Father McShane:
A Legacy of Transformation
who has led Fordham University for nearly two decades, fostering one of the most remarkable periods of sustained growth in the 181-year history of the Jesuit University of New York and providing steady, decisive stewardship amid the coronavirus pandemic, will step down as president on June 30. On April 27, Fordham named the new campus center at Rose Hill in his honor.
“It has been a blessing to work with so many talented and devoted faculty and staff, and with more than a hundred thousand gifted and community-minded students,” he said.
Father McShane:
A Legacy of Transformation
who has led Fordham University for nearly two decades, fostering one of the most remarkable periods of sustained growth in the 181-year history of the Jesuit University of New York and providing steady, decisive stewardship amid the coronavirus pandemic, will step down as president on June 30. On April 27, Fordham named the new campus center at Rose Hill in his honor.
“It has been a blessing to work with so many talented and devoted faculty and staff, and with more than a hundred thousand gifted and community-minded students,” he said.
Since 2003, Father McShane has raised $1 billion for the University, overseen the quadrupling of its endowment to more than $1 billion, and invested $1 billion in new construction and infrastructure improvements, including major renovation projects that expanded the Gabelli School of Business and resulted in state-of-the art facilities at Fordham’s Rose Hill and Lincoln Center campuses.
In 2012, Hughes Hall was dedicated as the home of the undergraduate Gabelli School of Business at Rose Hill, after a two-year $38 million renovation that allowed a digital-age interior to slip in behind the five-story building’s French Gothic façade more than a century after it was originally built.
Two years later, the Gabelli School expanded its undergraduate programs to Fordham’s Lincoln Center campus, and in 2016, settled in to its high-tech Lincoln Center headquarters at 140 East 62nd Street, once home to Fordham Law School. The renovated 130,000-square-foot building was designed to unite the Gabelli School of Business’ Manhattan community undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty.
And in 2018, Fordham officially opened its London campus, a six-story building in the city’s Clerkenwell neighborhood, home to the Gabelli School’s London programs for undergraduate and graduate students.
Among the gifts that made these projects possible and revolutionized business education at Fordham in countless ways are two transformative donations from the Gabelli School’s namesake, Mario Gabelli, ’65, and his wife, Regina Pitaro, FCRH ’76, in 2010 and 2020. These have been the largest gifts in the University’s history.
“For nearly two decades now, the University has had the great good fortune to have the leadership of Father McShane,” the couple recently wrote in a tribute note. “He joined the school at a difficult time, and has expertly steered it through a financial crisis as well as the global pandemic, with all of the challenges it brought to New York and our academic community. It is a testament to his vision and leadership that in the last two decades, Fordham has thrived and emerged stronger than ever.”