Getting to know Yale leaders—Kerwin K. Charles

Kerwin joined Yale in 2019 as the Indra K. Nooyi Dean and Frederic D. Wolfe Professor of Economics, Policy, and Management at the Yale School of Management (SOM). Previously, he was the Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergmann Distinguished Service professor at the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy. He has studied and published on a range of topics including earnings and wealth inequality, conspicuous consumption, race and gender labor market discrimination, the effects and health shocks, and housing bubbles and sectoral change in the economy. Among other professional duties, he is the vice president of the American Economics Association, the vice chair of NORC at the University of Chicago, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research, and an elected fellow of the Society of Labor Economics.

Kerwin grew up in Guyana, South America, and came to the U.S. at 18. Today, he lives in New Haven with his wife, Annette, and sons Lucas and Cyrus.

What have been the challenges of your experience with COVID-19?
I am leading a school (SOM) that is used to in-person engagement and interaction—in our instruction, faculty meetings, staff engagement, and the like. Then, having to pivot to a context that was, for a semester, entirely remote and then, for a year, hybrid meant that there had to be large and small adjustments in the way that I and others did their work. For example, one gets used to conducting meetings in a certain way. I am an active, energy-first kind of person and I move around when I talk, and so forth. Suddenly not being able to engage that way was a major adjustment. So, the challenge has been figuring out new ways to lead, to supervise, to inspire using a mode of interaction that was not what I was used to. Right now, in this Zoom interview, we are talking and behaving as if this is a normal, natural way of behaving, but it hasn’t been for most of our lives.

Opportunities?
I will say I am a silver-linings kind of person. COVID and its adjustments actually enabled me to meet more of my staff. Before the pandemic, we would have a general staff meeting with hundreds of people. But over the course of the year, I’ve been able to meet our staff in smaller groups. We have breakfast together—me in my home office and they in theirs. I meet the business operations team, or I meet the registrar and her team, or I meet my facilities staff members. I became more familiar with what’s happening in our groups at SOM. It has fostered and enabled a kind of interaction that would not have otherwise been possible. And I have really relished that. I’ve gotten to know people in a way that was different, in a way that has humanized people. And I believe, oddly enough, that it has brought me and my staff closer together. I know people’s hobbies; I didn’t realize how many of my staff took two buses to get to work; and more. We want to be careful not to lose this silver lining as we go forward.

What do you think is the best advice a leader can receive?
Lead with an open ear and mind to information, and be empathetic. I’m a labor economist.  And labor economists have long believed that one of the benefits of unions is to provide leaders of organizations with “voice.” What’s meant by voice is not only the call for better wages or better work, but also the perspective that allows you to lead as an engaged member of a joint enterprise. As a leader, one is necessarily distant from the actual doing of the thing, right? You’re running a plant down in Detroit and you’re leading a team that’s putting on the carburetor; you’re not installing the carburetor, but your people who are know it’s got a weird dent in it and that dent is slowing everybody down. You, the leader, bought the carburetor from a great manufacturer, but you would only know about the dent if you are open to information, and empathetic. I don’t know what it’s like to register students’ grades, but I want to be empathetic and understand the particular challenges that might make the registrar’s Thursday more difficult than her Monday. I want to be open to perspectives, insights, and information that only my staff can provide. If I’m leading empathetically and listening, mutual respect is communicated and in the end is helping all of us to do our jobs better.

What books are you reading now?.
All my life, since I was 10, I’ve been reading at least two books at a time. I just finished rereading “All Quiet on the Western Front,” a masterpiece in prose form. I can think of no better treatment of the horrors of war, and the challenges and the pain that it imposes on people. I’m currently reading a biography about Frank Ramsey called “An Excess of Power,” which is what one person said when he met Ramsey as a young man. Ramsey was a great economist, philosopher, mathematician, and social thinker who died before he was 30. He was a remarkable person who accomplished so much in so short a lifetime. I’m also reading “Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life,” which was written by two sisters, and expresses their thinking about the practice of racism in America. This book I read a chapter at a time and then reflect. Reading is a great source of happiness and educational inspiration for me.

What music do you listen to or have listened to growing up?
I love all kinds of music. My father and mother love R&B music. My granny, with whom I was extraordinarily close, loved music from a slightly earlier period. She  loved the song, “Under the Boardwalk,” which my wife and I played at our wedding. My dad loved and always played people like Bobby Womack, Al Green, Gladys Knight when I was growing up. I play these records all the time now. I also enjoy Mendelssohn and Schubert and lots of reggae. I listen to a fair amont of hip hop. J. Cole has been my favorite rapper of the last 15 years. I absolutely love his stuff. My nephew is always trying to introduce me to new rappers, but he knows my fondness for J. Cole, who I’ve heard Obama also likes.

What are you most grateful for?
I want to say my family, of course, my wife and two sons, but also my family writ large. I have a brother and a sister. My brother is two years younger than I am, and throughout my life, he’s been my best friend—when I was 11 and 16 and 21, and yesterday. My brother and I talk all the time. I seek his counsel; we disagree; we run ideas by each other. I’m also very close to my sister, but it’s a different kind of relationship as she’s my baby sister, eight years younger than I am. And there are my parents. We’ve always had this extraordinarily close familial bond, the five of us. And now I have my own family, my wife and sons, and I’m so grateful for them.  They make the whole thing worth living. They make everything.

What would be your number one travel destination?
I’ll give you two places. Rome is number one. I’ve never been there and hope to see it one day. I’ve also never been to China, and I’m very much looking forward to that at some point

If you could solve one human problem, what would it be?
The frustration I’ve faced as I consume history and reflect on what it teaches us, or as I observe life lived day to day and its politics, or talk to friends and family, or even overhear conversations, is the unbelievably foolish weight that people attach to irrelevant scripted traits—he is of a different “fill in the blank” than me, or she is a girl person, or he is a black person, or his notion of God differs from my notion of God so I can’t engage. If human transactions could be shorn of the shackles and blinders that come from this kind of thinking, it would dramatically help our species, I believe.

What people would you invite living or dead to a dinner party?
Perhaps my favorite writer of all time is H.L. Mencken. He would be at my dinner party. Abraham Lincoln would be there. Besides having lived one of the most extraordinary and consequential lives, he was by all accounts a very funny and a terrific story teller. Next, for sure, would be W.E.B. Dubois. I have a painting of him in my home office. He’s my intellectual hero and a constant inspiration to me as a scholar. Next, Churchill. I would just love to hear his take on politics and life. And to round it out, St. Paul, the Jewish man who converted to a fledging religion, that was not even a religion yet, and shaped it through his letters and writings into the religion Christianity has become. I’m fascinated by St. Paul.

What has helped you develop as a leader over the course of your career?
For me, it has been observation. Experience and observation. No matter what job I take, I still conceive of myself as a scholar and teacher. Over the course of my career, I have been fortunate to be in the company of extraordinary leaders who, in the discharging of their duties, have made me think, ‘Wow it’s amazing how she or he did that.’ One person that comes to mind is Rebecca Blank, who was the dean of the public policy school at the University of Michigan when I was a young faculty member. I remember her as a great leader who was no nonsense, but also caring and hugely energetic. At the University of Chicago, I got to know President Robert Zimmer while working on different projects. I saw how he led; how guided he was by certain core values, the thickness of his skin, his forceful articulation and defense of fundamental values, his excellent delegation. And there are others, including leaders here at Yale. While drawing from the example of these people, observing them, I’ve asked myself throughout my career, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to aspire to this?’

Tell me about your name?
My name is Kerwin Kofi. I love my name and I tell my parents all the time. My mom said she originally wanted to name me Andrew. Then one of my parents’ friends, from Ghana I think, told them about African boys’ names—Kwame means a boy born on Saturday and Kofi means a boy born on Friday. After that, my name was going to be either Andrew or the African name of whatever day I was to be born on. But one day, my father went to the cinema with a friend, and in the movie there was a character named Kerwin. My dad loved the name and went home to convince my eight-and-a-half-month pregnant mom to abandon her choice. I guess my mom finally caved, and I’m happy she did. I was born on a Friday so that is how Kerwin Kofi came to be. I’ve asked my dad many times if he remembers anything about the movie he saw that day, and he does not.  

Do you remember the first time…you made a mistake on the job, decided what you wanted to be when you grew up, etc.?
All my life I have been a big fan of two things, the natural sciences—physics, chemistry biology—and history. Economics I didn’t know much about. I was a math major as an undergraduate at the University of Miami and my friend Jason said he was taking this economics class about labor markets as part of his core requirements. So I do the same and go to the class, and I love it. The professor was Phil Robbins and I remember thinking, ‘I want to do this.” Now, of course, my parents expected me to be an engineer or a medical doctor, and I still tease my mother that I’m kind of a doctor. The class changed my life and I became a professor and teacher, which I’ve always loved.

What would you say to your 12-year-old self if you could talk with him right now?
When you are 12, the big focus is learning things, right? You’re learning the binary system or how to compute surface area or how to conjugate a verb. The reflective 12-year-old that I was then, who did well in school, was doing that. So what I would say to myself, or maybe to my own two sons, is that learning is a lifelong journey. That at 12 or 13, it is important to create certain habits of mind. If you don’t know something, you listen to people, you do your homework on it, you ask somebody. Over time you learn things better; how to speak with your wife about disagreements, how to write papers, how to study. Learning is something you are always going to do, so develop habits of learning while you’re young.