2010 MIDTERM ELECTION COVERAGE- PAGE 5
A TAKE ON FORDHAM’S STUDY ABROAD PROCESS- PAGE 9
SERVING THE FORDHAM UNIVERSITY COMMUNITY FOR OVER 90 YEARS
1918-2010
NOVEMBER 3, 2010
VOLUME 92, ISSUE 18
Fordham Honors Anti-Death Penalty Activist Sr. Helen Prejean, C.S.J., Author of Dead Man Walking, Recognized by Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education with Gaudium et Spes Award By CHRIS GRAMUGLIA CONTRIBUTING WRITER
PHOTO BY SIMON SULIT/ THE RAM
The Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education honored Sr. Helen Prejean, C.S.J., at an event on Oct. 29.
Fordham’s Graduate School of Religion and Religious Education held its fifth annual Sapienta et Doctrina celebration in the McGinley ballroom on Friday, Oct. 29. The event honored and thanked the men and women who have embodied the mission and virtues of the school and the Church through their work in religious education, community organizations and worldwide social justice. The keynote speaker and recipient of the Gaudium et Spes Award was Sister Helen Prejean, C.S.J. Prejean is America’s foremost advocate for the abolition of the death penalty. Her book Dead Man Walking, in which she recounts her experiences as the spiritual advisor to Elmo Patrick Sonnier, a Louisiana man whom she accompanied to his execution, was a bestseller and Pulitzer Prize nominee. The book was also made into an Oscar-winning film by the same name in 1995 in addition to an opera that was performed at the New York City Opera in 2002 that received international praise. In addition, the book has also been
adapted into a play by director Tim Robbins. The event began with a reception outside of the ballroom during which honorees, friends and family members were able to eat, drink, laugh and catch up with one another before the ceremony. The event began with an opening hymn led by New York City-area composer, conductor and singer Laurence Rosania, who was accompanied by Joe Simmons, another local musician, on piano. The hymn concluded, “Love to the loveless and gladness for pain, filling all hearts with the joy of your name.” Dean of the GSRRE, Father Anthony J. Ciorra G.S.A.S. ’91, then began by thanking everyone for being at the event. “This is the Church at its very best,” he said. He then humorously revealed that he would be scrapping the original opening remarks he had prepared in exchange for a piece that had “fallen out of his briefcase.” “Why are you a person of hope, even in these days?” he said. “Because I believe that God is creating the world today at this very moSEE PREJEAN ON PAGE 3
Gabelli Dean Identifies Curricular Goals, Lauds New Core By VICTORIA RAU
ASSISTANT NEWS EDITOR
The Hughes Hall renovation set to provide Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business with a centralized location will allow greater educational innovation and more interaction between faculty and students, Dr. Donna Rapaccioli, dean of GSB, said in an interview with The Ram. “Having Hughes Hall as a home for the Gabelli school is essentially creating an academic community for the schools of business,” Rapaccioli said. “The building will serve as a facilitator to allow us do the kind of educating we want to do.” The current scattered nature of GSB’s departments, offices and classrooms leaves business students without a common place to interact, a gap that a newly renovated Hughes will fill, according to Rapaccioli. Academic excellence, global opportunity, personal and professional development and pedagogical innovation were the four areas of focus that Rapaccioli identified as crucial elements of GSB’s continued ascension, areas for which both the Hughes renovation and Gabelli’s donation will provide resources. “One of our challenges has always been that the faculty was too small,” Rapaccioli said, adding that one of the main uses for the gift will be hiring more faculty members. GSB’s current fundraising goal, as part of the Excelsior | Ever Upward | The Campaign for Fordham, is $60 million, $43 million of which has been raised due to the efforts of Rapaccioli and others. Although BusinessWeek rankings are frequently
a topic of conversation surrounding the improvements this fundraising supports, Rapaccioli emphasized the subjective nature of the rankings and said that her focus lies elsewhere. “I have to focus on what I know that we’re doing,” Rapaccioli said. “In the end, what’s important to me is that we really are serving the students better and we are.” Rapaccioli named Career Services as one area for which GSB has increased support. Each business discipline now has a specific counselor within Career Services, and Nancy McCarthy now serves as director of personal and professional development. In a related effort to serve students better academically, GSB administrators have changed both the liberal arts and the business core for business students to reflect some of that aforementioned pedagogical innovation. These revisions allow students flexibility to take more liberal arts electives that might link more closely to their business major. With regard to the business core, Rapaccioli said that the now-required writing and speaking intensive freshman course “The Ground Floor” was successful during its trial period last year and continues to garner positive response from this year’s GSB freshmen. “This is exactly what I hoped business school would be like,” Paul Guinee, GSB ’14, wrote via e-mail to Rapaccioli. “Thanks so much for giving me this opportunity.” Changes to the sophomore business core are designed to allow students exposure to every business discipline before declaring their
majors. Students take either a half or a whole course in all business disciplines throughout the year in addition to working on an integrated project that ties together all the courses a student is taking in a term. “As the Core Revision Committee and I surveyed the curricular offerings at peer and aspirant institutions, we found that no other business schools offered an instructional framework to business in this way,” Dr. Frank Werner, associate professor of finance and economics, said. As the first group of sophomores experiences the new core, some students have expressed concern with managing so many different courses at once. “We have a large number of projects and exams, which makes the core very hard to balance out at times,” Rushi Shah, GSB ’13, said of the new core. “It almost seems like we have two or three major projects or tests due every week.” “I think they’re working hard, and it is more rigorous, but that was our intention,” Rapaccioli said, adding that they have created a Web site called corequniverse.net to help students manage several courses at once and that the faculty is open to tweaking the core in the future. “One great thing about the fac-
ulty that are teaching it [the new core] is that they’re very open,” Rapaccioli said. “They want to make it an outstanding experience for the students.” As this year’s GSB freshmen make the transition, Rapaccioli said she hopes to see one-half to three-quarters of students participate in the new core as sophomores, eventually reaching fully participation for sophomores in the GSB class of 2015. “Recruiters like it because it’s helping students connect the dots,” Rapaccioli said. “It makes everything more real and more alive.” In addition to exposing students to a variety of business disciplines early in their undergraduate careers, GSB has continued to strengthen programs in business disciplines across the board, as evidenced by BusinessWeek ranking Fordham’s marketing department fourth nationally. “We’ve put a lot of support behind the marketing students,” Rapaccioli said. She cited the increasingly active Finance Society and the studentmanaged fund in the University portfolio as ways GSB has strengthened the finance department, too. “I know people think of us as an accounting school, but I see us as
much broader,” Rapaccioli said, adding that GSB students’ majors are almost evenly split between accounting, marketing and finance. “The accounting profession is so dominant,” Rapaccioli said in identifying this aggressive recruiting as part of what contributes to the perception that Fordham is exclusively an accounting school. “They come on campus, they don’t pull out any stops [. . .] the profession itself is much more aggressive in the way it recruits.” Similar to Dr. Michael Latham, dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill, Rapaccioli said she sees the initiative for increased study abroad opportunities and accessibility as a major priority. “I fully support his [Latham’s] initiative to get more and more students to do full-semester study abroad programs,” Rapaccioli said. The nature of the business curriculum, though, means that her strategy is a little different, concentrating more on short-term and summer programs. “I think that every student should have an international experience, whether it’s a study abroad for a whole semester or a summer program or an extended study tour,” Rapaccioli said.
Sports PAGE 24
Opinions PAGE 7
Culture PAGE 13
Football beats Georgetown University Hoyas, 24-19.
A debate on the merits and scheduling of midterm exams.
A review of the Vince Lombardi play now on Broadway.
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