Over the last two weeks, Fordham’s Rose Hill campus experienced a large spike in positive COVID-19 cases. As of Thursday, Feb. 25, Rose Hill reports 246 active positive cases, according to the university’s testing dashboard. This number, far higher than any recorded during the fall semester, represents 5.54% of the total campus population. 

“This variant is more infectious than the previously dominant strain, and makes strict observance to COVID-19 precautions on and off campus even more important,” Valera said in the email. 

As in-person classes and activities remain on pause at Fordham University’s Rose Hill campus, some students have been directed to quarantine on campus after they tested positive or were exposed to COVID-19.

On Thursday, Feb. 18th, Fordham United Student Government (USG) spent the majority of their weekly meeting discussing rising COVID-19 cases on the Rose Hill campus.  

Gomez described the entire experience as very emotional, the culmination of almost a year of living through a deadly pandemic. “I was trying to not cry the entire time, and then I got to my car and promptly sobbed my eyes out for like 20 minutes,” said Gomez. “The only way that I can describe it...is a mix of mourning and loss but also relief — mourning the last year of our lives but relief that maybe the end is near.”

This Valentine’s Day, nearly 4,000 Fordham students received their “ideal match” on campus over email thanks to the Fordham Marriage Pact. The Fordham Marriage Pact is an offshoot of the original Marriage Pact, a program created for Stanford students that went viral after its immense success and has spread to many universities across the country in the last year. 

Wolff’s research proposal lays out what he hopes to accomplish: “This will be the first study in Fordham’s history to determine how students, particularly white students, understand racism and how it operates and Fordham’s complicity in promoting it. As Fordham pushes to create an anti-racism structure, it needs first to understand how racism permeates through the institution and how it as an institution fosters or undermines racial literacy.”

In late 2019, the New York City Charter was updated to begin using ranked-choice voting in local elections, making it the largest city within the United States to adopt this voting system. 

Dean William Gould, who had been assistant dean of juniors at Rose Hill for nearly 20 years, retired at the end of December 2020. Gould also taught classes in the political science department, College Honors Program and American Catholic Studies.

“While many Senators, on both sides of the aisle, condemn what happened on Jan. 6th, few Republicans think that Trump is responsible for what happened,” said Monika McDermott, a political science professor at Fordham.