President Tetlow speaks with the AP about the challenges facing her—and other college presidents—as they grapple with tight budgets, political attacks on higher education, and divisions within their student bodies. Read the full story here.
“These are enormously complicated institutions with so many different constituencies,” she said. “How do you navigate the latest controversy while still moving the university forward?”
“Bridging the gap between what they can afford to pay and the excellence they deserve is getting harder and harder,” Tetlow said. “It’s important to understand those goals are in tension with each other.”
“I am so eager to console the students who are in a great deal of pain,” she told the journalists. “I find myself in the embarrassing situation of revealing to them I have less power than they imagine that I do.”
“It’s so much easier to tear down an institution than to build one,” she said.
“What I’m proud of is helping Fordham double down on who we are — a Jesuit institution in New York, determined to find out how we can have an impact on a really broken world.”
“The advantage we have at this moment in a religious university is the ability to unabashedly talk about values and faith,” she added. “That’s harder at secular institutions, because they have to worry about offending people.”
