to our functioning, useful to our surviving, useful to our getting along in the world.The problem is, we’ve often been trained to ignore them. By our parents?
Sometimes it is simplified as charisma, and that’s part of it, but what they’re really doing is they are paying attention to the information that is contained in their own emotions and to others that are making decisions on the basis of it.
You know “big boys don’t cry,”“you got to put your emotions on hold and think in a rational way.” It really goes back to a western philosophical notion that passion and reason are opposites and they are in conflict.
During college you missed the angst and difficulties of the sixties, early seventies, civil rights and anti-war, and had more of a neutral experience.
Our premise is that actually our emotional systems inform our thinking and motivate our behavior in adaptive ways.
My college years of the late seventies, it’s true, the draft had ended, the war had ended and that definitely changed one of the dominant worries of college-aged people. We were very caught, particularly on issues of Apartheid and South Africa, at Stanford and other campuses, too. There was a lot of passion around how we could contribute, but it wasn’t as close to home.
The problem is, many of us don’t have the tools for extracting that positive value from our emotions. So our idea is a set of skills that help us identify emotions in ourselves and in others, help us understand them, use language to describe them, have an appreciation for how they change over time.The third is using your emotions to make a decision to solve a problem. And the fourth is to regulate your emotions to psyche yourself up or calm yourself down. What is an example? You cited leadership in the past? That’s a good question. An example—I have been given a manuscript to read and I need to be in a very critical frame of mind to read and correct it. But in fact, I’m really feeling great, I just watched the Red Sox win. [Interrupts, laughing] End of interview. [Laughs] Listening to some Bluegrass Music and I have an off day tomorrow, I’m in great spirits. When I’m in that emotional state, I’m actually not in the right mindset for reading something where I have to be critical. I might identify that I’m feeling awfully good and if I stay in that euphoric state, I’m not going to be critical enough. So, I might calm myself and say I’ll think about all these great things later, but right now I need to be critical. And I think about the last time I had to take a critical attitude and get to work. So I am regulating my own emotions for the task.You can do that before you play a sport, or before getting into an intimate conversation with somebody. So you had a book on emotional intelligence and leadership, what is the take away? Good leaders are paying attention to their own emotions and regulating them in ways that allow them to make good decisions. But also, they are paying attention to the emotions of other people. The good leader needs to understand when people are hearing [their] message. When people are being motivated by [the leader], when [the leader is] saying something that just isn’t going over very well and needs tact, to take a different course. 10 S EPTEMBER 2016
Your predecessor didn’t have to deal with the campus emotion that has emerged in the past couple of years. How did you take control of that process and channel what the students were going through against the needs of the community and the institution? One of the things we all have to realize is that while our emotions and our thinking work together, they’re not the same thing. Our students experience emotional reactions to feeling slighted or not being fully included on campus. We should be motivated to try to address those emotions. Our consideration of how to create a society, a campus, where people feel they fully belong, that also has to be a thoughtful and principled process. I think the students today are still more respectful than we were, nobody kicked you out of your office – yet, at least. Despite the way it looks through the media, which tended to focus on very unusual moments, mostly what was going on on campus was respectful, thoughtful, but a deeply felt conversation.You could walk around and hear. . . [Interrupts] No one was hanging you in effigy? People were really trying to make arguments on how do we create a campus where there could be freedom of expression, that’s fundamental, but also a mutual respect. There is a narrative about colleges and the [lack] of freedom of expression that students and many faculty are not in favor of full freedom of expression as we have thought of it in the past, you reacted to that? Yale has had policies that were articulated by a committee chair 42 years ago, history professor
C. Vann Woodward. Essentially it says that on a University campus, we have to be willing to tolerate expressions of others that disgust us. Because if we start drawing lines, we will stop and the need to articulate any argument needs to be preserved. Woodward also said civility and friendship and mutual respect are also important values. He said they don’t trump free expression, but they’re also important. We have to take our role as an educational institution seriously, we have to help people find their voices and to use those voices to counter speech that they don’t like, that they disagree with, that they find offensive, that is the answer, the answer is not to suppress it. But when you had to issue a policy statement or response, were you concerned that it would be understood you came down pretty hard for the free speech? Were you thinking I’m being risky, or I’m just standing? [Interrupts] What I was thinking during the whole time was this was just a false dichotomy, that it is free expression on the one hand and tolerance on the other. I believe the two can exist, and we can allow the expression of any ideology on this campus. When we hear something that is offensive to us, we can counter them with our own voice, I think most of our students understand this. So did this get screwed up in the media? I think the media paid attention to the precipitating events and if [something is said] others didn’t like, they say “they say it’s a free expression controversy and students today don’t tolerate free expression.” So are you happy with how it has settled in? Yes and no, I’m happy that we are having intelligent, thoughtful conversations on this campus and I’m hopeful everyone feels they can participate.The other aspect of emotional intelligence that plays out here is that we also have to empathize with the world that 18, 19 and 20 year old students find themselves. It is not the same world that we went to college in.They find themselves in a world where the shooting of an unarmed civilian is being broadcast through cell phone videos.They find themselves in the world, in particular, where African Americans are incarcerated in very high rates, where people are questioning the use of race and ethnicity in college admissions. They’re finding themselves in the world where someone running for the highest office in the land may use language that is about race, ethnicities, immigration that is designed to
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