From the Big Easy to the Big Apple

Tania Tetlow, J.D., a former law professor and current president of Loyola University New Orleans who has deep ties to the Jesuits and New York, has been named the 33rd president of Fordham.

She will be the first layperson and first woman to lead the University in its 181-year history. Her tenure will begin July 1.

“The Board of Trustees and the search committee were deeply impressed by Tania Tetlow from the moment we met her,” said Fordham Board Chair Robert D. Daleo, alumnus of Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business, Class of 1972. “She is deeply rooted in, and a strong proponent of, Ignatian spirituality, and will be a champion of Fordham’s Jesuit, Catholic mission and identity. She has a deep understanding of and comprehensive vision for undergraduate liberal arts and sciences, the Gabelli School of Business, Fordham Law, and all of the graduate and professional schools of the University.”

Tetlow has served as president of Loyola New Orleans since August 2018. She received her Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School, magna cum laude, in 1995, and her Bachelor of Arts in American studies from Tulane University, cum laude, in 1992.

Prior to being named president of Loyola, she was senior vice president and chief of staff at Tulane University from 2015 to 2018. She also served at Tulane as associate provost for international affairs, the Felder-Fayard Professor of Law, and director of the university’s domestic violence clinic. From 2000 to 2005, she was a federal prosecutor in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Louisiana.

In a video message to the Fordham community, Tetlow said she is “honored beyond measure” to have been chosen as Fordham’s next president, and talked about what it’s like coming from “a family full of Jesuits.”

“They taught me that faith and reason are intertwined. They instilled in me an abiding curiosity to find God in all things … They sang me to sleep with a Gregorian chant and taught me the absolute joy of learning. I grew up in New Orleans, but Fordham is the reason that I exist. My parents met there as graduate students and got married, and I was born in New York,” said Tetlow, whose father was a Jesuit for 17 years before leaving the order to start a family. “Fordham loomed large in my family. It was an institution of breathtaking excellence in the most exciting city in the world.”

Tetlow and her family left New York for New Orleans when she was a child; at age 16, she earned a Dean’s Honor Scholarship at Tulane University, where she later earned a Truman Scholarship that took her to Harvard Law. There, she embarked on a celebrated legal career and carried her commitment to justice forward as a professor, advocate, and university leader.

Her return in 2022 will usher in a new, exciting chapter in Fordham’s 181-year history. Joseph M. McShane, S.J., president of Fordham, said he’s confident he’ll be leaving Fordham in good hands.

“Tania Tetlow has in abundance the qualities of leadership one needs to run a major university, among them discernment, patience, decisiveness, self-awareness, and magnanimity,” said Father McShane, who announced in September that the 2021–2022 academic year would be his last as president. “Her commitment to Jesuit pedagogy and to Fordham’s Jesuit, Catholic mission is both deep and well-informed. I shall rest easy with her in the office I have occupied for almost two decades.”

Though she won’t start in her new post until this summer, Tetlow is already a member of the Fordham community through her family connections: her late father, Louis Mulry Tetlow, a psychologist and former Jesuit priest, received his Ph.D. from Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences in 1974, four years after earning a master’s degree from Fordham; and her mother, Elisabeth M. Tetlow, is also a double GSAS graduate, classes of 1967 and 1970, with master’s degrees in philosophy and theology. The prominent writer Joseph Tetlow, S.J., her uncle, provides another family connection to the Jesuits; he served for eight years in Rome as head of the Secretariat for Ignatian Spirituality and has held other important roles ranging from president of the Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley to associate editor of America Magazine. He is currently writing full time at the Montserrat Jesuit Retreat House in Lake Dallas, Texas.

Tania Tetlow is married to Gordon Stewart, originally from Glasgow, Scotland. They have a 9-year-old daughter, Lucy, and a stepson, Noah.

“This is a historic and exciting moment for Fordham,” said Daleo. “As a university that seeks to transform its students’ lives, we are preparing to be transformed by bold new leadership—leadership that will build upon Father McShane’s legacy of academic achievement and institutional growth.”

This sponsored content was written and provided by Fordham University. The editorial staff of Inside Higher Ed had no role in its creation.