In two months of interviews with more than a dozen alumni and around 25 faculty members and administrators, supporters of Salovey praised his attentive listening and adaptive leadership. But as Yale moves on from the renaming debate, his critics — from faculty members to student activists to alumni donors — argued that he was slow and indecisive during the controversy over Calhoun, delaying the announcement of his academic priorities and raising broader concerns about his administration. As has been customary since the 1990s, the Yale Corporation is also scheduled to begin an institutional review of the University, coinciding with the fifth year of Salovey’s presidency.

“Many people around the University have recognized that Yale’s a strong institution, but that President Salovey’s leadership has not been up to the task,” said one senior faculty member with administrative experience at the University, who requested anonymity to speak candidly.

But Salovey is focused on moving forward. Yale is about halfway through a two-year planning phase leading up to its next capital campaign, the first major fundraising push of Salovey’s tenure. His administration is also working on an academic investment plan for the University — a set of targets to guide fundraising and advance Yale’s educational mission. The objectives include greater investment in the sciences and the humanities, better integration of the arts across different professional schools, continued faculty excellence and improvements to Yale’s social science offerings.

“The vision that I’ve been spending this year articulating all over campus is a long-term one,” Salovey said in an interview earlier this month. “We’re talking a vision for the next five to 10 years. I’m totally committed to achieving that vision. And I have been anxious to get it started.”

A DISTRACTING 18 MONTHS

In his Freshman Address in August 2015, Salovey opened the latest round of the Calhoun debate, challenging the new batch of undergraduates to wrestle with Yale’s history. But the academic discussion he envisioned on that summer day was soon overtaken by the racially charged protests that swept Yale in the fall. Last April, following months of deliberation, Salovey announced that Calhoun would keep its name, citing concerns about “historical erasure.”

After the decision set off campus protests from Battell Chapel to Davies Auditorium, Salovey’s 25-person cabinet — an advisory body that includes the provost, academic deans and vice presidents — discussed the possibility of immediately reversing the decision. Although Salovey remained composed in public, the student and faculty backlash took a personal toll, said Gregory Sterling, the dean of the Divinity School, who participated in cabinet discussions last spring.

Salovey’s management of the Calhoun debate offered an illustration of his collaborative leadership style, which contrasts starkly with his predecessor’s more assertive approach. In interviews over the past month, Alpern and another high-ranking administrator described Salovey as less decisive than Levin, who dominated meetings with a commanding presence and immersed himself in the details of strategic planning.

“Rick was incredibly effective, and he also served for 20 years, said Sterling, the dean of the Divinity School. “Anybody that follows an iconic figure like Rick will have some challenges just in meeting people’s expectations.”

Salovey declined to comment on the comparisons between him and Levin. But he acknowledged that the length and intensity of the racially charged debates last year precluded the public rollout of his strategic priorities.

“When to announce plans, goals, when to get a planning process underway, even when to commit to a building project, is both a matter of the president articulating those goals, but also the campus community being ready to engage in a conversation about them,” Salovey said. “And I think for a while we had other issues that were commanding many people’s attention.”

THE OUTLINES OF A VISION

To inquire into Yale’s planning for the next 10 years is to encounter a whirl of academic jargon. In administrative circles, the big-picture ambitions Salovey outlined in November are known as “institutional priorities”: promises, as vague as they are expansive, to invest more in the sciences or to cultivate faculty excellence. Specific subtargets within those areas, such as building lab space or funding new programs, are known as “academic investments.” Connecting the two — the process of turning broad institutional priorities into specific academic investments — is “strategic planning.”

In his 2013 inaugural address, Salovey planted the seeds for the institutional priorities he outlined last fall, emphasizing the importance of a unified and accessible Yale. But four years later, the University must move from ambitious mission statements to a concrete and actionable vision for the future.

“The institutional priorities are broadly articulated versions of what the University has been committed to for two centuries,” Gendler said. “The way in which we operationalize those commitments is what the current conversation is addressing.”

In recent months, Salovey has dedicated much of his time to the development of the academic plan. He and Provost Benjamin Polak gave one of their first major presentations on new academic priorities at a cabinet retreat in August, according to high-level officials who attended. Last November, in an email to faculty and staff members, Salovey released an initial outline of his plans for the sciences, social sciences, arts and humanities. Since the summer, Salovey has sat down with faculty members to discuss those priorities on more than a dozen occasions, including at a meeting of the FAS Senate.

“There’s been a fairly quick pivot to those issues during the academic year, and I don’t think that’s a surprise,” said Snyder, the SOM dean. “There’s been a pent-up interest in those issues that’s been deferred. We have a lot of new deans on campus. People wanted to get at those questions about academic priorities and related issues.”

Aleh Tsyvinski, an economics professor, praised Salovey for his outreach, saying he has shown a clear interest in hearing faculty perspectives on the strategic planning process.

“He mainly listens, because the faculty knows the broad direction that the academic strategy is taking,” Tsyvinski said. “The president, no matter how much he knows, no matter how prescient of a scientist he is, feels he does not have the knowledge of the departments, the academic language. So that’s why it’s so important to ask a very broad spectrum of people for their input.”

So far, Yale’s strategic planning in the sciences has more structure than the University’s work in the humanities and social sciences, Gendler said. In a Jan. 25 email to faculty and staff, Salovey announced the creation of a committee led by Scott Strobel, the vice president who oversees planning on West Campus, to recommend specific investments in the sciences. Anna Pyle, who serves on the committee, said she appreciates Salovey’s enthusiasm for the sciences, and that the committee is working to “put a face on it rather than have it be a completely abstract concept.”

Polak said Salovey’s commitment to advancing the sciences dates back to the first few days of his presidency, when he called for the administration to accelerate work on the seven-story Yale Science Building currently under construction on Science Hill.

“He said to me, ‘Go fix that. Make sure that gets done first,’ and that was done first,” Polak said. “The demolition of Gibbs [Laboratories] that you can see from Science Hill or Whitney Avenue is the upshot of something that Peter laid out essentially his first week as president. Right from the start, he sets the direction, and then we work on getting it done.”

But other areas of the academic plan are significantly less developed, said Daniel Harrison MUS ’86, a music professor who participated in Salovey’s outreach to the faculty and has worked on the arts initiatives. According to Harrison, one of the president’s recent presentations was greeted with skepticism from faculty members in the social sciences, where Yale’s investment targets are less specific.

“The approach he’s taken is riskier, because it means trialing things that aren’t completely thought through, and that is risky because as academics we like to think things through,” Harrison said. “He’s getting feedback. What remains to be seen is how that feedback is taken on board.”

And, despite Salovey’s outreach to the faculty and his collaboration with Polak, some argue that his presidency still has yet to coalesce around a coherent vision for the future of the University.

“There’s a feeling he doesn’t have a plan. He doesn’t have a vision,” said the senior faculty member with an administrative background at Yale. “Maybe this will become it, but I don’t think people feel like in the last few years he’s demonstrated that he has that.”

The source described the November rollout of Yale’s institutional priorities as a “top-down” process conducted at high speed without much faculty input — a view echoed by the faculty senator who criticized the administration’s handling of the renaming process.

“Sometimes it feels like initiatives drop from the sky,” the faculty senator said. “Even in the message about ‘We’re going to promote the sciences,’ it just seems like people decided something, and everyone just goes along.”

 In the next month, Salovey is scheduled to meet with four different groups of faculty to discuss academic investments.

“My style is to be as consultative as possible. My style is to align my leadership team around a vision and get everyone working together. My style is to look to expertise,” he said.

But the development of academic investments is just one step in a longer process. Once the investment plan is clearly articulated, Yale will have to pitch its targets to potential donors. And that process, which has just entered the planning phase, seems likely to produce its own set of challenges.

 PREPARING FOR THE CAMPAIGN

 In a recent News survey of nearly 2,000 alumni from across the generations, 61 percent of respondents said they supported the renaming decision. But of the 150 alumni who said they had given $50,000 or more to Yale in the past, 52 percent of respondents said the renaming decision would affect their donations either “negatively” or “very negatively.” That group included six alumni who said they had donated more than $1 million to the University.

Richard Glowacki ’54, a former real-estate mogul from Toledo, Ohio, began giving to Yale in the 1970s, around the time of his 20th reunion. In 2014, he endowed an entrepreneurship initiative in SOM. By the beginning of this year, Glowacki had donated just short of $1 million in total to Yale, with several million more earmarked in his will for the SOM and the School of Architecture.

But earlier this semester, dismayed by the racially charged protests that swept campus in 2015 as well as the debate over Calhoun, Glowacki instructed his lawyers to remove Yale from his estate plan. “Yale’s leadership has become so politically correct that it has lost sight of lux et veritas,” he told the News. When he was asked to meet with Salovey to discuss his decision, Glowacki refused.

“I didn’t want to meet with him. He wanted me to reconsider the withdrawal of my gift,” Glowacki said. “I knew what the meeting was for, and I wasn’t gonna take it.”

Glowacki’s discontent with the current administration offers a snapshot of the sort of resistance Salovey may face as he presents his academic plan to donors following the Calhoun decision. While many campus critics have focused on Salovey’s decision-making process, outside the University’s walls, a subset of alumni dislike the substance of the decision as well.

“There will be people who will decide [the renaming decision] is the reason they wouldn’t want to give — there’s no question,” O’Neill said in March.

Salovey declined to comment on Glowacki or any other individual donor. But he expressed hope that critics of his leadership and decision-making would stay open-minded.

“I very much hope that any donor who is questioning their commitment to Yale, that they give me a chance to sit with them,” he said. “I’d like the opportunity to earn their support.”

Still, many alumni do not share Glowacki’s disappointment. Antonio Magliocco ’74 — whose contribution to Yale’s Science Teaching Fund was featured prominently on the website of the Development Office in 2014 — said the renaming decision made him more likely to donate in the future. And 22 percent of alumni surveyed said the name change has encouraged them to give to Yale.

The backlash against the decision comes at a time when the University already trails its peer institutions by certain fundraising metrics. In 2016, Yale’s fundraising total of $519 million ranked it 10th among American universities, according to the Council for Aid to Education. Columbia, Harvard and Stanford were among the schools outperforming Yale, the council found, although some of the higher-ranking schools are currently involved in capital campaigns, making the comparison inexact.

Glenn Murphy ’71, who served as president of the Yale Club of Boston in 2009–10 and was on the governing board of the Association of Yale Alumni in the mid-2000s, said the renaming decision and the administration’s handling of the campus protests “will definitely have a damaging effect on the capital campaign.”

“The inmates were running the asylum,” Murphy said. “The leadership failed to lead.”