The bright Sunday-in-May dawn breaks over the Bronx. It is 6:30, but much of the campus has been up all night, and some who would have liked to sleep later had been awakened at 4:30 by the mad clanging of the old ship’s bell of the aircraft carrierJunyo. Presented by Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, blessed by Cardinal Francis Spellman, and first rung by Harry S. Truman in 1946, it hangs in front of the gym. Exuberant seniors coming home high on the beer at Clarke’s Bar near the corner of Fordham Road and Webster Avenue and on the thrill...

When young Michael Nash and his five companions climbed down from their New York and Harlem Railroad car at the Fordham station on Sunday evening, August 9, 1846, he was not quite twenty-one years old, the age at which today most Bronx Fordham graduates are heading for law school or graduate study or are looking south, toward Manhattan towers, with dreams of careers in finance or the media. Lincoln Center graduates are looking in all directions, and a good number on both campuses are setting dates for their weddings.

The weary six had just traveled through an America at war...

In the 1950s, on the corner of 190th Street and Webster Avenue, parallel to the old New York and Harlem Railroad (later, N.Y. Central) tracks and the Third Avenue elevated subway tracks that clattered up the western border of Fordham campus at that time, stood a bar called Poe’s Raven. It was not the most popular college hangout—that was either the Decatur, two blocks up 194th on the left, or the Webster Bar and Grill, “the Web,” about a block south on Webster Avenue. The Web was an “elite” hangout, because beers there cost fifteen cents rather than the...

Little Robert Gould Shaw is mad. He’s a fiery, precocious, headstrong young fellow with, at thirteen, a strong sense of right and wrong—particularly when he feels that he himself has been wronged. This October 20, 1850, he’s sitting in the St. John’s College study hall, his head down over his work, writing the obligatory weekly letter to his mother. All the other boys are fooling around: they’re stamping their feet and letting out those whoops and yells that boys know make the prefect mad, especially when the prefect is a young and nervous Jesuit without the force of personality...

Robert Gould Shaw returned to his family estate on Staten Island in the summer of 1856. The family had moved there some years before in order to be near his mother’s eye specialist. A tutor, whom Shaw referred to as “the Crammer,” was hired to prepare him for the Harvard entrance examination. With an exaggerated estimate of both his intelligence and the value of his free-wheeling European education, Shaw presumed he would pass easily and be ushered into either junior or sophomore year.

Robert’s cramming was only one of the family’s summer concerns. His father, who had been a Free-Soiler,...

Little Jimmy Walsh—thirteen years old, born the year the Civil War ended—had, then in his second semester at St. John’s, never been flogged, but he had heard about those who had been. He wrote to his parents on March 4, 1879, in one of his very frequent but very short obligatory reports, that there had been quite a stir in the dorms the night before because they had had the first big floggings of the semester. Indeed, one of the boys who had been beaten was at that moment packing his bags and would go home tonight.

The...

One winter Saturday in 1999, I took three young women from my Books That Changed America course, in which we had been reading Jacob Riis’sHow the Other Half Lives, to visit the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, an old row house on Orchard Street with three apartments restored to resemble the crowded flats as they had been between 1860 and 1935. On the way back in the car, they asked me if Fordham had a school song; they had never heard one. Did Fordham have a school song? It has one of the greatest songs ever, I exclaimed, and...

What most of today’s Fordham students know about World War I they have picked up from an introductory American history course, assuming they take American history to fulfill the sophomore history requirement rather than taking Asian, ancient, medieval, or Latin American history. Or they learn about the war from reading Erich Maria Remarque’sAll Quiet on the Western Frontin high school, with its descriptions of parts of blown-up bodies hanging from barbed wire fences and trees; or Wilfred Owen’s poetry, with doomed youth coughing blood in gas attacks; or Ernest Hemingway’sA Farewell to Arms. They are likely to...

In 1957, as young Jesuits at the novitiate at St. Andrew-on-Hudson, right next to Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Hyde Park estate, many of us heard Fr. Robert I. Gannon’s voice long before we ever saw his face. Gannon, former president of Fordham (1936–49), was one of our novice master’s heroes, and one of Fr. Martin Neylon’s ways of teaching virtue during the daily conference was to tell little anecdotes about the fathers he revered. Fr. Gannon, he said, as rector of the Regis High School and of the parish of St. Ignatius Loyola at Park Avenue and 83rd Street, would...

President Roosevelt’s Monday, October 28, 1940, visit to Fordham is a day that will live in irony and ambiguity. According to Gannon’s account, FDR’s campaign manager, pressed by Republican candidate Wendell Willkie’s surge in strength, called on him at the height of the fall campaign to request an honorary degree for the president of the United States. This was an odd request because FDR, as governor of New York, had already received an honorary LL.D. from Fordham in 1929. Gannon proposed in its stead a Roosevelt-Willkie debate on the steps of Keating Hall. When Roosevelt declined, Willkie asked for seats...

When J. Harding Fisher was a student at Fordham in the early 1890s, the president was Fr. Thomas Gannon, a man with none of the oratorical gifts of his famous successor, but with his own dry view of the world, which he delivered annually to his boys after the reading of grades before vacation: “Boys! Go straight home! Your parents are awaiting you! There are dangers lurking in the city! Go straight home!”

Of course, the boys did not go straight home. They made their rounds of the alehouses and sang their songs; some got into trouble, and some of...

The theater is both the largest and smallest of worlds, and what may have stunned a corner of the Rose Hill campus was but a blip on the screen in the daily lives of young men and women who, often holding down full-time jobs, commuted to Fordham’s downtown schools at 302 Broadway.

Margaret Garvey, growing up in Brooklyn in the 1930s to the 1950s, read biographies of Jesuit saints and attended the Summer School of Catholic Action directed by Fr. Daniel Lord at Fordham in 1940 and 1941. She left Brooklyn at 7:00 a.m. and, by trolley and subway, made...

One summer afternoon in 1998, I biked from Mitchell Farm, Fordham’s Jesuit villa house in Mahopac, Westchester County, to the little town of Shrub Oak about a half-hour south of Mahopac. There I pedaled laboriously to the top of a steep country road called Stony Street, where a vast four-winged Colonial rosebrick structure sprawled across the horizon. It was a building that could have been a public school, a corporate headquarters, a factory, or a prison.

I had been here before. I felt like Charles Ryder, the narrator of Evelyn Waugh’sBrideshead Revisited, who came upon Brideshead Castle at the...

Sometime during the 1969–70 academic year, Leo McLaughlin, who had lost the Fordham presidency in December 1968, and taken the position of chancellor, came up to me in the Loyola Hall recreation room during drinks before dinner with some personal news. “I’m telling you this because it’s something you might want to do yourself someday. I’m leaving Fordham to go to Johnson C. Smith, a black college in North Carolina. I’m going to run a new experimental program to teach writing with the help of video. It sounds like an exciting idea.”

It struck me as typical Leo, as...

“I am a Fordham graduate, class of 1962, and I am proud of it. I am also an American. Of this too I am very proud.” In October 1965, Lt. Daniel F. Garde sat in his officers’ quarters near Saigon and worked on an unusual letter home. He had heard that college students had been demonstrating against American policy in Vietnam and was appalled. He did not know whether any Fordham students had been involved; he was confident that they would be above this kind of “pseudo-intellectual activity,” but just in case, he was sending a long missive to the...

Dawn Cardi, TMC, ’73, is a Manhattan criminal lawyer. When we spoke in November 1999, she had just finished setting up a witness-protection program not just for a witness but for his whole family. She lives happily with her second husband and their two sons and daughter in Riverdale, a few miles and thirty years—though emotionally a split second—from the Fordham campus, where, as a graduate of Mary Louis Academy in Queens, she arrived at Thomas More College in 1969.

Dawn’s parents were seventeen and fifteen when they were married, and her father was one of those fathers...

We don’t know who he is. We do know he is up to no good. He drives cautiously up the New York State Thruway toward a state park in Rockland County, a nightmarish thirty-five-mile trip in the night with the snow “beating relentlessly against the windshield.” A state trooper has rushed by him, lights flashing, but certainly the police have no reason to suspect that in his trunk, under a pile of luggage, “wedged in a space-defying squeeze against a spare tire,” is “a plastic bag containing the body of a prominent sixty-one-year-old writer, Ethel Lambston.” She has been dead...

The New York Province used to send Jesuit scholastics who were teaching high school to summer graduate classes at Fordham. In 1962, I took a course on John Henry Newman from Francis X. Connolly. I did not know then that Connolly had been at Fordham since the 1930s, that he had been a major figure in the Catholic Renaissance of those years, or that his 1948 anthology textbook, Literature: The Channel of Culture, would, after many of the norms and values it championed had been discarded, stand unused on the library shelf as an artifact, a remnant of a lost...

When freshman Taylor Maier arrived in 2007 he felt he had a lot to live up to. His older brother Drew had entered two years before and had a high GPA. His mother, Joyce, and father,Newsdayinvestigative reporter Tom Maier, class of ’78, had been married in the Fordham chapel about 100 feet from his dorm room. And, though he didn’t know it that day, his class of 2011 had the highest SATs in Fordham history. Taylor had been picked from a record 21,967 applicants, for a school listed among the 25 “hottest” in the country. But would he...