I graduated from Fordham last month, and I lived at the Rose Hill campus for all four years (except for my semester abroad and the coronavirus months), so I have a lot to say about my experience. (The months since the irruption of coronavirus have been a useful space to think about it all.) I suppose college is all about education changing your life, and I think that any form of education will do that. To anyone beginning at Fordham this fall, I don't think it's at all a waste of your time to begin classes on Zoom (assuming that's what will happen). I do think it will be different, though. Here's my perspective on what made Fordham unique in my experience and how being on campus was a big part of that.

I should start by saying that, as a member of the Class of 2020, my freshman year happened to be Fordham's "Dodransbicentennial" (175th anniversary) year. This probably meant that there was no better chance for someone like me (who hadn't had any previous real contact with Fordham) to get the know the school. Fordham (especially the Rose Hill campus) has accumulated a tremendous amount of tradition over its almost two centuries of existence. Being on campus and seeing buildings that have been there since the 19th century really makes you feel that. I don't know at this point what it's like to be a sentimental old alumnus, but I can imagine that one thing you get as a Fordham student living (or at least taking classes) on campus is a sense of the accumulation of shared Fordham experience over many years.

I had the particular experience of singing in the University Choir and the Schola Cantorum church choir, which meant often singing at official University events where the president (Fr. McShane) would talk a tremendous deal about Fordham's traditions and their relevance to today. It might get to feel like a bit much by the time you graduate (and my sentiments are probably magnified by how I was hyper-exposed to it all), but it certainly forms an important part of an on-campus experience. If it didn't, the whole campus might as well be torn down. And if the place is so intimately connected with the experience, the world of Fordham Zoom classes is necessarily very different.

Now, I'm very ignorant of Fordham experiences that don't involve spending a great deal of time at the Rose Hill campus. Every student has a different experience, and being part of the Dodransbicentennial Class certainly affected mine. I did, however, get to spend a relative chunk of time taking classes at the Lincoln Center campus, which is a different world (and much less residential in culture), and studying abroad helped to free me a bit from my fixation on Rose Hill as the center of my academic universe. This fall I'll be beginning an MFA at Columbia University (starting online, and switching to on-campus classes who-knows-when), so I'm certain that my experiences in the next few years will help to expand my horizons even more beyond the memory of my time at the Rose Hill Fordham campus. I am confident that Fordham's incoming freshmen will get a useful experience out of Fordham. It will, however, definitely not be the same as being on campus. That's neither for better nor for worse; it's simply different.