Emotional Intelligence.

In March 2015, I had a public conversation at Yale with the university's President Peter Salivay.

The occasion was quite an emotional one.

It celebrated the 60th anniversary of the Marshall Scholarships,

created by the British Parliament as a way of expressing thanks to the United States for the

Marshall Plan that helped Western Europe rebuild its economies after the Second World War.

The scholarships fund outstanding young Americans to study at any university in the United Kingdom.

So the gathering that evening was about the links between Britain and the United

States and the role of universities in cultivating that generosity of spirit epitomized by the

Marshall Plan that understands the need to build peace, not just wage war. But it had another

emotional resonance. Yale is one of the world's great universities,

yet there was a time between the 1920s and 1960s, when it had a reputation for being guarded about

even quietly hostile to the presence of Jews among its students and staff. Happily, that has not been

the case since 1960 when its president, A. Whitney Griswold

issued a directive that religion should play no role in the admissions process.

Today, it is warmly welcoming to people of all faiths and ethnicities.

Noting that fact, the president pointed out that not only was Yale that

afternoon hosting a rabbi, but he too, Salévae, was Jewish and the descendant of a great

rabbinic dynasty. You see, Salivay is an anglicization of the name Soloveitchic. Thinking back to that occasion, I wondered whether there was a more than merely family connection

between the university president and his great distant relative, Rabbi Joseph Soloveych,

the man known to generations of his students at Yeshiva University as simply the Rove.

Was there an intellectual and spiritual link also, however, oblique?

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