Like Mary and her little lamb from the beloved nursery rhyme, wherever Dr. Douglas Kelley goes, students are sure to follow. They swarm around him before and after classes, migrate to talk to him during office hours, play pick-up basketball games with him, volunteer with him and animatedly extol his praises to whoever will listen, urging people to take one of his classes.
“Just one class is all it takes,” says Brittney Sanford, a psychology senior and a teaching assistant in Kelley’s introductory communication class. “You’re almost guaranteed to take at least one more, if not many more. I think that if you looked at how many students have changed their major after taking his classes, you’d be surprised.”
Kelley is an associate professor at the New College’s Division of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Arizona State University’s West campus. He’s been teaching communication courses there since 1994 and is known campus-wide for his specialization in interpersonal relationships — especially those dealing with marriage and forgiveness.
In fact, Kelley and Dr. Vincent Waldron, an ASU professor and Kelley’s frequent collaborator in research and writing, have pioneered the field of forgiveness studies at ASU, as well as on an international level.
“All tenure-track professors have to have some research agenda,” Kelley says. “I was interested in forgiveness but I didn’t think that I would study it at that time. Then I did a two-hour workshop on conflict in marriage. I did about two minutes on forgiveness.
“Everybody had so many questions and was so fascinated by the idea, so that really launched my interest in studying forgiveness … It turned out to be the first study of forgiveness in the communication field.”
Kelley and Waldron received a small grant from the John Templeton Foundation and began their data collection, which they eventually used to write a book, “Communicating Forgiveness,” the first of its kind in the communication field.
“We were fortunate to interview couples who had been married 30 or more years. Most had probably been married closer to 40 to 50 years,” Kelley says. “We interviewed them in their homes and spent about an hour and a half with each couple talking about issues in their marriage and how forgiveness played into that.”
Kelley and Waldron gave the couples the space to describe their experiences with forgiveness and what it meant to them personally.
“We let people self-define forgiveness and make a distinction between forgiveness and acceptance,” Kelley says. “Forgiveness for me is critical. A philosopher in the 1950s said that we’ve been given the power to remember the past but not to change it. We have the power to imagine the future but not to ensure it.”
Kelley teaches a special topics course centered solely on forgiveness and reconciliation, but the concepts permeate his other communication classes as well.
“I feel like I know a lot about forgiveness (because of Dr. Kelley),” Sanford says. “That is his area of expertise so he sets a good part of each course to explaining it. A lot of it is clarifying what forgiveness is not.”
Kelley is emphatic about this point. He says that most people have a skewed understanding of what forgiveness means and that it’s important to understand the nuances within the concept.
“Most people’s training for forgiveness is, ‘Go tell your sister you’re sorry,’” Kelley says. “Even if you grow up in a faith background and you hear about forgiveness from God or how we should forgive each other … to a lot of people, those are just words, and nobody tells you how to do it.”
Kelley teaches students that forgiveness is a process and that it’s OK to take time with each step, or even to stop at a step. Forgiveness isn’t a one-time activity to check off of a to-do list, but rather an ongoing learning process.
“One of the things that I love about forgiveness is that it never excuses a behavior or tolerates a bad behavior,” Kelley says. “It says that something hurtful happened but somehow I want to work through that issue. I might reconcile with you or I might not. Forgiveness doesn’t demand reconciliation. It sets the stage for it, if you will, but it doesn’t require it. I can forgive but still set boundaries.”
Forgiveness is also about health, Kelley says. He encourages students to work through their issues and forgive for their emotional health.
“The danger if we don’t forgive is we hold onto anger and bitterness, resentment and injustice,” Kelley says. “The healthiest way for me to move forward is to let go of those negative emotions. Forgiveness brings so much wonderful emotional closure. We don’t just move away from negative feelings but we can also move toward a place of positive feelings and thoughts about that person.”
In person, Kelley is quietly enigmatic. He’s soft-spoken but outgoing and has an effortless charm that is punctuated with an occasional burst of goofiness. His classes are full of students who hang on his every word, chuckling at his jokes and listening intently to his personal stories about his wife, sons and friends, which he uses to illustrate the communication topics he’s teaching.
“His stories relate to us and they’re very real,” Jennifer Giralo says. Giralo is a communication studies senior and Kelley’s TA. She admires Kelley for his work with inner-city youth and families and for his dedication to teaching.
“He’s just the best professor I’ve ever had,” Giralo says. “He challenges the way we see things. The best part is that he really cares about his students. He really individualizes them and is very encouraging. I just admire him a lot.”
Sanford is involved with Young Life, a Christian service-based organization that Kelley works with. She is also close friends with Kelley’s son and, as a result, has gotten to know Kelley on a more personal level than most students.
“As incredible of a professor he is, he’s an even more wonderful person,” Sanford says. “He’s really like another father to me. I always feel so proud of him the way a daughter would feel proud of her father. And I think there are a few people who would say that about him.”
Contact the reporter at llemoine@asu.edu
