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Spring
Books History of human dimensions
FORDHAM: A HISTORY
AND MEMOIR by Raymond A. Schroth, SJ Loyola Press, 424 pages,
$16.95 |
Reviewed by ANTHONY
KUZNIEWSKI
Fr. Raymond Schroth, Jesuit Community professor of humanities at
St. Peters College in Jersey City, N.J., is known to NCR readers
as media critic and author of articles on the recent crisis in the church. His
book on Fordham, the New York Jesuit university, is based on archival
materials, the student newspaper and magazine, and his own memories as an
undergraduate and member of the faculty, and demonstrates his versatility and
journalistic expertise.
This book is hard to characterize. It is not a definitive
institutional history, analyzing change over time in the various components of
the university, which was founded in 1841. Nor is it a memoir that describes
the experience of a single individual. Rather, it is a book of stories about
Fordham -- some personal, some historical -- through which the history and
character of the institution emerge in their human dimensions, with humor,
wisdom, tragedy, inspiration.
Fortunately, these stories rest on an excellent understanding of
Jesuit higher education and its development over the centuries. The second
chapter, for instance, takes its title from Edgar Allan Poes visits to
the campus in the mid-1840s. He liked the Jesuits, he said, because they were
highly cultivated gentlemen and scholars, they smoked and they drank, and
played cards, and never said a word about religion. Yet, in the same
chapter, Schroth offers a succinct exposition of the traditional Jesuit
Ratio Studiorum (Plan of Studies) of 1599 that formed the central
pedagogical paradigm at Fordham and all Jesuit schools.
During the mid-19th century, the ratio was interpreted in a
proscriptive manner, with heavy emphasis on humanistic (classical) studies. The
approach also mandated a healthy balance between study and recreation, orderly
academic progression, personal spirituality, and mentoring relationships
between faculty and students. The ratio took on a distinctive flavor at
each school because of the local culture and because of the individuals who
invested themselves in the enterprise and struggled over it.
Athletics was one of the variables that brought prominence to
Fordham. In football, the legendary Frank Cavanaugh came from Boston College in
1926. He warned players unwilling to lose an arm or a leg to quit the team.
Cavanaugh knew the meaning of sacrifice, having been badly wounded in World War
I. Between 1929 and 1931, his teams lost only two games. By 1932, the
aftereffects of his war injuries had damaged his eyesight so badly that he
could no longer see his players and he was asked to resign. Later Vince
Lombardi played for Fordham as one of the seven blocks of granite
and carried his Jesuit-inculcated values into his coaching career with the
Green Bay (Wis.) Packers.
Racial diversity prov-ed a difficult challenge. Fordham refused
admission to a qualified black candidate in 1934 over the protests of Fr. John
LaFarge (editor of the Jesuit weekly, America) and Catholic social
activist Catherine de Hueck Doherty, who lobbied the university for three years
to accept African-American students.
G. Gordon Liddy, a figure in the Watergate debacle, was a product
of postwar Fordham and remained devoted to his alma mater. To capacity campus
crowds, he announced: The Jesuits taught me how to think. They did not
teach me what to think. I am not their fault. He sent three sons to
Fordham during the 1980s.
Other vignettes tell the stories of Robert Gould Shaw, who
commanded the 54th Massachusetts during the Civil War and was memorialized in
the movie, Glory; Denzel Washington, who discovered his acting
talents as an undergraduate; and Jesuit Leo McLaughlin, controversial Fordham
president from 1965 to 1969, who left the Jesuits to marry and returned to the
campus infirmary to die.
The book includes an appreciative account of Fr. Joseph
OHares presidency, which started in 1984. OHare argues that
identity is determined by a Jesuit universitys contribution to the
dialogue between faith and reason and its promotion of the Catholic educational
tradition. That identity challenges individuals to find God in all
things, to undertake active lives as men and women for others, and
to strive beyond the status quo toward a better world. Its a strong
definition and a good one, and Schroth illustrates its force through his
marvelously engaging text.
Jesuit Fr. Anthony Kuzniewski is professor of history at Holy
Cross College, Worcester, Mass.
National Catholic Reporter, February 7,
2003
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