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		Cultural Solutions for Cultural Problems: Students Affairs and Popular Culture Part I: The Power of Popular Culture By Christopher Rodgers Director of Residential Life for Judicial Affairs at Fordham University's Rose Hill Campus Students of college age are attuned to the minutest vibrations within American popular culture. From dress to language, adornment to courtship, many of our students mirror the images, sounds, looks, and attitudes (in the contemporary sense of the word) they observe in the media. Changes among college students in the latter half of the last century would seem to support this observation. These changes often appear in the form of mere fashion-- mostly harmless variations in student appearance. In the latter half of the twentieth century, however, the penetration of popular culture messages and values has appeared to deepen among members of the college-age population, affecting far more than surface aspects of the young. The sharply increased ubiquity of the media-- the television, radio, and internet signals in which these messages and values are suspended-- as well as the direct targeting of this age group have contributed to the growing power of what, for the purposes of this article, is called popular culture. At the same time, warnings about the decline of the family in the last half-century (Bennett, 1999, Etzioni, 1993) and faltering primary and secondary school-- traditional structures within which generations of students have been acculturated-- indicate a change in how students learn about the society they are poised to join. Whether this powerful cultural force affects students is a matter of concern. These effects present educators, secondary or post-secondary, with serious problems. Something is missing in a growing number of students, and schools find themselves involved in remediation on a more basic level than ever before. Increasingly, Youngsters are enrolled in many public schools-- and quite a few private ones-- with their characters underdeveloped and without a firm commitment to values. The basic reason is that the families have been dismembered or the parents are overworked or consumed by other concerns and ambitions. (Etzioni, 1993, p. 89) As Mary Ann Glendon (1991) observes, "As social norms become weaker, a kind of moral vacuum arises." (p. 102) Like nature, culture abhors a vacuum. Where old cultural structures have declined, new structures may be anticipated to rise. Popular culture fills the vacuum. Its pervasive nature is obvious to Student Affairs administrators. Students arrive on our grounds from distant geographies that would previously have guaranteed wide gulfs in idiom, dress, and traditions just a handful of decades ago. Today, they are drawn remarkably close by access to the common culture transmitted by electronic media. Indeed, more time is spent by the average young person absorbing the messages of the media, particularly television, than is spent in school. (Graber, 1988) Incoming freshmen from the Eastern Shore of Maryland, rural Texas, suburban Connecticut, and East Cleveland, Ohio can now be counted on to dress, talk, and act in remarkably similar ways. The media has contributed to this great homogenization of the youth in this country, and obstacles to its effects have been aided by the erosion, over most of the last half-century, of competing structures such as family. (Bennett, 1999, Etzioni, 1993) The search for common cultural reference points among students can be observed directly at that common campus tradition-- Orientation. It is a brief search for most students, as conversation can be reliably fortified once the participants discover that they are each able to recount, with near eidetic accuracy, the complicated stories video-taped, broadcast, and re-broadcast in the form of "The Real World", "Friends", and "Temptation Island." These stories, and the values and messages that underlie them, comprise the popular culture for our students. Its near-universal familiarity is an indication of its power and its reach. As Graber (1988) observes about the socializing power of the media The bulk of information that young people acquire about the nature of their political world comes from the mass media. It reaches them either directly through exposure to the electronic and print media or indirectly through exposure to the media of their families, teachers, acquaintances, and peers. Mass media presents to the young specific facts as well as general values. It teaches them which elements produce power, success, and dominance in society, and it provides them with models for behavior. Young people make heavy use of such information because they lack established attitudes and behavior patterns. (p. 11) Student Affairs administrators ignore this reality at the peril of their competing and often diametrically opposed messages and values. Why this Article? This tension between messages is not highlighted to set up popular culture as a straw man. Like most phenomena, our gargantuan culture has its benefits as well as its costs. In the past two decades, information has built whole industries. An economic boom has been fueled, figuratively as well as literally, by new media for business as well as entertainment (witness the stock value of many dot-coms whose only asset is the idea of what they will eventually do). Many have become rich and almost all have benefited in some manner (leaving aside the "digital divide" for a moment). Information, in myriad ways, has become something akin to a democratic right. To have wrought even the changes that can be observed among our students, this new culture must have tremendous influence. This power is a matter of concern to those whose responsibility it is to acculturate, educate, and protect young people. Fair-minded observers on the political left (Joe Lieberman) and the right (William Bennett) have identified both productive and destructive messages in this culture. Rather than simply attacking the popular culture and leaving it at that, it is important that use such observations to develop strategies that can compete in the cultures we seek to help construct on our own campuses. In that vein, the purpose here is to make some preliminary observations about some of the possible connections between the challenges we experience in Students Affairs work and the messages that saturate our students. The following does not pretend to be a methodical or scientific study. Its thrust is that Student Affairs professionals must be engaged in and aware of the larger culture's changes so familiar to our students in order to make our own messages an effective counterpoint. Further, we must be acutely observant of the possible negative effects these changes-- some obvious and some not-- have on students and on campus life. Finally, we must resist the impulse to acquiesce in the face of such a strong trend. We must instead resist and translate engagement and awareness into strategies to counteract the unhealthy effects that impede our work for students. We must preserve the campus as a shelter from those self-absorbed, intolerant, and antinomian aspects of the popular culture so that we may live up to our professional and institutional missions. Popular Culture is a Commodity Before a project such as this one can begin, it is important to briefly examine the underpinnings of popular culture. Not surprisingly, to do this is to look at the economic engine behind the curtain. Far from a spontaneous, organic, and creative occurrence, popular culture is an overwhelmingly corporation-generated construction. Surely artists and other creatives are actors within this framework, but one must merely listen to even the complaints of the talented about "the industry" -- music, movie, art, take your pick-- to see the subordinate role played by those individuals whose expression the First Amendment was conceived to protect. Today, corporations form the core and the infrastructure of our popular culture. Attorneys, marketers, and accountants have more to say about the ideas, images, and art to which we are exposed than do writers, painters, and musicians. If popular the corporation produces culture, then it is a commodity like any other, adherent to the rules more usually associated with widgets than with CDs. Popular culture is, for instance, advertised, sold, profited from, and manufactured, just as widgets are. The corporate structures that produce it exist to enrich their stockholders. Naturally, these bodies have a vested interest in assuring that it is created at the lowest possible cost, sold at the highest possible price, and consumed at the highest possible rates. It is also like any other commodity in that its producers have the means to generate some demand for it within the population, most directly through advertising, both overt and covert. In at least one way, however, this product is unlike any other. This difference is key. Entertainment is unique, as it enjoys the protection not merely of any amendment to our Constitution, but that of the first, free speech. In choosing one product over another, the logic of the corporation appears to carry far more weight than other considerations. As Sut Jhally writes The media are not public institutions but private ones. They are owned and controlled by the corporations who have concentrated wealth and power in their hands. They thus reflect the needs of their owners. (p. 68) Music industry legend is rife with stories of commercial bands making it over more "artsy," less "accessible" musical groups. Machiavellian managers change the art (read: product) to better suit the market, better sell records, and better contribute to the bottom-line. Today's deluge of "boy bands" (assembled, seemingly, in real time by focus groups of 14 year old girls) is just the latest iteration of an old parable about our popular culture. Payola, the once-vilified practice of paying disk jockeys to play records (read: generate demand), is currently experiencing a comeback the music industry. The illusion of artistic merit is too often a thin veneer maintained so the fraud doesn't become so obvious that the market's stomachs are turned. Market research identifies the sweet spot demographic for products (from cars to makeup to clothes to computers) as the young. Competition among producers only serves to amplify the measures taken to move product to these consumers. To edge the other out, one must be there first, and with a better product. College Students are Vulnerable to Unhealthy Popular Cultural Messages and Values Couple this economic "state of nature" with the gradual diminution of the influence of many of the traditional structures within the society, and the stage is set for the peddling of profitable popular culture product, according, nearly exclusively, to whether it profits the producer. In other words, a good product is that which is profitable, regardless of its effect on the user. Manufacturers of junk food have long adhered to this naked market-centered logic. The supermarket, however, cannot stock its shelves with Twinkies and Fritos exclusively, as the immediate effect would be detrimental to the market itself. No such immediate effect is evident in the cultural supermarket, however. There, the effect is subtler and more gradual. As Daniel Bell (1996) writes What has occurred today is that restraint has gone slack, and the impulses to release find no tension-- or creativity. More to the point, the search for release has become legitimated in a liberal culture and exploited (as in the music industry) by commercial entrepreneurs … (p. 145) The junk food, that which sells to a hungry public, has taken over the supermarket, protected as it is by First Amendment absolutism and the profiteers who become rich with its consumption. Bell worries over the culture in which anything goes, and the effect this lack of control has upon the polity and the nation. We happen to deal with the population most affected. The college campus is a concentrated, intentional community-- oftentimes a microcosm of the larger society, and possessed of a high-turnover, volatile, and youthful population. Here, the less healthy messages of profit-motivated culture appear to have direct effects on the quality of community, the educational experience, and even the safety of students. Some illustrations of parallel developments in the popular culture and on campus may be helpful. Sex MTV does an awful lot of business around Spring Break. Recently, this channel treated viewers to three female University of Wisconsin students reliving a highlight of their break experiences-- their tendency to kiss each other and strangers simultaneously on the mouths. They called this "the triple kiss", and one described how her mother was loath to share a soft drink with her upon her return home. Parents are so uptight! Another student defended his videotaped break adventures as "what college students think of" when they imagine Spring Break. From this broadcast, this student's behaviors consisted mainly of drinking, having apparent strangers drink alcohol from his navel while he lay shirtless on a bar, and the removal of his clothing for a group portrait with other students. One can imagine that fellow professionals in Madison are proud of the students this channel has chosen to grant a national audience. At least MTV intercut criticism from a few dissenting Wisconsin students, who seemed irritated at the way the school was portrayed. They sound like nothing so much as voices in the wilderness. If judged by economic criteria solely, the producers of this kind of cultural product are simply logical businesspeople. The market proves that appeals to the active sex drives of high school and college-age populations’ sells product. Clearly, this is not a new idea. While using MTV as an example is, at this point, well beyond cliched, a few hours spent lingering on this cable channel is an excellent illustration of the larger point. Programming such as that described ironically derives its cast of characters from our institutions and is possibly the most spectacular available example of direct marketing to teen/young adult libido available. While entertainment for young people containing portrayals of serial promiscuity without consequence is readily available (the norm?), it is often at least draped in plot and dialogue. MTV's Spring Break programming is perhaps unique for its distillation of the libidinous from such apparently unnecessary trappings. Ironically, it is rather honest about what it purveys. Can one "prove" direct connections to this apparent trend in the popular culture and the pathologies we may observe on campus? Probably not. Are we seeing students who are, however, less careful, more willing to take risks, and less responsible sexually than they should be? The answer is obvious. Is this problem getting worse? It certainly seems that way. More recently, Fisher, Cullen, and Turner (2000) confirm what many have suspected and what previous research has hinted at: College campuses host large concentrations of young women who are at greater risk for rape and other forms of sexual assault than women in the general population or in a comparable age group. Based on their findings, Bonnie Fisher and her colleagues estimate that the women at a college that has 10,000 female students could experience more than 350 rapes a year-- a finding with serious policy implications for college administrators. (p. III) This national survey of more than 4,500 women at larger (over 1,000 undergraduates) colleges and universities found that 1.7% reported having been sexually assaulted and 1.1% reported the attempt. A number of other research establishes strong links between drinking and sexual aggression on campus (Cureton and Levine, 1998, Ullman, Karabatsos, and Koss, 1999). Objective observers, then, can hardly be accused of paranoia if they react with concern to the apparently correlative preoccupations of the popular culture and the college-age population with what might reasonably be called less-than-healthy sexual behaviors. This concern is greatly amplified by the simultaneous concern with alcohol use and the connections between the two problems. In other words, there is no "chicken little effect" among Student Affairs administrators sounding an alarm and searching for the causes of this disturbing trend. The case can be made that popular culture messages in this area impede Student Affairs work. Simply put, the contradictory messages that can be absorbed even casually from the media make our jobs harder. Student Affairs professionals understand, through experience, that the kind of unfettered, unreflective, and blithe sexual hedonism increasingly portrayed in music, movies, and television can have grave mental and physiological consequences for students. The alcohol fueled hookup scene at bars and at parties, the perennial problem of date rape, and the portrayal of sexual interaction in media entertainments as free from risks and ramifications, are cause for some alarm. This is the case regardless of the character, traditions, and affiliations of one's institution. One looks, almost fruitlessly, for examples of responsibility, self-restraint, or even reflection when it comes to issues of sexuality in the media. One can point to exceptions, often cleverly situated to indemnify producers from just such accusations, but these are merely eddies in a strong current. References to safe sex and responsibility ring hollow when intercut with plotlines that cast the risky behavior from which we beg students to refrain as alluring. Producers often rely on such portrayals to attract audiences in the first place. These entertainments are not nearly as funny when our work weeks are populated with unwanted pregnancies, STDs, and acquaintance rape. Those of us who work with students can be forgiven the strong suspicion that this pervasive material affects behavior. Violence and Alcohol Experience in the market has shown producers of popular cultural products that stylized violence is appealing to the young. The most popular entertainments are sometimes the most violent. Student Affairs professionals, however, worry a great deal about the resort to violence among individual as well as large groups of students. Our institutions rely on us to provide structures for the non-violent resolution of disputes some students are altogether too willing to resolve with their fists. There seems to be little in the larger culture to which we may refer in trying to encourage this alternative. One must look for the efforts of peacemakers with some diligence, as the tendency to romanticize violence has the power of tradition in the popular culture and its entertainments. In many of the most common shared stories of the culture, the majority of those who enter into conflict find resolution through the most violent means. Oddly, this kind of behavior is often at odds not only with the values of the larger society, but also with the reality of everyday life within it. Imagine if the gunfights per night portrayed on television were a reality in municipalities across America. Particularly, male figures within the popular culture are cast as dependent upon the resort to violence to achieve respect. The fullest, and saddest, expression of what many have called a "culture of death" is the romanticized figure of the gangster rapper, and the ongoing mainstreaming of his music and message, particularly in poor minority communities where such violence is a clear and present danger to male youth. As Bob Herbert writes in a column in the New York Times about Eminem's recent nomination for a Grammy award, rap has thoroughly broken faith with the surpassingly great, centuries-long tradition of black music in America. With rap, both the music and poetry have vanished…This stuff is readily available to 10-year-olds, which should make any serious person both angry and sad. A steady diet of this ugliness is poisonous, the equivalent of developing one's self-image by looking in a toilet. (Herbert, p.A23) Students cannot easily look to the media for the role models they require for the kind of conflict resolution those of us within higher education require of them. Increasingly, the link between alcohol/drug abuse and violence Student Affairs professionals see is supported by research. Southern Illinois University at Carbondale's 1998 Core Institute survey 30,695 students at 64 institutions reveals a number of disturbing facts about violence among students. According to the 1995-1996 surveys, binge drinkers were 3.5 times more likely to be victims of physical violence. In addition, 45 percent of students who reported being victims of unwanted sexual intercourse, 50 percent of students reporting forced sexual touching, 43 percent reporting being threatened with physical violence, and 42 percent who report that they were victims of actual physical violence also report being under the influence of alcohol or other drugs at the time. (Core Institute, 1998). Mass student violence is also an issue linked closely to alcohol. Institutions around the nation, often in the midst of efforts to confront the alcohol culture by cracking down on underage drinking, run up against something The Chronicle of Higher Education (1998, May) has labeled "The Right to Party Movement." From Tennessee to Connecticut, Ohio to Washington, students have resorted to violence controllable only through resort to tear gas and riot police. As Gov. Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania commented in the aftermath of riots involving Penn State students, "This isn't a Penn State problem. It's a cultural problem, a community problem, an American problem." (Zimmerman, 1998, p. 7) The power of the culture to establish social norms is again at play here. Sometimes, these are evidenced as sub-cultures, such as the one that maintains near yearly "traditions" of public drinking and rioting among some student populations. The University of Connecticut's run of perennial incidents is one example. (Gose, 1998, p. A47) These could be taken as aberrations, "kids being kids", or mere pathologies of the young. More likely, such instances of mass student violence are an illustration of the tendency of students to step in and create their own culture where their institutions have failed. Rights Americans see themselves, first and foremost, as individuals. (Ladd, 1994) The economic, political, as well as the popular culture overwhelmingly emphasize the individual and her or his rights. Conversations with students, specifically those being confronted for conduct violations, evidence strong identification with individual rights and entitlements that is often unleavened by presumably less attractive notions of personal or community responsibility. Glendon (1991) calls such overt preoccupation "rights talk"-- and it appears to warp many students' perceptions of their role on our campuses. As more and more institutions rethink the "hands-off" approach to the college community that gained prevalence in the 1960s and 1970s, professionals may find that the larger culture's overemphasis on individual entitlements leaves them with nothing with which they may work. So pervasive is this assumption among students, we behold the recasting of pathology (as in the case of underage abuse of alcohol) as a right (the "right to party" movement). Institutional and national ambivalence play a role here. As Seymour Martin Lipset (1968) writes, in his fascinating examination of the student revolts of the 1960s, This ambivalence is enhanced by those components of American values that make adults reluctant, even when they have good cause, to sharply call students or youth to task. Rather they like to encourage youth and students to take independent, new positions. This ties in with part of the American self-image that assumes that the United States is a progressive country, one that accepts reform and change. (p. 50) In another way, the enrollment management ethos, derived from a business culture often incongruent with that of a liberal arts education, may aggravate this problem. Wrongly constituted, it instills a set of customer service expectations (another new "right") in students that is more appropriate to a shopping foray at K-Mart than an educational enterprise. The student is not the same as a customer, and application to an institution to be educated is evidence that they are not always right. Creeping consumerism cannot be discounted as a factor in these trends. The impersonal legalistic environment to which some institutions resort is also damaging, as it elicits nothing so much as revulsion from students the institution might otherwise count upon to support its efforts to build responsible communities. "Our institutions have become so blinded by the need to protect the rights of students that we have lost sight of the responsibilities of membership in our communities. (Lowery, 1998, p. 27) By contrast, the culture that the Student Affairs professional seeks to bolster is one that emphasizes responsibilities in constant tension with rights. The educational value of such a stance is amplified by the disequilibrium between these two notions so noticeable in the larger society. As Dallin Oaks (1998) observes about this tension We cannot raise ourselves by adding to our inventory of individual rights. The fulfillment of individual rights depends on the fulfillment of individual and group responsibilities. If we are to raise all mankind and ourselves we must strengthen our common commitment and service in the cause of responsibility for the welfare of others and the good of society at large. (p. 95) In just the way he describes, university communities are a brake against the slide of which student internalization of rights rhetoric is one symptom. Institutional, Professional, and Departmental mission statements have in common numerous references to "training good citizens" and "preparing leaders" who are equipped to face the challenges and problems of society. Should this be more than rhetorical flourish, Student Affairs administrators must listen closely to the vocabulary of rights, and adopt equally compelling vocabularies and strategies of responsibility. College Finally, the popular culture's stereotypical image of college culture is not what most in Student Affairs would want it to be. This image is often one of simple hedonism, a crass pastiche of drinking, drugs, risk-free promiscuity, and romanticized rebellion. Clearly, messages like these tilt the playing field on which the Students Affairs professional is tasked to do his or her job. One wonders with what images high school students would arrive at the university if it weren't for the movie Animal House or MTV's Spring Break coverage. Higher education professionals should (and often do) blanch at the images high school students (a target market) must glean from these shows. Even more disturbing are the direct connections between the Spring Break phenomenon and direct corporate sponsorship. Last year alone, "corporations put an estimated $50 million into Spring Break advertising and promotions, and at least 1.25 million students, spending over $1 billion, participated in the festivities." (Sperber, 2000, p. 177) In a truly bizarre example of hypocrisy, news-oriented media outlets, often subsidiaries of parent corporations like the one that owns MTV, air breathless exposes about the depredations of Spring Break and its risky behavior. Higher Education's efforts to put forth a more accurate or healthy image to youth seem inaudible amid hedonistic and romanticized popular culture messages. An agglomeration of entertainment corporations, spring break entrepreneurs, and alcohol manufacturers sometimes seem to have more to say about life on campus than those who know the most about it. It should not surprise us when these strong images, produced by media manufacturers and distributed in myriad ways to the target market demographic, arrive with students each September at move-in day. Summary The preceding sections of this article have been an attempt to outline sources within the culture that may, at the very least, contribute to these difficulties. It is clear that the problems with which Student Affairs professionals deal do not spring from thin air. The ubiquity of the media outlets producing and distributing popular culture product, the attractiveness of its packaging, and its sheer volume give the foundational ideas and assumptions of this product great influence in the population we serve. An increasing proportion of the product itself is premised upon foundational ideas and assumptions which sell, but which are also at variance or opposed to those of the institutions in which we work. If the behavior of the past is an indicator for the future, this will continue. The logic of the market impels producers to find new product to take the place of old and less profitable ones. The idea that our work is somehow isolated from the effects of this product seems naïve. The more important question is how we and our institutions, often possessed of diametrically opposed values and messages, can compete. Some modest proposals for such competition are offered in Part II of this article. Part II of this article will be featured in the next site update of www.reslife.net. References Lipset, S.M. (1968). The Activists: A Profile. In Daniel Bell and Irving Kristol (Eds.), Confrontation: The Student Rebellion and the Universities. New York, NY: Basic Books Bell, D. (1996) . The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism. New York, NY: Basic Books. Bennett, W. (1999). The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators. New York, NY: Doubleday. Core Institute at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale (1998). 1998 Statistics on Alcohol and Other Drug Use on American Campuses [On-Line]. Available: http://www.siu. edu/departments/coreinst/public_html/1998.htm Cureton, J. and Levine, A. (1998). When Hope and Fear Collide: A Portrait of Today's College Student. San Francisco: Jossey Bass. Etzioni, A. (1993). The Spirit of Community: The Reinvention of American Society. New York, NY: Simon and Schuster. Fisher, B., Cullen F. , Turner, M. (2000). The Sexual Victimization of College Women [On-Line]. Available: http://www.ncjrs.org/txtfiles1/nij/182369.txt Gose, B. (1998, May) At Connecticut's Party Weekend, Days of Music Replaced by Nights of Vandalism. The Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A47. Glendon, M. A. (1991). Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse. New York: NY: Free Press. Graber, D. (1988). Mass Media and American Politics. Washington, D.C.: Congressional Quarterly Press. Herbert, B. (2001, January). A Musical Betrayal. The New York Times, p. A23. Hernandez, K., Hogan, S., Hathaway, C., and Lovell, C. (1999, Spring) Analysis of the Literature on the Impact of Student Involvement on Student Development and Learning: More Questions than Answers? NASPA Journal, 36, pp. 184-197. Hoekema, D. A. (1994). Campus Rules and Moral Community: In Place of In Loco Parentis. Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield. Jhally, S. (1989). The Political Economy of Culture. In Ian Angus and Sut Jhally (Eds.), Cultural Politics in Contemporary America. New York, NY: Routledge. Johannesen, K. (1999). Influencing the Drinking Culture at the University of Arizona. Catalyst, 5, 9-10. Ladd, E.C. (1994). The American Ideology: An Exploration of the Origins, Meaning, and Role of American Political Ideas. Storrs, CT: The Roper Center. Lowery, J. W. (1998, Summer). Institutional Policy and Individual Responsibility; Communities of Justice and Principle. New Directions for Student Services, 82, 15-27. Oaks, D.H. (1998). Rights and Responsibilities. In Amitai Etzioni (Ed.), The Essential Communitarian Reader (pp. 95-105). New York, NY: Rowan & Littlefield. Posner, B., Rosenberger, J. (1997, Fall). Effective Orientation Advisors are Also Leaders. NASPA Journal, 35,1, pp. 46-56. Sperber, M. (2000). Beer and Circus: How Big-time College Sports Is Crippling Undergraduate Education. New York: Henry Holt and Company. Student Rioters Demand 'Right to Party. (1998, May). The Chronicle of Higher Education, p. A46. Zernike, K. (2000, October). New Tactic on College Drinking: Play it Down. The New York Times, p. 1. Zimmerman, R. (1999). Alcohol and Student Disruptions on Campus. Catalyst, 5, 6-7. About the Author Christopher Rodgers is the Director of Residential Life for Judicial Affairs at Fordham University's Rose Hill campus in New York City, where he began his career as a Resident Director in 1992. As Associate Director of Residential Life for Staff and Student Development for the last six years, Chris has, among other responsibilities, supervised Resident Directors, Resident Assistants, and overseen programming in the residence halls at Rose Hill. He earned a Bachelor's degree from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., holds a Master's Degree in Political Science from Fordham, and is a doctoral candidate in the Administration, Policy, and Urban Education Division of Fordham's Graduate Education Department. He and his wife, Regina Dougherty Rodgers, live just outside the university's gates in the Belmont section of the Bronx.