Yale President-Elect Welcomes Conference Participants

October 26, 2012

View a video of President-Elect Peter Salovey's welcome remarks.

Read a story on the Conference at YaleNews.

Following are the transcribed remarks of Gary L. Haller, Co-Chair of the University Advisory Council on the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, and Peter Salovey, Provost and President-Elect of the University, in welcoming participants to the eighth Annual Conference of the Yale National Initiative.

Introduction by Gary Haller: My name is Gary Haller. I am Professor of Chemical Engineering and Chemistry here at Yale. I am standing here as the Co-Chair with Paul Fry of the Executive Committee of the Teachers Institute. My point of business is to introduce Peter Salovey. Peter Salovey is the Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology and he is our current Provost. He was a Stanford undergraduate, but was awarded a Yale Ph.D. in psychology in 1986. Immediately after finishing his Ph.D., he joined the faculty and he has served as Dean of the Graduate School and after that as Dean of Yale College before being appointed Provost in 2008.

The Yale Office of Provost oversees strategic planning and allocation of resources, both academic and teaching excellence in all parts of the University. Peter's research interests are in emotional and health behavior, and he is probably best known for the concept that Mayer and Salovey developed called "emotional intelligence" on which he has published several books and/or edited books as well as called to attest a major emotional intelligence as a set of abilities.

This group I think would be more interested in his position as a teacher and his interaction with the Teachers Institute, and he is doing well on both accounts here. Peter is recognized as an outstanding teacher. He was awarded the Lex Hixon '63 Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Social Sciences and also the William Clyde DeVane Medal for Distinguished Scholarship and Teaching in Yale College. The University Council of the Teachers Institute is appointed by the President, and it advises both the President and the Executive Committee on matters having to do with elementary and secondary education. Peter has served on that Council since 1999. He continued to serve as an ex officio Council member during his two deanships as he does now as Provost. No other Provost, in my memory, has been as supportive of the Institute as Peter has. He is currently working with the Executive Committee to help raise some endowment for our STEM seminars that would be something like the endowment that already exists for the Humanities. I would ask you to please welcome Peter, who will then welcome you to campus.

Welcome by Peter Salovey: Thank you, Gary. That was a nice welcome to "the welcomer." I appreciate that. I am Peter Salovey. I am the Provost and a Psychology Professor at Yale University. You know he made the comment that the Provost, that's where the resources are. That is of course the first thought that everybody has when they meet a Provost: That is where the University's checkbook must be located.

I just had a very funny experience. We had the inaugural Skip Gates lecture on campus about a week ago, and this is a lecture that emanates from a gift that a big fan of Skip Gates, and a Yale alum, made remembering that Skip had at one time been at Yale. It is probably our only lectureship in honor of a Harvard professor here at Yale. In any case, Kwame Anthony Appiah gave a marvelous lecture to a packed house at the Whitney Humanities Center, and at the end of it Skip, who came to hear him and to be celebrated, got up to make a few personal remarks, and basically told the history of the Department of African American Studies here at Yale. That was fascinating and very personal kind of history. Then, as he wrapped up - for those of you who have ever met Skip Gates or have seen him on television, he is a very charismatic guy and the way he did it - as he wrapped up, he looked around and said, "Oh, there is the Provost, and my suggestion to all of you is, "go pick his pocket!" That is the way his talk ended. So, at the end I went up and said, "Thank you, Skip, for creating a miserable next couple of weeks for me." In fact the e-mails started to come in with new requests for money, "Skip suggested that …."

Anyway, let me welcome you all here today on behalf of President Levin, who would love to be here. I know many of you are from the West Coast. We have San José people, and San Mateo County folks, and maybe others. That is where he is right now; he is fund raising on the West Coast. If you know our President, you know that he grew up in San Francisco, and he is also catching a bit of the Giants at the moment and is quite excited about that. But, if he were here, he would be welcoming you. So, I welcome the Yale National Fellows, the superintendents and other school administrators, school officials who are here, Yale faculty members - many of whom have supported this program for many, many years - and faculty from other institutions, and the National University Advisory Council. Maybe we have covered everybody with all those categories, but if not, welcome to you as well.

This is the fifteenth of the national meetings held at Yale since 1983, and it really reflects Yale's long-standing commitment both to this program, but also to working with public schools. We have a special commitment, of course, to the schools here in New Haven, and we look for ways to do that on multiple trajectories from the Teachers Institute, to the new New Haven Promise program, to programs that have come and gone, but experimental programs on campus designed to bolster public school teaching in this area.

Perhaps one of the aspects of the Yale branch of this program that is most exciting to me is to look at the list of arts and sciences faculty primarily - the faculty from some of our professional schools, like Forestry and Environmental Studies - and see who are actually teaching workshops with our public teachers. It is a "Who's Who" of our best teachers. It is really amazing to me that these folks, who are so dedicated to teaching Yale College students and have incredible careers as scholars and researchers in their own right, are willing to make the time and commit themselves to doing workshops and actually helping out, as well administratively, with the program. It is really a heartwarming commitment to teaching, and I think we all express our gratitude. It's a "Who's Who" list that I am always quite impressed with when I look at it.

Over the years it's actually been about one hundred faculty members from Yale, including three Deans of Yale College, many department chairs, and a fourth Dean of the Graduate School, who now happens to be the President who is rooting for the San Francisco Giants that I mentioned earlier. All of whom have worked in the program. So as recently as two weeks ago, faculty from the program here at Yale were in my office talking about what they gained from participating, talking about financial stability of the program long term, and talking about the way in which the network of school teachers, public school teachers, and university faculty committed to pedagogy formed as a result of the program. The content is important, but as a psychologist, the process is important, too, to the formation of these networks. It is very, very important.

We celebrate today, the launching - not quite the launching, but it's been in the works for a few years - but essentially the launching of a new Institute in Richmond. I was talking with the Richmond group over lunch, and I know it's something you want to talk about, and other initiatives as well.

Let me just close with one other comment. I know a few of you from last year probably heard me say this last year, so I will tell the short version this year. I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing if it weren't for the teachers that I had, primarily in high school. I went to public high school in two places: three years in Buffalo, New York and one year in Los Angeles, California. I was one of those very odd kids who actually did his senior year in a different high school than my first three because my family moved. It wasn't only a different high school, it was a different culture. I would like to say there are no places in the U.S. as different as Buffalo, New York and Los Angeles, California, but they were pretty different. Even the language - I had to learn a new language. I remember the first day I was in Los Angeles, the kid next door said, "Do you want to play catch?" and I came out with my glove and baseball. He said, "That be bitchin'!" I did not know what he was talking about. "Bitchin?" Anyway, I had great teachers in both of those schools, but especially in my Buffalo high school, Williamsville North High School, where these were folks absolutely committed not just to teaching us, but to our growth, our maturation, and our future careers. It was really inspiration from them that made me want to be an educator.

I was telling this story to someone who only came to Yale a few years ago, our new chair of the Department of Chemistry. He said to me, "Where was that?" I started to describe where it was. He had gone to the same high school, had the same teachers, and had the same experience that I did. He felt he was a chemistry professor because of the teachers he had at Williamsville North High School in the suburbs of Buffalo, NY. About three weeks later, two of our English teachers, who were married to each other, came through town and we had lunch with them, and had a chance to actually talk to them about the influence they had on our lives. They remembered us far better than we thought we deserved to be remembered by them. Not that we did not do memorable things in high school, but really got a chance to thank them and express our gratitude. They had both just retired and we clearly had them at the very beginning of their careers.

When I look out at the group of kids that I went to that high school with and the number of them now making careers in education, either teaching high school or grade school, but also the number of faculty, my little group, a dozen of us that get together every year, none of us came from fancy backgrounds - the child of a cop, the child of a logistics manager at a company, the child of a podiatrist, the child of a farmer, that group of people are a professor at Cal State Humboldt, a professor at Loyola in Chicago, a professor at the University of Wisconsin - me. It's remarkable that this school and its influence of an inspiring group of teachers created these folks completely dedicated to education for the rest of their lives.

Thank you all for being here. I hope you get a chance actually to enjoy the New England fall, particularly if you are not from New England. I hope you get a chance to enjoy New Haven, particularly if you have never been in New Haven before because it's not what you thought it was - it's a lot better. I hope you get a chance to enjoy our campus, and most importantly, I hope you get a chance to enjoy each other. Welcome to Yale. Welcome to New Haven. We are delighted you are here.