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’s president. She did not 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 ouster came only weeks after M. Elizabeth Magill, who had appeared at the same congressional hearing as Dr. Gay and faced similar condemnation for her testimony, stepped down as president of the University of Pennsylvania. Ms. Magill had lasted just 18 months.
“Being a university president is a tough job on a good day,” Ms. 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 Ms. Tetlow to Fordham. Added to 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 — Ms. Tetlow’s somewhat unusual profile 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 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 tenure had just come to an end. The board of trustees was looking for a leader who would remain true to the Jesuit mission while also introducing fresh energy and ideas. Ready for change, the board chose not only the first woman to lead Fordham in its 182-year history; Ms. Tetlow is also the first president who isn’t a priest.
Over the course of several months, Ms. Tetlow sat for wide-ranging discussions in her spacious office in the Bronx (and a more spartan one at Lincoln Center), while watching the Rams play football at Jack Coffey Field and before singing in Fordham’s annual Christmas concert.
Engaging and unmistakably sharp, Ms. Tetlow, 52, easily toggles from light cultural topics (dogs and ’90s bands) to more pressing issues, like climate change and the need for more government assistance to soften the financial strain of college. She regularly concludes statements with the clause “the research shows” — leaving little doubt of her grasp of it.
While 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 liberal arts degrees to first-generation 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 of 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, Ms. 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, Ms. 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 attraction could not be denied, and Mr. 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,” Ms. Tetlow recalled. “But I owe my existence to Fordham.”
While her parents were completing their graduate studies — and raising a baby in an apartment in the Bronx — they joined forces with Paul Brandt, a community organizer working to stem the flames of urban destruction that were devastating 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 ultimately acquire six postgraduate degrees), and her father worked as a psychologist and a professor, also counseling prisoners at the Angola state penitentiary. Tania attended parochial grammar school and public high school.
Although her father chose family over clergy, he always held fast to Jesuit values, Ms. Tetlow said, passing them down to Tania 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.”
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, staring down murderers, drug dealers and arsonists, “Law & Order”-style.
“The arson cases always involved a planning meeting at a Waffle House,” she recalled. “You haven’t cracked the case until you found the Waffle House meeting.”
Ms. Tetlow gained the respect and admiration of many of her colleagues in law enforcement, like Lon Boudreaux, a former F.B.I. agent and now a chief deputy in the Plaquemines Parish Sheriff’s office in Louisiana.
“Her mind-set is much more liberal than mine, but she put bad guys behind bars,” he said in a telephone interview. “Her big thing was, she didn’t want nobody to be a victim. When you’ve got a gang tearing up a neighborhood and everyone hiding under their beds because they’ve got bullets flying through the wall, she was all about taking them 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 wiretaps and surveillance, there was also the seemingly simple case of a man who confessed to felony gun possession. He was almost certainly headed to prison. But a casual remark from an investigator raised doubts for Ms. Tetlow, who notified her boss and the defendant’s lawyer. The defendant, who had been facing a minimum 10-year sentence, 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 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, Ms. 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.
“Our future was very unclear at the time and she led the turnaround,” said Robért LeBlanc, the chair of Loyola’s board of trustees. “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.
Facing a world with a dwindling number of Jesuits, Fordham was prepared to hire a layperson, just as 20 other Jesuit colleges and universities had already done. But the board of trustees wanted someone whom the Jesuit faculty members would embrace, and few laypeople could stake a claim to the Jesuit tradition like Ms. Tetlow, who soaked it all in around the dinner table. Though her father died in 2017, Ms. Tetlow is still in contact with his brother, the Rev. Joseph Tetlow, a prominent Jesuit priest, whom she still consults today.
“Tania has just been outstanding in terms of her relationship with the Society on and off campus,” said Armando Nuñez, the board’s chairman, referring to the Jesuit order, formally called the Society of Jesus.
Ms. Tetlow has built a presence on campus in her first 18 months on the job, presiding over board meetings, greeting students and singing in the university choir, as her mother did. (She even sang the national anthem before a Yankees game last season.) She has become a fixture at the men’s basketball games, regularly dancing with the Fordham Ram mascot. She has also stressed the importance of Fordham students engaging with the Bronx community outside the confines of the campus, as her parents did decades ago.
Which is not to say that Ms. Tetlow has not faced criticism as president.
Her announcement to raise tuition by 6 percent last year provoked an outcry among students, while at the same time she faced frustrated staff who wanted more pay. Some wonder why her salary seems to be a secret — she declined to divulge how much she is paid, and the board is not required to disclose it.
“When she took over there was a lot of excitement,” said Isabel Danzig, a recent editor of the campus newspaper, The Fordham Ram. “That may have been tempered a bit, because any university president is going to face tough issues. But overall, the perception of her on campus is quite positive. Most students think she has handled things well.”
It is still early in Ms. Tetlow’s tenure, and many will judge her not just by how she is regarded by students but by her ability to raise money, as compared with her ordained predecessors. But following a nearly two-century legacy of priests does not worry her. Her success at Loyola suggests that if anything, it may be less jarring for a woman to succeed a priest than to break into a long line of male former C.E.O.s, who tend to dominate the top jobs at American universities.
“The priest as president is a model rooted in humility, not swagger,” she said. “When women try to swagger, we often get punished for it. And, frankly, it’s not how I roll.”
