Tania Tetlow
President of Fordham University
Tania Tetlow has served as the 33rd president of Fordham University since July 2022, when she became the first layperson and first woman to hold the office since Fordham’s founding in 1841. Tetlow is a legal scholar and former assistant U.S. attorney with a strong commitment to the transformative power of Jesuit education.
President Tetlow has deepened Fordham’s ambitions as the Jesuit University of New York, making major new investments in STEM in connection with the University’s strengths in the humanities and professions.
In 2024, she oversaw the completion of Fordham’s $350 million Cura Personalis Campaign, which surpassed its goal, raising more than $370 million to enhance the student experience. And in 2025, she was instrumental in securing a $100 million gift—the largest in Fordham’s history—from alumni Maurice (Mo) and Carolyn Dursi Cunniffe. The gift will be used to break ground on a cutting-edge, integrated science facility on the Rose Hill campus and to launch and expand STEM degree programs.
For her leadership in Catholic higher education, President Tetlow received Commonweal Magazine’s inaugural Centennial Award in 2024. She serves as board chair of the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities and, starting in July 2025, will serve as vice chair of the board of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities.
Prior to Fordham, Tetlow served as the 17th president of Loyola University New Orleans for four years, the first woman and the first layperson to lead that institution. Under her leadership, Loyola completed a turnaround to recover from the most challenging period in its financial history. The university improved its bond rating and repositioned its finances through careful budgeting, increased retention, continued enrollment growth, and expansion of online, graduate, and professional programs. She led this turnaround while navigating multiple hurricanes and the COVID-19 pandemic.
From 2015 to 2018, she served as senior vice president and chief of staff at Tulane University, where she was a key strategic advisor to President Michael Fitts. For 10 years before that, she was a Tulane Law School faculty member, serving as the Felder-Fayard Professor before becoming chief of staff. Her scholarship focused on the overlap between equal protection law and criminal procedure, and helped persuade the Department of Justice to reimagine its regulation of constitutional policing. She also directed Tulane’s Domestic Violence Law Clinic, teaching students how to save lives through the practice of law. She used her expertise to improve the local criminal justice response to domestic violence and sexual assault.
Before her career in academia, Tetlow served as an assistant U.S. attorney, prosecuting violent crime, narcotics, arson, and fraud cases. She also clerked for the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals and worked as an associate at Phelps Dunbar, litigating complex commercial transactions.
Tetlow graduated cum laude from Tulane University with a Bachelor of Arts degree in American studies, and she is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, where she earned a Juris Doctor degree and was a Harry S. Truman Fellow.
A Catholic who was born in New York and grew up in New Orleans, President Tetlow is the daughter of Fordham alumni (her parents met in graduate school at Rose Hill). Her late father, Louis Mulry Tetlow, was an educator, clinical psychologist, and former Jesuit priest who earned his Ph.D. at Fordham. Her mother, Elisabeth Meier Tetlow, a biblical scholar and author, earned two of her five master’s degrees—in philosophy and theology—from Fordham.
Fordham University – DAUR Teams
