festival. “There’s so many pizza stands, what if I choose the wrong one?”
Don’t worry, if you get sick of Italian food (or consumed by choice anxiety from all the different vendors), the festival features plenty of other cuisines to try, too. There’s gyro and lamb, BBQ, Jamaican jerk chicken, pineapple bowls
with fresh seafood and plenty of arepas. There is even a stand called “Wontonissimo” that boasts, “Wontons with an Italian accent.”
Now that you’ve gobbled up everything in sight, you’ll need something to wash it down with. You could go for the Aperol Spritz, with the refreshing and bubbly taste of bitter oranges and summer, fully immersing yourself in the Italian feel of the festival. Or you could spring for the $7 cappuccino from Caffe Roma, which has been on the corner of Brooke Street since 1891.
“It’s extra foamy,” said another patron about the cappuccino from Caffe Roma. “It tastes more like a traditional cappuccino than you’d get at Starbucks.”
If you’re not into coffee or Aperol, don’t worry, there are plenty of smoothie stands, lemonade stands and beets for you to enjoy. And although the prices of the food and drinks might not be college-student friendly, the accessories and goods sold by the remaining vendors certainly are.
Yes, they sell LABUBUs. Just don’t ask if they’re real or where they came from.
You can also survey tables covered in necklaces, rings,
bracelets and even sweaters for dogs. There’s truly something for everyone at this festival, despite its origins and name boasting Italian-American pride. In 2025, it’s really not a festival that’s geared towards any specific group, but tries to cover the needs of anyone passing through Mulberry Street for the next two weeks.
And after you have eaten and shopped away all your
What Can A Painting Know?
series of repeated dots of paint with varying textures, sizes and colors. Meanwhile, the road and horizon are composed of smooth, uniform lines of color. Most interesting is the brushwork for the mountain and trees. The rough brush strokes make the larger plants and trees more visible. The piece is especially dazzling in person because of how the paint composition changes the aesthetic beauty of the piece. Due to the technique used to paint the dots of the field, each individual dot has a slight sheen that makes the painting itself look like the shimmering scales.
“Unknown Pleasures” comes together as a serene yet melancholy piece. One who sees the painting is invited to a tranquil world which only an art museum can provide. Museum goers become detached from their lives, engrossed in the detail left behind in brushwork.
Wong describes the inspiration for the piece as “a mindful state that people go through in such as listening to music or daydreaming.” But like these other momentary escapisms, the painting also inevitably has an element of finality. Depending on where you stand while observing the piece, different trees and patches of grass shimmer. However, the beautiful illusion that allows this painting to glow is one that is constantly being destroyed and recreated by the human eye. Much like a daydream that is quickly forgotten, a
person may never truly be able to view the painting with the exact same feeling again. The beauty that wholeheartedly engrossed its viewer was born and served its function before being undone.
In contrast with the serenity of “Unknown Pleasures,” Carlos Almaraz’s “Solo Crash” (1981) depicts a more provocative and unsettling setting. The piece is of an ardent car crash on a highway bridge. As flares burst on the first higherup bridge, the pine green car flipped on its back, hurdling over the lower bridge. The rear of the car burns, leaving a plume of grey smoke as shards of metal rain down alongside the wreck. The eeriest detail is the shadow of the car, which is a viscous red splattered across the highway. The color choice splits the piece into conflicting motifs. The highway and backgrounds are all in cheery, smooth pastels, which depict the world as inviting and new. In contrast, the car wreck uses gritty colors, highlighting the sudden, vicious tragedy. These conflicting styles between the gritty and the relaxed elements portray a distinct conflict between the individual and their environment.
The struggle reflected on the canvas stems from the personal experiences of unprecedented change that Carlos Almaraz has undergone. Almaraz had a fascination with car crashes, dedicating his artistic career to them. His fascination came
remaining dollars, you can spend the rest of your night on the rides. There’s two Ferris wheels to choose from and teacups, for all of your spinning needs.
The festival is open from 11 a.m. to 11:30 p.m. everyday until Sept. 21. There’s plenty of time to fit it into your busy school schedule, and it’s even better when you go with a friend.
from trying to depict the angst he felt living in Los Angeles during its urban development. Over the course of a year, entire new highways sprang up in his neighborhood, drastically altering the dynamic of the community. Apathy looms over Alvarez and his work. The world seems apathetic through the visual of the car wreck and the people who are either gravely wounded
is a reflection of the uncertainty or killed in it. The background and bridge continue to be bright and colorful, despite the present tragedy. “Solo Crash” tells a somber message about the unstable nature of humanity in the face of the universe. In spite of any tragedy a person may experience, whether it be sudden or prolonged, the world will move regardless of our destination.
COURTESY OF @FIFIVAL
The MoMA’s “Destination Unknown” exhibit
COURTESY OF @SANGENNARONYC
The San Gennaro Festival has taken over Manhattan’s Little Italy
CULTURE
Who’s That Kid?| Gianni Diletto FCRH ’28
Sophomore Reflects on Student Involvement at Fordham
By JACK MCDONALD ADVERTISING DIRECTOR
Involvement in the Fordham community is extremely important for students. It gives students the opportunity to enrich their lives through meeting friends and making a meaningful contribution to the world. However, it is often the activities Fordham students take part in at home that influence what they will be involved in once they arrive at college.
Gianni Diletto, FCRH ’28, is rather familiar with this concept. Born in Massapequa, Long Island, Diletto spent much of his early life training in mixed martial arts, which earned him a black belt in Kenpo Karate and a blue belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. He trained at the American Black Belt Academy in Massapequa Park from the age of six, where he eventually began work as an instructor. “Being a teacher was one of the best experiences I ever had,” said Diletto. “I was able to help students be more confident.”
Once Diletto arrived at Fordham, he longed to continue this commitment away
By SABRINA LOPEZ CONTRIBUTING WRITER
On Sunday night, I sat in the living room of my off-campus apartment, berating my television. The three women sitting and screaming alongside me were my roommates. We have very strong opinions on the characters in the show, “The Summer I Turned Pretty,” that we love to hate: Jeremiah, Conrad and Belly.
The four of us, donning our most comfortable pajamas, sat cross-legged, absentmindedly eating Keebler Cookies and Sour Patch Watermelon, exchanging laughs at every unhinged comment we added to the incestuous love triangle unfolding on our screen.
It was at this moment that I stopped to reflect on how lucky I was to have met my roommates, something I’ve done a lot since our senior year — or “our year of lasts,” as we call it — began. I looked around at the three of them, tucked under blankets and debating whether or not to turn on the subtitles, and I smiled to myself.
It was three years ago, right around this time of year, we met under typical first-year circumstances: introducing yourself to everyone because you are desperate for friends and terrified to eat alone in the caf.
Really, our friendship started with first-year roommates and Loschert Hall.
I met Erica Lapreay, FCRH ’26, on move-in day in Aug. of 2022. Excited, but nervous,
from home. As such, he joined the martial arts club, where he continues to develop his love for mixed martial arts and teamwork.
Diletto has also made his Catholic faith a large part of his Fordham experience. From a young age, he attended Sunday Mass at Maria Regina Roman Catholic Church in Seaford. He studied the Confraternity of Christian Doctrine (CCD) up to his Confirmation at Maria Regina through their parishioners’ program. Diletto continues to attend mass at Maria Regina during the summer and when he visits home during the year. “I met many of my good friends that I still talk to there [at CCD],” said Diletto. “It [Maria Regina] was the first place that started to build up my Catholic faith, and I appreciate it deeply.”
When Diletto arrived at Fordham, he was inspired to get involved in Fordham’s liturgies, which are at the heart and soul of the university’s heritage. As such, in the spring of 2025, he joined Campus Ministry and was commissioned as a hospitality minister and Eucharistic minister.
As a hospitality minister, Diletto is responsible for greeting parishioners who enter the church and ushering them to the pews. He also helps lead the collection following the petitions and convenes with parishioners as they exit the church. As a eucharistic minister, Diletto distributes the bread and wine to parishioners. “Joining the church ministry made me feel a part of something greater in the Fordham community, especially being a hospitality minister, as I am able to do something for the Church that is so valuable to me,” said Diletto. Diletto is also committed to university safety and security. He recently began work with Fordham’s Department of Public Safety, where he serves as a student worker in the Lombardi Fitness Center and William D. Walsh Family Library. Diletto is responsible for ensuring the safety of the student body using university resources and facilities. “It is a very peaceful environment, and I have personally had no issues with anyone I have come across with,” said Diletto. “It is a wonderful job to have.”
aspires to work in a service where you can help people, ranging from a police officer to a forensic scientist or even a lawyer. “When I was younger, I knew I wanted a
Thank You, Loschert Hall
we quietly set up our respective sides of the dorm, careful not to disrupt each other. It wasn’t until our families had gone and the two of us were left to navigate college that we realized we wouldn’t just be polite roommates; we’d be friends.
One week into our first year, Erica and I were introduced to Ava Rabeni, GSB ’26, whose roommate had lasted 48 hours at school before deciding she wasn’t ready for college and promptly moved back home. The three of us fell into an easy routine of taking walks in the New York Botanical Garden and dinners in the caf.
One night, Erica, Ava and I were sitting at a high-top in Così when someone ran up to our table and, without introducing herself, began peppering Ava with questions about her infamous roommate who’d fled school after two days. Ava then introduced us to Jenny Lockel, FCRH ’26. We invited her to sit with us, unknowingly sealing our friendship fates.
As our first year went on, and the change in weather made it impossible for us to stay outside longer than was absolutely necessary, the four of us spent all of our time in mine and Erica’s dorm, Loschert 231.
In between classes, we’d sit cross-legged on the floor in the carpeted space between our two beds. We’d fall over laughing at ridiculous jokes
and bond over the universal experiences all first-year students share. It was there that we’d made our plans to live together the following year. By a stroke of luck, we secured our fourth-floor Walsh apartment.
As sophomores, we learned how to live together, managing each other’s quirky habits and desired cleanliness levels. Once we were comfortable, the year flew by in a haze of living room dance parties and reality television marathons. Between episodes of “The Bachelor,” we made plans for our junior year and semesters abroad.
As psychology majors, Erica and Jenny chose the DIS program in Copenhagen, Denmark, for the fall of 2024. Ava would spend her spring semester in London, and I would go to Sydney, Australia. Despite the distance, these opportunities seemed too incredible to pass up, so with the knowledge that we’d be separated for an entire school year, we begrudgingly moved out of our Walsh apartment with promises to keep in touch as best we could.
Luckily, our study abroad adventures and long-distance FaceTime calls kept us distracted from the time apart. When we reunited in June to move into our senior year offcampus apartment and begin our summer internships, it was like no time had passed.
Today, we’re halfway through September and trying to relish every moment of “our year of lasts.” Balancing class schedules, jobs in the city and club
job that helped people, and even though I’m not sure what that job will be yet, I’m sure I will get one that will allow me to achieve my goals,” said Diletto.
requirements has proved to be more difficult than we thought, and so our time spent together feels both precious and fleeting. These last few weeks have made me realize that the unscheduled moments — sitting on the couch in our PJs, yelling at the TV — are the ones I’ll remember most.
It is in those moments that I’m transported back to Loschert 231. It might feel like
Sharing memories is one of the most special parts of the college experience we’ve drastically changed since then, but in a lot of ways, we’re still those same first-years sitting in a circle on the floor of that dorm. When you learn to live with roommates, you strike a delicate balance. Sharing space, splitting chores and navigating each other’s weird habits. If you get lucky like me and you’re able to make it work, you’ll still want to be friends at the end of it all.
Diletto
Sophomore approaches college as an opportunity to continue growing.
GIANNI DILETTO FOR THE FORDHAM RAM
SABRINA LOPEZ FOR THE FORDHAM RAM
It’s Alive! (And Surprisingly Deep)
By RAOUL MUSYAFFA CONTRIBUTING WRITER
As the onslaught of the felled leaves graces the paths and the chill in the air approaches (along with the new movie coming out very soon), I find it most appropriate to share a personal review of the Gothic horror book “Frankenstein” by Mary Shelley. I will try my best to sustain the spoiler-free nature of this review, and with respect to that, here is a recap.
Victor Frankenstein, the story’s central protagonist, seeks to test the limits of his scientific knowledge by attempting to animate life with his own hands. With his success, he is imposed with a perverse exhibition of life, and decides to abandon his creation out of terror of what the book refers to as the “daemon.” The story progresses in consequences to Victor’s own wrongdoing as something irredeemably wretched. I will leave it at that … for it was an excellent read.
Prior to reading this classic, I acknowledged the whole mythology of Frankenstein in utterly contrasting ideas from what the original provided. The culturally conceived notion of Frankenstein was nothing more to me than narratives of a despicable monster brought upon by a mad scientist. A wholly fantastic idea, but that was all that remained in what I knew. I even thought Frankenstein referred to the monster. In fact, the original
story is heavily layered in philosophical ideas and socially relevant themes, which proved the book to be thoroughly captivating. These elements turned it from not merely a good horror story, into a legendary parable. To name a few of these subjects and themes explored in this parable, they include knowledge paired with unlimiting ambition, isolation, the relationship between creature and its creator, vengeance and more (Read the book!). To quote a line that encapsulates those ideas quite nicely, Victor denounces: “Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.” I would also like to include his meditations in creating the daemon: “A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. No father could claim the gratitude of his child so completely as I should deserve theirs.”
It’s impressive to note that Shelley was only 18 when she wrote this book. She did so knowing that readers might conjecture some parts of the story to reflect her own meditations on the acquisition of knowledge during an age when she was eager to learn. These themes brought the story to a
powerful level and got me to finish the book in merely a couple of days, rendering it stronger than it would have been if it were purely horrific.
Another aspect that made the book so great was Shelley’s brilliant writing. I have read online reviews of people saying they found tedium in her repetitive writing and subjects reiterated constantly throughout the book that exhausted the literature. It is true I caught her using the words “wretched” and “ardour” almost a hundred times and describing the abject miseries of Victor and the daemon just as much, but that never proved to me to be an obstacle to seeing her craft of such beautiful and effective expressions of literature. To quote a few lines, she wrote: “But I am a blasted tree; the bolt has entered my soul; and I felt then that I should survive to exhibit what I shall soon cease to be—a miserable spectacle of wrecked humanity, pitiable to others and intolerable to myself.” With this, she brilliantly conveys, almost in a confessional style, descriptions of the most wretched experiences. I surmise she was a thoroughly innovative writer for her time.
I have to say, although this might be a personal effect, I found the book so captivating and immersive that I caught myself under the contagion of such narrations of misery and turmoil that I honestly felt quite terrible at times when I
read this book. Her descriptions of the subjects of such a perversion of nature, such a swallowing guilt and irrevocable wretchedness in Victor, and especially the daemon as a misunderstood creature were highly palpable,I swear! Read these lines spoken by the daemon in one melancholic passage: “I am malicious because I am miserable… If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear… I allowed myself to be borne away by them,
and forgetting my solitude and deformity, dared to be happy… My person was hideous and my stature gigantic. What did this mean? Who was I? What was I? Whence did I come? These questions continually recurred, but I was unable to solve them.” Brilliant. Needless to say, I implore you to replace your underwhelming knowledge of Frankenstein with the original horror, and make sure to watch the movie after!
The Fordham Ram Crossword
4. SHE WAS AN AUTHOR AND JOURNALIST WHO HELPED FOUND THE NAACP
6. LAST NAME OF CIVIL RIGHTS ACTIVIST AND JOURNALIST KNOWN FOR HIS COLUMNS ON RACE WHILE EDITOR OF THE CRISIS 1910-1934
9. AUTHOR OF “IN COLD BLOOD”
10. FIRST NAME OF POLITICIAN AND NEWSPAPER PUBLISHER WHICH THE PULITZER PRIZE IS NAMED AFTER DOWN
1. ENVIRONMENTAL JOURNALIST BEST KNOWN FOR HER 1962 BOOK ABOUT THE DANGERS OF PESTICIDES
2. WELL KNOWN CBS EVENING NEWS ANCHOR FROM 1962-1981
3. JOURNALIST KNOWN FOR HIS WARTIME COVERAGE AND ON THE GROUND REPORTING, PARTICULARLY DURING HURRICANE KATRINA
5. LAST NAME OF “THE SUN ALSO RISES” AUTHOR WHO REPORTED ON EUROPE
7. AUTHOR OF “THE RIGHT STUFF”
8. JOURNALIST AND HUMAN RIGHTS ACTIVIST WHO WROTE ABOUT THE PLIGHT OF BOSNIA FOR THE NATION
MEGHAN CATTANI/THE FORDHAM RAM
Mary Shelley’s classic “Frankenstein” remains a relevant and worthwhile read.
Volleyball Leads Nation in Blocks
By JOE HENRY ASST. SPORTS EDITOR EMERITUS
Despite a 1-2 record on the weekend, Fordham University Volleyball made it clear that its season-opening success isn’t a surprising run, but a reflection of its identity: a scrappy group with a chip on its shoulder — and the nation’s best blocker on the frontlines.
Through her first eight matches, junior middle blocker Tatum Holderied stands alone as NCAA-DI’s top blocker, and it’s not close. At last week’s Rose Hill Classic, she dominated at the tape, posting seven, 10 and 11 blocks.
Holderied ranks first in the country in both major blocking metrics, having notched 76 blocks and 2.24 blocks per set. The runners-up have 61 blocks and 1.90 blocks per set, respectively.
In a noteworthy freshman campaign, Holderied averaged 1.09 blocks per set — one of the four best marks in program history. After a sophomore season riddled with injury, questions were looming about Holderied’s ability to return to her rookie-season form. She’s been, by the numbers, twice as good as her rookie performances.
For her efforts, Holderied was awarded Atlantic 10 (A10) Defensive Player of the Week for the second time in three weeks. During the week she didn’t win the award, she outblocked the winner 22 to 11.
In Fordham’s 3-0 sweep of Fairleigh Dickinson University
(FDU), the Rams swatted 14 blocks to begin what would become a weekend-long block party in the Bronx.
Holderied and fellow middle blocker, sophomore Sophia Kuyn, combined for 11 blocks, pairing most of the time with junior outside Erynn Sweeney and junior setter Whitney Woodrow, who’s quickly developed from star to superstar in her junior season. Woodrow’s four blocks against FDU tied a career high; she’s now posting career-best perset marks in assists, digs, aces, kills and blocks.
Senior Audrey Brown — ranked second in NCAA in blocks by a right-side hitter — had three rejections, while adding 13 kills on a career-best .619 hitting rate.
Brown stayed hot during a Friday afternoon four-set loss to Hofstra University, adding seven kills and a career-high 16 digs. As a team, Fordham posted 15 blocks.
The party stayed bumping Saturday. The Rams managed to top each of their previous feats, recording 16 rejections, which included a set-winning shutdown from Holderied and senior Zoe Talabong in set two.
As the weekend came to a close, Head Coach Ian Choi dipped into his bench, where the Rams’ reserves delivered some of their best-ever outings.
In Friday’s loss to the undefeated Hofstra University Pride, senior Mackenzie Colvin gave the team a much-needed jolt, getting low for three clutch digs against the hardest-hitting
Athletes of the Week
In a solid showing for the Fordham University Rams at the Jasper Fall XC Invite, junior distance runner Bradford Duchesne led the way. He notched a personal best in the 8K with a time of 24:58.8, good for a fifth-place finish. He was the top finisher for the Rams on Saturday, Sept. 13, helping them to a third place team finish among the 17 teams.
Junior middle blocker Tatum Holderied was a major piece of the Rams’ four-match win streak to open the month of September. Holderied is now the top blocker in the nation with an average of 2.24 blocks per set. She has three games this season with block totals in the double digits, most recently in Fordham University’s loss to Temple University on Saturday, Sept. 13. She notched 10 blocks in Fordham’s loss to Hofstra University on Friday, and another seven in the Rams’ sweep of Fairleigh Dickinson University on Thursday.
squad the team has faced all season thus far.
On Saturday, sophomore Bridget Woodruff took over late in the Rams’ set two win; two of Fordham’s last five points came from a Woodruff block and kill. Woodruff was uber-efficient, using her lefthanded swing to land a career high-tying five kills on seven attacks. Sophomore Gabby Destler, who struggled in the back row to start the season, was exceptional defensively against Temple, logging six digs, adding five kills and two blocks.
The Rams’ best back row player thus far, however, has been sophomore Özge Özaslan. While taking lead libero duties, Özaslan has looked better with each match, finishing the weekend with a 22-dig outing. The things that Özaslan does to get to seemingly unreachable balls cannot be described with words; while the Fordham block rightfully gets its shine,
Özaslan’s hustle gives this team its heart, keeping them in contention on every point they play.
Though Fordham eventually fell to a 6-3 Temple squad with a litany of quality pin hitters, the Rams firmly established that their blocking isn’t some one-off run — it’s who they are.
Fordham has extended its streak of games with doubledigit blocks to five, the longest in program history. Their 45 combined blocks are the most in a three-match span in program history. In fact, the team’s 49 combined blocks in its top three best blocking performances this year are the most in any combined three games from any individual season in program history.
The Rams now rank first in the nation in blocks and third in blocks per set. Equipped with the single-best blocker in the country, one of the best blocking right-sides in the NCAA, and a trio of above-
average blockers on the strong side in Sweeney, Talabong and Destler, this Fordham team could legitimately end up a top-five blocking team in the nation, just one year removed from a 254th-place finish in that exact same category.
Fordham was projected to finish last in their conference entering the season, and no one batted an eye. Just three weeks later, the narrative has completely shifted.
With a firmly established identity and a slew of players enjoying breakout seasons, this Rams squad has shown that they can be competitive for a playoff spot, even in a loaded A-10 conference.
For the meantime, the Ram block party hopes to bounce back in the team’s finale of non-conference play against the 1-8 Central Connecticut State University Blue Devils. The game will begin at 3 p.m. this Saturday, Sept. 20, with televised coverage on ESPN+.
Bradford Duchesne Junior Cross Country
Tatum Holderied Junior Volleyball
Fordham’s very own Tatum Holderied is the number one blocker in the nation.
COURTESY OF FORDHAM ATHLETICS
The WNBA is on the Rise, With or Without Clark
By KURT SIPPEL STAFF WRITER
It’s no secret that the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) star Caitlin Clark is a big sell when it comes to viewership and ticket sales. When she is playing, interest rises. But this season, she had persisting injuries that caused her to stay off the court for a significant amount of time.
When it was announced on Sept. 4 that Clark was going to be out for the remainder of the season after setbacks in her recovery process from her right groin injury caused her a bone bruise, many believed that the WNBA would take a large hit without Clark. Yes, it did affect some aspects. For example, during WNBA All-Star Weekend, ticket prices dropped 48% the day of the competition when it was announced she would not play.
The Clark effect took the league by storm her rookie year, leading to more eyes and ticket sales. It put a lot of new eyes on the league that’s been growing since the 90s.
With Clark missing the rest of the season, it was suspected that there would be issues getting fans to tune into games when she wasn’t playing. But ESPN just had its best viewership numbers for the regular
season in the history of the WNBA. They averaged a record 1.3 million viewers over the 25 regular season games they aired. These numbers are up about 6% from last season, which recorded 1.2 million viewers for 24 games. Clark did play a very large role in those numbers. Nine of the 10 most-viewed games this season involved the Indiana Fever. But there were still record numbers for the other 14 games, including the other game in the top 10 that showcased the New York Liberty vs. the Las Vegas Aces. Even on shows like ESPN’s WNBA Countdown pregame,
the viewership rose over 7%. Fans are very interested in the product, with or without Clark. When it comes to attendance, the WNBA’s 13 franchises had over 2.5 million fans over 226 total games.
A good example of the rise of the WNBA’s interest is with the Golden State Valkyries, a brand new expansion team, which averaged a league best 18,064 fans a game this season. Golden State set a record for expansion teams with 397,408 total fans selling out all of their 22 home games. It shows the number of fans excited to watch the
WNBA, especially one in their home city.
There seems to be no fear that the WNBA won’t be able to maintain their fans without Clark. If that was the case, they wouldn’t have been able to broker a new 11-year, $2.2 billion media rights deal last year, with three different networks willing to pay as the value rises because of the historic interest in the WNBA.
The WNBA will be fine without Clark for now. The same thing might be said about the Fever. Of course, losing your number one superstar is not easy for any team. But
they have real chemistry that helped them make a push for the playoffs.
Indiana closed the season winning six of their last 10 games and went 24-22 on the season. The Fever are not just without Clark; they are also without Sophie Cunningham, who was ruled out on Aug. 19 after getting surgery for her torn MCL.
The weight of this team is now all on other players, including Kelsey Mitchell, Aliyah Boston and Natasha Howard. They have cemented themselves as the backbone of the team with Clark and Cunningham out.
But the Fever have been able to maintain their playoff positioning due to the team being built on a next woman up mentality. Now, with Clark and Cunningham out, they remain in contention for the playoffs.
Clark has a lot to do with the rise and the success of her team and the interest in the WNBA. But the other stars have helped to maintain it, keeping fans hooked even though Clark will not see the floor for the remainder of the season.
Previewing the 2025 Ryder Cup
By IAN NELSON ASST. SPORTS EDITOR
From Sept. 26-28, the 2025 Ryder Cup will take place at Bethpage Black Golf Course in Farmingdale, New York. The Ryder Cup is played every two years, alternating between a venue in the United States and one in Europe. This tradition has been in place since the first contest in 1927. The last iteration in 2023 saw Team Europe win at the Marco Simone Golf & Country Club in Rome, beating the USA 16.5 to 11.5. The tournament featured a dominant performance by the European team. This time, the U.S. team will look to bounce back from their defeat with a victory on home soil.
The 2025 U.S. Ryder Cup team, under first-time captain Keegan Bradley, consists of six automatically qualified players joined by six captain’s picks. The automatically qualified players include four-time major champion and current world number one Scottie Scheffler, 2025 U.S. Open champion J. J. Spaun, 2017 Tour Champion and Olympic gold medalist Xander Schauffele, along with five-time PGA Tour winners Russell Henley and Harris English. For the captains’ picks, Bradley selected two-time major champions
Bryson DeChambeau, Justin Thomas and Collin Morikawa, eight-time PGA Tour winner Patrick Cantlay, as well as Benjamin Griffin, Cameron Young and Sam Burns. Bradley elected not to use one of his captain’s picks on himself, although he is currently ranked 11th in the world. Despite having a legitimate case to make the squad, Bradley did not choose to pick himself, prioritizing his role as captain and the team’s success over personal playing status. Over the course of the season, other players stepped up and earned their spots on the team, leading Bradley to believe it was best for him to focus solely on captaining. Had he opted differently,
he would have been the first Ryder Cup playing captain since Arnold Palmer in 1963 at East Lake.
Team Europe, captained by Luke Donald, aims to regain the cup with a strong, experienced lineup. The squad’s six automatic qualifiers include Grand Slam winner and current world number two Rory McIlroy, current world number six Tommy Fleetwood, 2013 U.S Open champion Justin Rose, along with Rasmus Højgaard, Tyrrell Hatton and Robert MacIntyre. Captain Donald’s six captain’s picks went to two-time major champion Jon Rahm, 2019 Open Championship winner Shane Lowry, plus Sepp Straka, Viktor Hovland, Ludvig
Åberg and Matt Fitzpatrick.
Some of the biggest factors for winning the Ryder Cup include team cohesion, strategic captain’s picks and pairings based on player personalities and skill, effective course management tailored to the specific course and strong team preparation and strategy overall. Players’ ability to adapt to the team format, which includes different match types and the pressure of collective play, is crucial for success. Mistakes on this front contributed to Team USA’s defeat in 2023, as then-captain Zach Johnson’s captain’s picks were questioned by many because they appeared to prioritize friendships over current form, with players like Justin Thomas
being selected despite poor recent performance, and the snub of in-form players like Bryson DeChambeau. This problem was not seen in Bradley’s picks.
In terms of its difficulty, Bethpage Black keeps pace with some of the most challenging courses in the world. Bethpage Black’s difficulty stems from its extreme length, narrow fairways, deep and punishing rough and massive bunkers, all set on a hilly, walking-only course designed to challenge the world’s best golfers. The difficulty of the course is summed up in its infamous warning sign that reads, “The Black Course Is An Extremely Difficult Course Which We Recommend Only For Highly Skilled Golfers.” The sign reflects its brutal nature, which includes treacherous multitiered greens and formidable par-4s.
As of right now, Team USA is the favorite to win the 2025 Ryder Cup, with odds favoring them due to the home advantage and strong performances from top American players during the season. Despite Europe being the defending champions, the U.S. is widely expected to triumph as home course advantage has historically proven as a significant factor in the Ryder Cup.
COURTESY OF INSTAGRAM/@caitlinclark22
Indiana Fever star Caitlin Clark will miss the remainder of the WNBA season due to a right groin injury.
MEGHAN CATTANI/THE FORDHAM RAM
The Ryder Cup will take place from Sept. 26-28 at Bethpage Black Golf Course.
Rams Land Seventh at Metropolis
By GIANNA TETRO STAFF WRITER
The Fordham University men’s golf team opened its 2025-26 season with a statement, competing in the Metropolis Intercollegiate, hosted by Columbia University at the Metropolis Country Club in White Plains, New York. The Rams battled through the course and a fluctuating leaderboard to finish seventh among 15 teams.
They wasted no time making noise in the first round, surging to third place and putting pressure on the other teams. But golf is a game of consistency, and the second round proved to be unforgiving. The team slipped to 10th, struggling to keep the momentum from round one. Though, as was demonstrated previously, the Rams didn’t back down. In the final round, they regrouped and climbed three spots, securing a tophalf finish that spoke to their ability to respond to adversity.
Standout sophomore Liam Howard, who finished in the top 10 individually, reflected on both personal and team
performance. He noted the confidence boost from the opening round but emphasized the need for consistency, saying, “We just have to string together three good rounds instead of one or two. There are a lot of positive takeaways … that we can build on.” Howard credited his strong play to a summer spent competing in amateur tournaments with high finishes, adding that the rest of his teammates had also worked really hard over the summer to come in prepared.
Preparation, in fact, was a
common theme for the Rams. Howard pointed to the value of those summer reps, while junior AJ DePaolo echoed the importance of offseason work. “I personally felt pretty solid,” DePaolo said. “The scores didn’t fully reflect that, but coming off of summer I had a lot of confidence and was happy with certain parts of my game … though there are definitely some areas to improve upon.”
The conditions at Metropolis Country Club added another layer of challenge. Rainy practice
rounds and tight, narrow-lined fairways tested both patience and shot-making. Still, Fordham found ways to grind.
“I don’t think much changed from day one to day two,” DePaolo explained. “We just fought and battled through a tough course and conditions and were able to jump a few [spots] with a couple of better shots under pressure in tougher conditions.”
That resilience was seen across the roster. Junior Luke Brower climbed after a strong second round to finish 57th,
RECYCLE
Ram please
while junior Tucker Silva placed 44th. DePaolo and sophomore Patrick Ginnity rounded out the lineup in 55th and 69th, underscoring Fordham’s depth.
However, this tournament was more than one finish, as Howard remarks that one of the team goals “is to win at Worcester Country Club in honor of our captain last year, Jake Mrva.” That sense of purpose carried beyond individual results, shaping the team’s broader goals for the season.
Between Howard’s top-10 finish, DePaolo’s determination and the team’s ability to battle back under pressure, Fordham’s seventh-place result at Metropolis feels more like a beginning than a conclusion. The Rams’ next test comes at the Ryan T. Lee Memorial Invitational at Wethersfield Country Club in Connecticut on Sept. 22 and 23. With experience under their belts and confidence rising, the Rams are driving into the season with focus, resilience and clear goals. And if their opener is any indication, Fordham Men’s Golf is just getting started.
COURTESY OF INSTAGRAM/@fordhamgolf
Driving into the Season the Fordham men’s golf team turned in a strong showing at the Metropolis Intercollegiate.
Football Seeks First Win After Loss to Stony Brook
By LEAH RENSHAW CONTRIBUTING WRITER
The Fordham University Rams dropped to a 0-3 record on the season after a 41-18 defeat at Stony Brook University on Saturday, a game that highlighted strong individual efforts but also had several recurring issues with slow starts, turnovers and unfortunate lapses during big plays.
Linebacker James Conway anchored the defense, piling up 15 tackles and snagging a second-quarter interception that set up Fordham’s first points of the game. His play kept the Rams competitive through a scoreless first half for the offense. However, Stony Brook proved their explosiveness with a 93-yard touchdown pass in the third quarter, a strike that erased any momentum Fordham had begun to build.
The Rams showed brief flashes of offensive rhythm in the third quarter. Following Conway’s interception, the offense had a balanced drive with a combination of short passes and inside runs, resulting in a field goal that finally put Fordham on the scoreboard. On their next possession, quarterback Gunnar
By JAMES NELSON ASST. SPORTS EDITOR
The sport of boxing is simultaneously headed in two very different directions. On one hand, boxing’s popularity is experiencing a resurgence and this generation of professional boxers is the most talented ever. Thanks to investments from the General Entertainment Authority (GEA), a department of the Saudi Arabian government, most boxing promotions can no longer keep their top fighters in strict contracts and feed them easy fights. Dream fights such as the heavyweight title unification bout between Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk have been realized through big spending by the GEA. On the other hand, many boxing promotions have resorted to nostalgia and gimmicks to attract viewers in recent years.
On Sept. 4, CSI Sports announced that boxing legends Mike Tyson and Floyd Mayweather Jr. agreed to an exhibition match taking place next year. Aside from the massive size difference between the fighters, their ages and physical condition make the prospect of this fight outrageous. Tyson is 59, coming off a depressing performance against influencer boxer Jake Paul in November of last year; the bout was originally scheduled to take place in July of 2024, but was postponed after Tyson suffered an ulcer flare-up. During the fight, Tyson wore a knee brace and commentators speculated on whether he was injured, citing his slow movement.
“I almost died in June. Had eight blood transfusions. Lost half my blood and 25 pounds and had to fight to get healthy,” Tyson said in a post he shared on Instagram after the fight.
Smith found his timing with quick sideline throws before launching a deep 35-yard pass to Troy Worrell for the Rams’ first touchdown. For a few minutes, the tempo and execution displayed some potential for a more dynamic attack.
Smith finished with 163
passing yards and the touchdown to Worrell, while Jack Freeburg added four catches for 54 yards, giving Smith a reliable target. Comparatively speaking, this was not Smith’s best game. On the ground, running back Jamell James contributed 45 of the team’s 124 rushing yards, but
Fordham averaged under three yards per carry and struggled to stay ahead. Turnovers and third-down inefficiency were costly. The Rams converted only eight of 20 third-down attempts while Smith threw two interceptions and the team lost a fumble, setting up short fields for the Seawolves. After being down 13-0 at half, Fordham briefly bridged the gap to 20-10 after Worrell’s touchdown, but Stony Brook’s quick response sealed the ultimate outcome.
Despite the loss, the Rams can still draw positives from Conway’s defensive leadership and Smith’s flashes in the passing game. With Patriot League play approaching, Fordham will look to tighten up defensively, establish a more consistent rushing attack and turn these individual performances into their first win of the season.
Overtime: Boxing Is Unrecognizable
As for 48 year old Floyd Mayweather Jr., the former champion has remained relatively active in the ring. In 2023, Mayweather fractured his hand in an exhibition match with Aaron Chalmers. In 2015, Mayweather underwent surgery on his right shoulder stating that the injury had been bothering him throughout his career. Mayweather last fought in an exhibition against John Gotti III, a pro MMA fighter and the grandson of the famous crime boss John Gotti. Not wanting to tarnish his 50-0 professional record, Mayweather only agrees to fight in exhibitions. In an exhibition match, the fight is not scored by judges and thus the fighters’ professional records are unaffected. Mayweather also tried his hand at influencer boxing when he faced off against famous vlogger Logan Paul in June of 2021. Boxers coming out of retirement or clinging onto their careers has been a staple of the sport for decades. In a sport of big egos and big promotions, it is all too common for boxers to milk every last moment of their careers. However, in a day and age where social media personalities are a massive draw in the
boxing space, more and more fighters are deciding to pick up the gloves again.
Jake Paul, who is widely regarded as the face of influencer boxing, serves as a prime example of dragging older fighters back into the ring. Paul’s name and personality have made him one of the biggest attractions in sports, dwarfing the popularity of most professional fighters. Paul’s formula for success is simple: lure in a big-name fighter who is past their prime or half his size (or both), hype the fight as his toughest matchup to date and laugh all the way to the bank. In his short time in boxing, Paul has faced off against retired UFC fighters Anderson Silva, Nate Diaz, Mike Perry, Ben Askren and Tyron Woodley. When Paul isn’t knocking around MMA fighters who have little experience in a boxing ring, he cherry picks older, smaller boxers to further pad his record. Paul knocked out long retired pros Andre August and Ryan Bourland and bested 39-year-old Julio César Chávez Jr. in a fight that went the full 10 rounds. Unfortunately, the practice of cashing in on the nostalgia
of fight fans goes beyond greedy influencers. Fight promotions have recognized that the surest way to draw viewers is to sign as many big-name fighters as possible, regardless of their age or health. There is no better evidence of this than the Bare Knuckle Fighting Championship (BKFC). BKFC’s roster consists mostly of retired boxers, kickboxers and MMA fighters with the occasional influencer such as TikTok star Bryce Hall sprinkled in. Misfits Boxing, a startup boxing promotion run by YouTuber KSI has recruited retired UFC fighters including Darren Till, Luke Rockhold and Tony Ferguson.
“Boxing is a business” is an age-old saying among fans. Fighters’ opponents aren’t assigned to them like a football team receives their schedule from the league; fighter rankings are subjective rather than analytical. So the process of booking future fights can be influenced by the politics of the promotion, the fighter, the venue, city, state, etc. The bottom line for any sports league is to drive a profit, however, no league is more shameless about it than boxing promotions. Promotions have begun to integrate influencer fights and exhibition
matches into their professional cards. In the aforementioned Paul vs. Tyson fight, elite boxers Amanda Serrano and Katie Taylor fought on the undercard of the event for the super lightweight championship. Two of the greatest female boxers of all time fighting for a world championship served as a warm-up act for the main event: a YouTuber duking it out with a boxer who is old enough to have grandchildren. The lesson learned from this is that talent doesn’t draw viewers anymore in boxing, personality and gimmicks do.
On Aug. 20, Paul announced an exhibition match against Gervonta “Tank” Davis, the current WBA lightweight champion. Davis is undefeated with the only taint on his record being a draw in his most recent fight against Lamont Roach Jr. If Davis does not relinquish his title, it will be a groundbreaking moment in the history of boxing: a sitting world champion opting to fight in an exhibition against an influencer rather than a deserving contender. If more top-tier boxers follow in Davis’ footsteps, the impact on legitimate boxing would be cataclysmic.
A Fordham receiver makes a contested catch.
CRISTINA STEFANIZZI FOR THE FORDHAM RAM
MEGHAN CATTANI/THE FORDHAM RAM
Influencer-Boxer Jake Paul has fought several retired athletes to bolster his record.