Get to know Yale leaders—Tamar Gendler
Tamar Szabó Gendler is Yale’s Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS), the Vincent J. Scully Professor of Philosophy, and Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science. She holds a BA summa cum laude with Distinction in Humanities and in Mathematics-&-Philosophy from Yale University (1987) and a PhD in Philosophy from Harvard University (1996). After teaching at Syracuse and Cornell Universities for nearly a decade, she returned to Yale in 2006 as Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Cognitive Science Program.
In 2009-10, supported by the Mellon Foundation’s New Directions program, Tamar spent a year as a full-time student at Yale doing coursework in psychology, neuroscience, and statistics. In 2010, she was appointed Chair of the Yale philosophy department, becoming the first woman chair in the department’s two-century history and the first woman graduate of Yale College to serve as the chair of a Yale department. In 2013, she was appointed Deputy Provost for Humanities and Initiatives, a position she held until she assumed her current role in 2014. As FAS Dean, Tamar has focused on building excellence and collaboration within and across traditional disciplinary boundaries throughout the divisions in FAS and across the university more broadly.
Tamar has held Fellowships from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Fellowship Program in the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies/Ryskamp Fellowship Program, the Collegium Budapest Institute for Advanced Studies, and the Mellon New Directions Program. In 2013, she was awarded the Yale College-Sidonie Miskimin Clauss ’75 Prize for Excellence in Teaching in the Humanities. Tamar has served on boards or steering committees for the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine; the National Science Foundation; the National Endowment for the Humanities; the Mellon Foundation; the Smithsonian Institution; the Kavli Foundation; the Tata Corporation; and numerous colleges and universities across the United States and internationally.
What are you reading these days?
I’m reading a biography of the great philosopher and economist Frank Ramsey that was written by a scholar named Cheryl Misak. She is a very interesting person who did important work in analytic philosophy and then became provost at the University of Toronto. The book is called Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers and it’s not only a biography of this amazing thinker, who died at the age of 26, but also an extraordinary portait of British intellectual life in the 1920s. It’s a nice example of a book that’s written for both a popular and academic audience. I was listening to it first on Audible and ended up buying a written copy because big sections of the book are formulas and those are hard to listen to while chopping onions. Other Yalies who have reportedly enjoyed the book include (SOM Dean) Kerwin Charles, (former Provost) Ben Polak, and (SOM instructor) Tim Geithner, among others.
Do you have a particular genre that you like more than another?
I read in four different genres, two for work and two for life. The first genre is related to my job of overseeing the tenure and promotion cases in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. Almost every weekend, I have the pleasure of reading a book by a current colleague who is moving to a more advanced position or by a future colleague whom we hope to hire.
My second work genre is related to intellectual assignments I have on behalf of the university. Right now, for example, I’m overseeing an initiative on ethics and artificial intelligence, so I have a stack of books on my bedtable to help me get oriented in the field. As far as reading for pleasure, I have trusted recommenders and I read basically anything they send my way. My husband is an extraordinarily sensitive reader of fiction so whatever he puts on my desk, whether it’s Marilyn Robinson or some early 20th century Russian writer who’s just been translated, I read it. I also take books that my colleague Katie Lofton shares. She gave me one of Alison Bechdel graphic novels, which was spectacular. So books recommended by venturesome friends is the third genre. The fourth genre reflects my interest in intellectual communities. What does it take to create an environment where ideas flourish? This I ask myself since I view myself as having a pastoral role at Yale. The Ramsey biography is an example of my learning about communities where ideas prosper and trying to find a way to reproduce aspects of them here.
What is the best advice you’ve received as a leader?
Former dean of Yale College, Mary Miller, gave me great advice from Hamilton, the musical: talk less, smile more. And listen, listen, listen. It’s not a skill that comes naturally to people who were raised in an academic environment, particularly in a field like philosophy, which was my home discipline. It’s a field that is very argumentative and permits interrupting because its success comes from a willingness just to speak without edit. And when you’re in a conversation with somebody else who has that model in mind, speaking without edit, you can make amazing progress. It’s like an unbelievably quick game of sport, where you’re just hitting back, getting back, hitting back, getting back, and everybody knows what the project is. This is not the best genre of listening in a leadership environment. The same holds for teaching. When we start out teaching, we think that it’s all about talking and then learn quickly that teaching is all about listening. So, I would say that’s my most important leadership lesson: learning to listen.
What musical artists are you listening to now or have always loved?
I have an old-fashioned strand where I like Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and Tom Waits. We once went to see Leonard Cohen at a concert in Wallingford. My husband and I were in our late 40s at the time and we were the youngest people in the audience. Leonard Cohen went down on his knee on stage while singing and then couldn’t get back up until one of his band members helped him stand—but he went right back to singing and he was great. By contrast, I saw Bob Dylan at Toads when I was an undergraduate and he was totally smashed when he got up on stage. During the pandemic, my family and I watched all the seasons of Twin Peaks, including the endless terrible second season, but it was worth it because it introduced me to the singer Julee Cruise, which became our pandemic soundtrack. Finally, my husband, who is Hungarian, has introduced me to the extraordinary Roma music culture. And his father is a musician, so he has a nuanced ability to help us find particularly interesting Roma music.
What human problems would you solve if you could?
There are three issues that come to mind. The first is the question of global climate change, which I think is existential. The second question is how can we make compassion instinctive? I think there is a way of cultivating habits of sympathy, that when done properly, would solve a huge number of problems. And my third concern, because I’m involved in this ethics and AI project, is about the way in which the pace of change, of technological innovation, is coming faster than our ability to recognize its social implications—how do we relate appropriately to technological change?
What five people living or dead would you invite to a dinner party?
Over the past year, my father – who is 93 – has faced a range of medical challenges, from heart failure to a broken hip to pneumonia. But through each of the ordeals, he has remained completely mentally acute. He has read and watched and listened and conversed. There are four particular people who have sustained him through this period through their artistry and gifts, and I would love to have a dinner party with my father, Everett Gendler, and that quartet. They are Fareed Zakaria, whose television program my father watches religiously every week; Angela Buchdahl, the rabbi at Central Square Synagogue, whose Shabbat evening services he attends – also religiously – by zoom each week; the novelist Amor Towles, whose Lincoln Highway my father read on his Kindle (in 48-point type) during the month of December; and the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, whose music has uplifted him at the darkest moments.
On your leadership journey, what has helped you develop the most—relationships, courses, making mistakes, hard work, or all of the above?
I’ve made so many mistakes. I am extremely energetic, and I completely misunderstood what it meant to be in a leadership role. What I have learned partly and still have to focus on is to be truly aware of the effects of my actions on those around me. I’ve done a lot of work on this. I went to a summer program at the Center for Creative Leadership in Colorado; I’ve had coaches at various times; and I have several trusted colleagues in my office who are very honest with me and unafraid to let me know when I trip up. I am somebody who gains energy from interacting, so I do a lot of my leading by just walking around and listening. I have a place that I call my “corner office”, which is the corner of Grove Street and Hillhouse Avenue, and I often just stand there and see who walks by. It’s a very nice way to get casual information from campus. Yes, I’ve learned from leadership courses and very, very wise colleagues, but mostly I’ve learned from doing it wrong, then reflecting, and trying to figure out how to do it right.
What are some of your favorite memories from childhood?
I have an unbelievably awesome family. My childhood was filled with things that were eccentric then and are ordinary now. My synagogue put solar panels on its roof in 1978. My father, who was a rabbi, became vegetarian in 1948. His involvement with the civil rights movement began in 1955 when he went to the Highlander Folk School in Monteagle, Tennessee with Rosa Parks. My mother did Jewish feminist menstrual commemorative activities in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. I brought my lunch to school in wax paper bags. We had a Volkswagen bus, and my dad wore this orange and grey Lopi-wool crocheted poncho. We had an organic garden and a compost heap. We planted buckwheat in the front yard as a cover crop – in suburban Massachusetts in 1975! We also at one point lived on an ecumenical commune run by a rabbi, a priest and a minister (I know, it sounds like the opening to a joke). But only the rabbi was there because the priest and the minister were in jail for burning draft cards. The minister’s wife was part of our extended family along with a group of children she adopted from a wide range of racial backgrounds. This was a very, very quirky period in my childhood that I remember fondly.
Then, astoundingly, after living this lovely, wonderful bohemian life, my father took a job as the Jewish chaplain at Phillips Academy, the prep school in Andover, Massachusetts. What an amazing introduction to code switching, to trying to figure out how to navigate this very particular, very intellectual, very interesting place. I stepped out of a hippy community into one where my classmates’ parents were on the cover of Town and Country (or Forbes.). It was also the time of The Preppy Handbook. But there were enormously interesting academic things going on— there was computer science, incredible history courses, and my freshman English teacher was novelist Julia Alvarez. So, I had this very wonderful childhood, which had these absurd introductions to what I think of as the purest forms of experience— early 1970s Jewish counterculture in the Boston area, and then life at the most elite prep school.
When was the first time you made a mistake on the job or reached an important goal or realized what you wanted to be when you grew up, or anything else you can think of?
The first time I made a mistake on the job was the day that I walked in. As I said, I mistakenly thought my job was to boss people around because I had a child’s conception of what you do when you are a dean—you shape the world in an image that you have of it; but, of course, that’s exactly what not you do.
Then there was the first time I realized what I wanted to do with my life. I always assumed as a child that I would become a congregational rabbi because my father was one and it seemed to me like the perfect job—it was intellectual because you got to read books; there was a public performance aspect and I loved public speaking: once a week you took a text that mattered and shared it with the community. It was a pastoral profession in the sense that you listened to people, helped solve their problems, created community. But I was agnostic, and I thought it would be hard to be a rabbi as an agnostic. So, I spent the summer in Jerusalem at a conservative women’s Yeshiva where I was studying texts, living in this beautiful area in Jerusalem called the German quarter, and walking around the quiet city on the Sabbath. The ironic thing was that at the end of the summer, I was an atheist. So I was obviously not going to be a rabbi, but I knew I could capture a lot of what I was interested in with my conception of an academic. And as I have grown and matured, my educational role has grown more and more pastoral. My big insight is realizing that the best way for me to be a dean is, in a loose sense, to be a rabbi.
What would you say to your 12-year-old self if you could talk with her today?
Oh, I would say, ‘Don’t be afraid of people.’ I was so scared of people when I was 12. Oh my God, I was worried. Did I have my shirt buttoned the right way? Did I have on the right socks? Had I tweezed my eyebrows properly? I’ve told you a little about my childhood so it probably wouldn’t surprise you that we didn’t have a television, so I wasn’t up on any TV shows. I was a very socially isolated person. When I got older, I thought, ‘Wow, there is this amazing thing; you can interact with people, and they’ll talk to you.’ I would definitely tell my 12-year-old self, ‘Don’t be afraid of people; don’t shape your life around your imagined sense of their judgments of you. Connect with them, grow in relationship to them, learn from them, but don’t fear their evaluation.”