Not a priest, not a man, but ready to run Fordham

Tania Tetlow, the new president of Fordham University, was in New Orleans over winter break, isolating with a case of Covid, when she learned that Claudine Gay had been forced to resign as president of Harvard. She didn't know all the facts of the case, but it was still a sobering moment.

Dr. Gay had been in her post for barely six months. Her resignation came just weeks after M. Elizabeth Magill, who appeared at the same Congressional hearing as Dr. Gay and received a similar conviction because of her testimony, resigned as president of the University of Pennsylvania. Mrs Magill had only lasted 18 months.

“Being a university president is a tough job on a good day,” Ms. Tetlow said recently. “I think we're all feeling vulnerable right now. These are difficult issues to navigate.”

The ability to navigate turbulence is one of the many assets that brought Ms. Tetlow to Fordham. Added to her extensive resume — putting murderers and drug lords in prison as a federal prosecutor in New Orleans, challenging longstanding gender barriers while untangling the finances of a bankrupt institution, singing the national anthem at Yankee Stadium — Ms. Tetlow's somewhat unusual profile seems unique eligible for Fordham.

Fordham is a mid-sized Jesuit university nestled on 85 pristine acres in the heart of the Bronx (with a second campus at Lincoln Center in Manhattan). Fordham may not be as scrutinized as Harvard and Penn. Also, the campus has not been inundated with protests over the war in Gaza on the scale seen at other colleges. But the challenges she faced when she took over in July 2022 were no less daunting.

She succeeded the Rev. Joseph M. McShane, an admired priest whose 19-year term had just ended. The board of trustees was looking for a leader who would remain true to the Jesuit mission while introducing new energy and ideas. Ready for change, the board not only elected the first woman to lead Fordham in its 182-year history; Mrs. Tetlow is also the first president who is not a priest.

Over the course of several months, Ms. Tetlow sat for extended discussions in her spacious office in the Bronx (and a more spartan office at Lincoln Center), watching the Rams play football at Jack Coffey Field and before singing in Fordham's annual Christmas concert .

Ms. Tetlow, 52, is engaging and undeniably sharp, shifting easily from light cultural topics (dogs and '90s bands) to more pressing issues, such as climate change and the need for more government support to ease the university's financial burden. She regularly ends statements with the clause “the research shows” – leaving little doubt about her understanding.

Although smaller and perhaps less prestigious than Columbia and New York University, Fordham takes great pride in its underdog status. Relatively isolated in the Bronx, the university is known for providing high-level degrees in the liberal arts to first-generation students and the families of immigrants.

Over the past decade, Fordham's enrollment has grown 10 percent to nearly 17,000, with an increasing number of students of color from areas outside the New York region. But even though enrollment increased by 30 percent during that period, the sticker price for an undergraduate year can reach about $60,000.

In a sense, Ms. Tetlow's mandate is to guide a Jesuit university through a highly secular world of skyrocketing tuition and growing doubt about the value of a liberal arts education, and to do so as a pioneer.

It wouldn't be the first time. Before Fordham, Ms. Tetlow was president of Loyola University New Orleans, another Jesuit school. There she was also the first woman and first layperson to hold that post. She turned out to be very suitable for the job; she is credited with leading a turnaround that saved the university. But at Fordham, she may have been born for it.

Nearly every step she takes on the Bronx campus is on ground crossed by her parents, who met in a Fordham chapel in the late 1960s. Her father, L. Mulry Tetlow, then a graduate student and Jesuit priest, celebrated the Mass, and her mother, Elisabeth, also a graduate student, was in the choir. Their attraction could not be denied, and Mr. Tetlow soon left the priesthood and married the love of his life. Within a few years, Tania was born.

“The details were very vague, and they just giggled when they talked about it,” Mrs. Tetlow recalled. “But I owe my existence to Fordham.”

While her parents were finishing college — and raising a baby in a Bronx apartment — they joined forces Paul Brandta community organizer working to contain the flames of urban destruction that were ravaging the South Bronx at the time.

When Tania was a toddler, the family left the Bronx for New Orleans. Her mother earned a law degree from Loyola (she would eventually earn six postgraduate degrees), and her father worked as a psychologist and professor, as well as counseling prisoners at Angola's state prison. Tania attended the parochial grammar school and public secondary school.

Although her father chose family over clergy, he always held on to Jesuit values, Ms. Tetlow said, and passed them on to Tania and her two sisters. She remembers a sign on her father's desk that summed up the Jesuit approach to academic research: “Question authority, but polite and respectful.”

Ms. Tetlow attended Tulane University and then Harvard Law before returning to Louisiana and briefly entering private legal practice. She then spent five years as a federal prosecutor, tracking murderers, drug dealers and arsonists, “Law & Order” style.

“Arsons always involved a planning meeting at a Waffle House,” she recalls. “You didn't solve the case until you found the Waffle House meeting.”

Ms. Tetlow earned the respect and admiration of many of her law enforcement colleagues, such as Lon Boudreaux, a former FBI agent and now chief deputy in the Plaquemines Parish Sheriff's office in Louisiana.

“Her mentality is much more liberal than mine, but she has put bad guys behind bars,” he said in a telephone interview. “Her big thing was she didn't want anyone to be a victim. When you have a gang destroying a neighborhood and everyone is hiding under their bed because bullets are flying through the wall, she wanted to take them all down.

But Ms. Tetlow also strove to empathize with the defendants, to “walk in their shoes,” as she put it. Among the dramatic convictions she helped secure involving wiretapping and surveillance, there was the seemingly simple case of a man who admitted gun charges. He was almost certainly on his way to prison. But a casual comment from an investigator raised doubts in Ms. Tetlow, who notified her boss and the defendant's attorney. The suspect, who had demanded a prison sentence of at least ten years, turned out to be innocent.

“That's the case I'm most proud of,” she said.

It also gave her pause. She told herself that if it became too easy and comfortable to turn people away, she would leave the job, and she did. She began teaching at Tulane Law School before moving to the administrative side as chief of staff to Tulane's president.

Three years later, Ms. Tetlow was hired as president of Loyola, tasked with steering the university through a crippling budget crisis. Loyola was in too much dire straits at the time to worry about breaking barriers. That she was a layman heading a Jesuit school and a faculty of priests was not of paramount importance.

“Our future was very unclear at the time and she led the turnaround,” said Robért LeBlanc, chairman of Loyola's board of directors. “Now Loyola New Orleans is thriving as a liberal arts institution, and I don't think that would have been possible without her.”

At Tulane and Loyola, Ms. Tetlow learned the details of running a university — and burnished her credentials as the leading candidate to replace Father McShane at Fordham.

Faced with a world with a dwindling number of Jesuits, Fordham was prepared to hire a layman, just as twenty other Jesuit colleges and universities had already done. But the board wanted someone who would be embraced by the Jesuit faculty members, and few laypeople could lay such claim to the Jesuit tradition as Mrs. Tetlow, who soaked it all up around the dinner table. Although her father died in 2017, Ms. Tetlow remains in touch with his brother, the Rev. Joseph Tetlow, a prominent Jesuit priest, whom she still consults today.

“Tania has just performed very well in terms of her relationship with the Society, both on and off campus,” said Armando Nuñez, president of the board, referring to the Jesuit order, which was formally called the Society of Jesus.

Ms. Tetlow built a campus presence in her first 18 months on the job, chairing board meetings, greeting students and singing in the college choir, just like her mother. (They even sang the national anthem before a Yankees game Last season.) She has become a fixture at the men's basketball games and regularly dances with the Fordham Ram mascot. She has also emphasized the importance of Fordham students connecting with the Bronx community beyond the confines of campus, as her parents did decades ago.

That is not to say that Ms. Tetlow has not faced criticism as president.

Her announcement to increase tuition fees by 6 percent last year sparked outrage among students, while at the same time she faced frustrated staff wanting higher pay. Some wonder why her salary appears to be a secret; she declined to reveal how much she is paid, and the board is under no obligation to make it public.

“When she took over, there was a lot of excitement,” said Isabel Danzig, most recently editor of the campus newspaper The Fordham Ram. “That may be somewhat tempered, because every university president has to deal with difficult issues. But overall, the perception of her on campus is quite positive. Most students think she handled it well.”

It is still early in Ms. Tetlow's tenure, and many will judge her not only by how she is regarded by students, but also by her fundraising ability, compared to her ordained predecessors. But following a legacy of nearly two centuries of priests doesn't worry her. Her success at Loyola suggests that it may be less shocking for a woman to succeed a priest than it is to break into a long line of male former CEOs, who tend to dominate the top jobs at American universities.

“The priest as president is a model rooted in humility and not swagger,” she said. “When women try to show off, we are often punished for it. And honestly, that's not how I roll.”