A friend of India set to take over as Yale president

Washington, Nov 10 (IANS) Peter Salovey, provost and chief academic officer of Yale University, who has played a key role in building the Ivy League institution’s linkages to India, will become the university’s next president in June 2013.

Salovey, whose appointment was announced by the New Haven, Connecticut based university Friday, has been a critical figure of the Yale India Initiative and has been instrumental in deploying institutional resources in support of the India Initiative. He succeeds Richard C. Levin, another India friend who assumed the Yale Presidency in 1993 and announced his intention to step down earlier this year.

Chris Argyris Professor of Psychology Salovey’s academic work has involved collaborations with Indian researchers and institutions.

He and investigators at the the National AIDS Research Institute in Pune, for example, carried out studies on issues of stigma and discrimination in health care settings in India.

The studies aimed to identify the forms of stigma and discrimination and its effects in health care settings in urban, industrial and rural populations. This work was started in 2002 and continued several years.

Announcing Salovey’s unanimous selection by the Yale Corporation, the University’s governing board, Senior Corporation Fellow Edward P. Bass noted: “Peter brings a profound understanding of Yale, and great ambitions for advancing the University in the years ahead.”

Salovey came to Yale as a graduate student in 1981 and has had three decades of academic and administrative experience at the University.

He is the only president in the history of Yale who has served as the chair of an academic department, as dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, as dean of Yale College, and as provost.

He is also the latest in a series of Yale provosts who have been selected to lead major universities; his immediate three predecessors went on to head Cambridge, MIT, and Oxford.

Salovey’s research focuses on the ways that human moods and emotions affect behaviour and decision-making. With John D. Mayer, he developed a broad framework known as “emotional intelligence” to describe how people understand, manage and use their emotions.

Since the launch of Yale India Initiative in 2008, Yale has committed significant financial resources to position itself among the world’s pre-eminent institutions for the study of and engagement with India and South Asia.

Yale also launched the India-Yale Parliamentary Leadership Programme in 2007 and the India-Yale Higher Education Leadership Programme in 2011 to build the leadership capacity in Indian higher education.

(Arun Kumar can be contacted at arun.kumar@ians.in)

IANS 2012-11-10 08:38:03