By Mike Jordan Laskey
When Tania Tetlow became the president of Fordham University in 2022, she was the first woman and first layperson to assume the role. She was not a newcomer to the Jesuit tradition, however — Tetlow previously served as the president of Loyola University New Orleans (first lay and female president there, too) and her uncle, Fr. Joe Tetlow, SJ, is one of the great contemporary sages of Ignatian spirituality.
In a recent interview with the Jesuit Conference’s Mike Jordan Laskey, President Tetlow discussed the joys and challenges of her role, what makes Fordham unique within the competitive marketplace of higher education, the chaotic state of college athletics today, and more. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Mike Jordan Laskey: When we last talked for the AMDG podcast, you were serving as president of Loyola University New Orleans. Now, you’ve been president of Fordham University for about two and a half years. What about the new job has been surprising? And challenging?
Tania Tetlow: The happy surprise is that the incredible student warmth that I had at Loyola is also here at Fordham. I didn’t know if the bigger institution in blunt, aggressive New York would be different, but it’s not. These students are amazing and so kind to each other. And the challenges are the challenges of higher ed. We are navigating an increasingly hostile world where higher ed is a political football. And the growing affordability crisis is something we have to deal with, too.
There’s a lot on your plate. How do you begin to figure out what to do and where to start?
Well, this is where discernment comes in. My Uncle Joe, the beloved Jesuit, tells me all the time, “The answer to the crisis can be found inside the crisis.” And, annoyingly, he never explains what he means! But what I think he means is that you have to look to the specific. When you try to project simple answers on to complicated problems, you’ll get it wrong.
So it’s been a lot of taking in data, really digging into numbers, understanding where we are — but also listening really, really hard with the curiosity of a detective.
You are the first woman and the first lay president of Fordham. Have you felt the weight of that truth? How has being a history-maker affected your work?
Well, it’s really more startling for everyone else than for me, because I wasn’t here before and the juxtaposition is not apparent to me. I think for every person who’s anxious about it, there are 100 more who are thrilled by visible signs of change. It’s exciting to students, I think, having the first woman president, and it’s a moment to think hard about how we take the opportunity to speak about mission in a different voice. And I do think people, at least for a while, are listening to me because I have a different voice than they’ve heard before.
There are huge challenges in higher ed: Affordability, campus protests within the past year, the fact that universities are targets for all kinds of pundits, the list goes on. Approaching any problem, do you have a process? What is your MO for when you have something difficult that comes up?
There are some decisions that just need to be made quickly. But really hard decisions require time. So you figure out how much time is available to you and then pull people around the table, including the truth teller. It can be very provocative and annoying, but they’re going to be far more blunt and help you see things you might not otherwise see. The lawyer in me wants to be very analytical and data driven, but the lawyer in me can also visualize anything from that data, right? But it still requires then sitting with your gut and really checking in with your values.
And so, when I make a really hard decision, I’ll try to come to a decision, but then I’ll do one more round around the table, asking, “Is there any other way than this? What are we missing? What have we gotten wrong?” I try to be very open to the possibilities.
Another thing that I’ve learned that helps: A good group discernment technique from the Jesuit tradition is to ask everyone to put out all the arguments on one side first and think and pray on it, and then do the same on the other side. And then lots of breathing and praying.
I’m wondering about the Jesuit identity of Fordham and how to share that with a new generation, probably folks who have never met a Jesuit before. I imagine a lot of your students 100 years ago would’ve known the Jesuits before they arrived at the university. How do you lean into Fordham’s Jesuit, Catholic identity and use that as a strength while also adapting and welcoming all kinds of students from all sorts of backgrounds?
One thing that Jesuit schools collectively have been doing and thinking about is, how do we better remind people what Jesuit education is? There’s a very important part of Jesuit tradition: When you go into a foreign land, you don’t just shout at people in Latin. And I think when we talk to Gen Z, it’s not enough to talk to them about cura personalis and magis, right? We have to translate into their language, so we’ve really been working hard to do that.
We have to make it clear that this is not a place of intolerance, that to be a Catholic institution does not mean we don’t want people of other faiths or people who are not of faith. And if you are a person of faith, no one is going to make you feel stupid or anti-intellectual or presume your politics. You get to be your full self here in ways that aren’t always true in an increasingly hostile secular world that is disrespectful of all religions too often.
One of the big selling points for students is your location in New York. What is distinct about being in the city?
There’s almost nothing you could crave as a profession or something you want to engage with that isn’t within a mile. And so our job is to make that accessible. Ninety percent of our students intern at least once, and often two or three times. My favorite story about this was getting a tour from the Papal Nuncio to the United Nations, Archbishop Caccia, who was showing me the empty general assembly room. He showed me his chair and said, “This is where I sit to represent the Vatican and the pope. Unless I’m busy, and then my Fordham intern sits here.” Our students make it very clear to us that the city teaches them as much as we do.
What role do you think athletics has within higher ed? Have you felt it changing in the last few years — especially with things like the transfer portal and athletes making money off their name, image and likeness?
It’s total chaos right now. I think that in important efforts to regulate those handful of schools that make lots of money on athletics, the risk is that they kind of ruin it everywhere else. Schools like ours and most in this country spend money on athletics — we don’t profit off of them at all, not even close.
And we do it because we’re trying to enrich the lives of students. We look at our outcomes for student athletes. They graduate at higher levels, and they have incredible career outcomes. Employers love them because they’re the kind of kid who got up at six in the morning to go out in the cold and practice and learn teamwork and discipline. So we don’t want to lose that in the context of regulating Power Five football.
I don’t know where we’ll come out. The only quick way to fix the uncertainty would be for Congress to act, but right now they’re pretty frozen as well. I do have these dreams, though, that we’ll come out on the other side. and they’ll figure out some semi-professional kind of league for those few schools, and the rest of us could go back to what college athletics are supposed to be.
As someone who’s deeply formed in the Jesuit way and Ignatian spirituality, is there anything from the Jesuit spiritual life that you find particularly helpful for leaders?
I draw on the tactics of leadership that the Jesuits have honed as one of the most successful transnational organizations in human history. I’ve tried to be really thoughtful about prayer. I’m using Kevin O’Brien’s book on the Spiritual Exercises for daily prayer.
I’m trying to do the examen at the end of the day and to focus more on gratitude than self-flagellation, because I tend to be tempted by the latter. But it’s hard to carve out the time, and the lay presidents have been thinking more about how Jesuits are trained and almost required to take retreats every year, to have a spiritual director. We need to have more of that for the lay presidents, and that’s what we’ve asked of the provincials: “Don’t be afraid to offer that to us. We’re desperate for it. So give us more help in that regard.” I think that’s going to happen.
Is there anything else that you think is important for our readers to know?
Our students have been raised in a world of toxic social media and political discourse that’s pretty rough. What we teach in Jesuit institutions about discernment, about being open and curious, about having a willingness to embrace complexity, about wanting to find that hard answer, about assuming good intentions of other people and not just yelling at them — it’s just never been so important. It’s what the world needs right now. So we’ve all got to work harder.
