At the pre-parade brunch at the Harvard Club, Fordham’s president, Tania Tetlow, paid homage to the University’s Irish founder, Archbishop John Hughes, and the generations of Irishmen and women who helped build the U.S., brick by brick.
“It is hard to imagine what this country would be without the Irish—every stone that we laid and every canal that we dug. But not just that—because we have brought our adopted home an intellectual brightness, an obsession with poetry and drama, the ability to laugh at what should make you weep. Without us, this country would be missing a certain sense of joyfulness,” President Tetlow said. “And without us, there would be no Fordham University—because it was founded for us.”