“A Cross between a businessman and a nightclub entertainer”

Today marks the death of Robert I. Gannon (1892-1978), Jesuit educator and university president. From 1936 to 1949, he presided over what some consider the golden age of Fordham University. During this perios many considered Fordham to be America’s premier Jesuit university in America. Certainly it had the most colorful president. The son of a railroad executive, Gannon grew up in New York City and attended Georgetown before joining the Jesuits. He defined his presidency as “a cross between a businessman and a nightclub entertainer.” One of the city’s most sought-after after-diner speakers, by his own estimate he raised about $125,000 a year. A strident conservative, he called academic freedom “mumbo jumbo,” and he once said that “a piece of rubber hose is at times worth ten years of the new [educational] psychology.” Although he came to Fordham during the days of the great football teams that included Vince Lombardi, during World War II he halted football altogether. After the war he brought back on a less elaborate scale. His rationale was that he wanted to get Fordham “off the vaudeville stage and . . . back to the campus.” One Jesuit historian had said that Gannon was more a communicator than an educator, and that he “understood education to be one of the performing arts.” (He is seen here wearing the biretta next to President Franklin D. Roosevelt when the latter visited Fordham in 1940).