Not a priest, not a man, but ready to run Fordham
Woman takes the reins in Bronx at Jesuit-run school
NEW YORK — Tania Tetlow, the newish president of Fordham University, was in New Orleans, isolating with a case of COVID over winter break, when she learned that Claudine Gay had been forced to resign as Harvard University’s president. She did not know all the facts of the case, but it was still a sobering moment.
Gay had been in her post for barely six months. Her ouster came only weeks after Liz Magill, who had appeared at the same congressional hearing as Gay and faced similar condemnation for her testimony, stepped down as president of the University of Pennsylvania. Magill had lasted just 18 months.
“Being a university president is a tough job on a good day,” Tetlow said recently. “I think we’re all feeling fragile right now. These are tough issues to navigate.” The ability to navigate through turbulence is one of the many assets that brought Tetlow to Fordham.
With her somewhat unusual profile and her wide-ranging résumé — putting murderers and drug lords in jail as a federal prosecutor in New Orleans, challenging longstanding gender barriers while untangling the finances of a foundering institution, singing the national anthem at Yankee Stadium — Tetlow seems uniquely suited to Fordham.
A midsize Jesuit university tucked into 85 pristine acres in the heart of the Bronx (with a second campus at Lincoln Center in Manhattan), Fordham may not draw the kind of scrutiny that Harvard and Penn do. Nor has its campus been roiled with protests over the war in the Gaza Strip 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 McShane, an admired priest whose 19-year tenure had just ended. The board of trustees was looking for a leader who would remain true to the Jesuit mission while introducing fresh energy and ideas. Ready for change, the board chose not only the first woman to lead Fordham in its 182-year history; Tetlow, 52, is also the first president who isn’t a priest.
Fordham takes great pride in its underdog status. Relatively isolated in the Bronx, the university is known for providing highlevel liberal arts degrees to firstgeneration college students and the families of immigrants.
In the last 10 years, enrollment at Fordham has grown by 10 percent, to almost 17,000, with an increasing number of students of color and from areas outside the New York region. But even as the number of applications rose 30 percent in that period, the sticker price for one undergraduate year is up to about $60,000.
In one sense, Tetlow’s mandate is to guide a Jesuit university through a very secular world of skyrocketing tuition and increasing doubt over the value of a liberal arts education, and to do so as a pioneer.
It wouldn’t be the first time. Before Fordham, Tetlow was president of Loyola University New Orleans, another Jesuit school. There, she was also the first woman and first layperson to serve in that post. She proved well-suited for the job; she is credited with leading a turnaround that saved the university. But at Fordham, she may have been born for it.
Almost every step she takes on the Bronx campus is on ground traversed by her parents, who met in a Fordham chapel at the end of the 1960s. Her father, L. Mulry Tetlow, a graduate student and Jesuit priest at the time, was saying Mass, and her mother, Elisabeth, also a graduate student, was in the choir. Their love could not be denied, and L. Mulry Tetlow soon left the priesthood and married the love of his life. Within a couple of years, Tania was born.
“The details were very vague, and they would just kind of giggle when they talked about it,” she recalled. “But I owe my existence to Fordham.”
Although her father chose family over clergy, he always held fast to Jesuit values, Tetlow said, passing them down to her and her two sisters. She remembers a sign on her father’s desk that encapsulated the Jesuit approach to academic inquiry: “Question authority, but politely and with respect.”
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, staring down murderers, drug dealers, and arsonists.
Tetlow also strove to empathize with the defendants — to “walk in their shoes,” as she put it.
She told herself that if it became too easy and comfortable to put people away, she would leave the job, and so she did. She began teaching at Tulane Law School before moving over to the administrative side as chief of staff to Tulane’s president.
Three years later, Tetlow was hired as president of Loyola, tasked with guiding the university through a crippling budgetary crisis. Loyola was in too much distress at the time to worry about breaking barriers. That she was a laywoman leading a Jesuit school and a faculty of priests was not paramount.