With all of the recent brouhaha regarding presidents of major universities and how they have dealt with antisemitism and protests on their campuses, one major university that has not aroused significant discussion is Yale and its president, Peter Salovey. A possible explanation came from one of my favorite writers in The Jewish Link, Mitchell First, who recounted in a recent column that Salovey is a descendant of the Soloveitchik family, and thus a cousin of the Rav and his current descendants. I bring this story forward in this cancer column as Salovey is also a prominent cancer researcher.
Peter Salovey was born in 1958 in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His mother was a nurse and his father a professor of chemical engineering. The family moved frequently as his father changed academic positions, so Salovey spent time in New Jersey as well as Buffalo, New York before ending up in California for his high school years where his father was at USC. He did both a BA and an MA in psychology at Stanford before going to Yale where he completed his PhD in psychology in 1988.
He joined Yale’s faculty as an assistant professor and rose to a full professor by 1995. His most prominent work was for emotional intelligence. It is apparently the ability to understand your own emotions as well as those of people around you. Salovey coined the term in 1990 and went on with his collaborators to describe how to measure and utilize this ability in each individual.
I came into contact with Peter in the 1990s when he was attending meetings of the American Society of Preventive Oncology, the leading organization in the U.S. for cancer epidemiology and prevention, in which I was deeply involved. His other major area of interest was health messaging, particularly as it related to cancer. He conducted extensive studies on how to tailor messages on tobacco cessation so as to make them more effective in motivating smokers to quit. Likewise, he addressed the topic of shared decision-making, which was just becoming a more common approach to dealing with controversial decisions in treatment choice. For example, he has several studies and papers on how shared decision-making was accepted by women with breast cancer who had to choose between lumpectomy and mastectomy and whether having shared decision-making—the women were given the information about both lumpectomy and mastectomy and offered the opportunity to choose which treatment they preferred—and the ability to participate in the choice was a positive factor or whether their preference was the older paternalistic system.
Message-framing was a large part of his research, which largely focused on health promotion—screening practices, prevention such as tobacco, etc. It did sometimes tend to involve clinical issues as well. If one wishes to communicate to a patient their risk of cancer recurrence so they can make decisions regarding further management, how should that information be conveyed in the best fashion so they can understand and comprehend it? Is it better to say, “You have an 80% chance of surviving?” Or is it better to say, “You have a 20% chance of dying?” The two statements are, of course, factually equivalent but which will a patient absorb, comprehend and be able to act on better?
These were issues that Salovey studied in the cancer realm—of course, the answers were usually that it varied by various factors. But he generated a fairly large set of publications on these topics in the cancer arena. We became somewhat friendly during that time frame, ate together a few times, and he was a very personable and nice guy. He went on to become the dean of Yale College, and when I went on a college tour with my daughter Dana, he met briefly with us in his office. He subsequently became the provost of Yale and in 2013 its president.
I do not know if the Saloveys and the Soloveichiks are close enough to go to each other’s weddings and simchas; I have not seen any mention of any connection to synagogue or Jewish life in his background.
When his appointment was in process as president in 2013, his familial connection to the Soloveichiks was certainly known and publicized—it was seen as a positive, a sort of yichus. An article in the Yale Daily News in 2013 suggested that, by Salovey ascending to the presidency of Yale, that the Soloveichik family was ascending the pinnacle of intellectual achievement not just within the Orthodox Jewish world but also within the secular intellectual world. The article got a bit carried away as it suggested, “… as President, he can draw upon the Talmudic genius and educational innovation of his namesake…” I don’t know if Salovey is well-versed in Talmudic reasoning, though I suspect he would be sympathetic to it, and we can therefore be grateful at the present time for a quiet Yale campus.
Alfred I. Neugut, MD, PhD, is a medical oncologist and cancer epidemiologist at Columbia University Irving Medical Center/New York Presbyterian and Mailman School of Public Health in New York. Email: [email protected].
This article is for educational purposes only and is not intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment, and does not constitute medical or other professional advice. Always seek the advice of your qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment.
