Into the Mainstream

In 1841, New York City's Fordham University set up shop as a small Roman Catholic college called St. John's, on Rose Hill in The Bronx. A few years later, New York State gave the school twelve muskets for protection against threatened attacks by anti-Catholic Know-Nothings. The antique weaponry was a good symbol of the old Ford-ham--primarily a school for the children of Irish and Italian immigrants, as much concerned with preserving their faith against the forces of secularism as with promoting academic excellence.

All that has changed. Now the nation's fourth largest Roman Catholic university,* Jesuit-run Fordham has a healthy sprinkling of non-Catholics among its 6,997 full-time students. Strong in English, French, philosophy and the classics, Fordham now trails only Notre Dame in overall quality among Catholic schools, and is rapidly trying to catch up. Faculty salaries have been upgraded--the average pay of full professors, $13,543 in 1965, will reach $22,500 in three years--and the school is on the hunt for academic stars with the stature of Communications Pundit Marshall McLuhan, who will join the staff next semester. Such is the pace of change at Fordham, quips its theology department chairman, Father Christopher Mooney, that "if you stay home with a cold one day, you find that some great experiment has been tried but you missed it."

People with Purpose. Fordham is now building an entirely new coeducational liberal-arts college on a $25 million campus near the cultural glamour of Manhattan's Lincoln Center for the Per forming Arts. Its dean, the Rev. Arthur Clarke, expects to accept 3,000 "mature, bright students--people with a purpose" to enjoy an "urban, strongly humanistic" curriculum. The Lincoln Center campus already includes Fordham's School of Law, which handled mainly night students in rented downtown quarters for 60 years, and will add the School of Education, still housed in what Executive Vice President Rev. Timothy Healy calls "a dump--but a dump on fire with enthusiasm." The enthusiasm is generated by Dean Harry Rivlin, lured away from the City University of New York, who is shunning undergraduate "teaching methods" courses for future teachers in the city's slum schools, is sending them into those schools as freshmen to learn under fire instead.

Many of the university's new leaders were picked from other city schools by former Hunter College President John J. Meng, who is now a vice president in charge of the Lincoln Center campus. In September, Fordham is opening another of its innovations: a separate experimental college in which about 30 students a year will live and study for three years with a dozen faculty members and devise their own curriculum. Father Healy calls the school--named after Cambridge Scholar Elizabeth Soule, who is joining its English faculty --an "anti-college," in which "nothing we have done in the past will be beyond questioning."

Other new ideas at Fordham include a "33" program to put eighth-grade youngsters into the university's prep school, run them through a B.A. in just six years instead of the normal nine. A new Communication Arts Center hopes to acquire Huntington Hartford's $7,400,000 Gallery of Modern Art on Manhattan's Columbus Circle at the price of assuming Hartford's $3,800,000 mortgage. Fordham recently opened a four-year college for women, the first such coordinate college at an American Catholic university.

Competing with Yale. Fordham's new spirit shows up in its openly ecumenical, postconciliar attitude toward religion in education. This month the university appointed a Lutheran Church historian, the Rev. Robert L. Wilken, as a permanent member of its theology department --the first Protestant clergyman to hold such a full-time post at a Catholic university. The school also employs Rabbi Irwin M. Blank of Temple Sinai in Tenafly, N.J., as a visiting lecturer. Last fall Fordham began to share libraries and lecturers with the interdenominational Union Theological Seminary; currently it is competing with Yale on a proposed affiliation with the Jesuits' Woodstock College in Maryland.

The university's era of innovation began under the Rev. Vincent T. O'Keefe, who left the presidency in 1965 to serve as a Jesuit executive in Rome, and is being enthusiastically carried on by his successor, Father Leo McLaughlin, 54. A onetime dean of Fordham College who has a doctorate of letters from the University of Paris, Jesuit McLaughlin wants Fordham to achieve "true greatness in action," even by Ivy League standards. While Fordham will always retain "the distinctive attributes of a Catholic university," he is confident that it can "move into the mainstream" of U.S. education, to compete for, and serve, the nation's best students and scholars.

* After Marquette (8,411 students), St. John's in New York (8,394), Chicago's Loyola (7,567).

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