Most of us have known only Gregory Geoffroy as ISU president. In May, Geoffroy’s first “class” will graduate from Iowa State.

After all this time together, it seems reasonable that the captain of this ship and its crew and passengers would think similarly about university issues.

That isn’t the case, as Geoffroy made clear Friday throughout an interview in Beardshear Hall with Iowa State Daily reporters, editors and editorial writers.

Students, as a rule, are prone to gallows humor about things like tuition, classes taught by tenured faculty and City Council ordinances.

Geoffroy, as a rule, is prone to taking any issue on which there’s divergence of thought and explaining why there is reason to think the result will benefit all sides.

He’s an optimist about Iowa State — and he’s also good at it. Take a look:

On low-priced commercial housing competing close to campus with the Department of Residence: “Our interest, quite frankly, in Campustown, is seeing Campustown be an attractive part of the Ames community.”

On the need for a succinctness-starved group like the Commission on Improving Relations Among ISU Students, the University, the City of Ames and the Ames Community: “You have a lot of different kinds of inter-relations, and they’re all different. Overall, I’d say that this environment is much more of a ‘one community’ than other university communities.”

Similarly, Geoffroy doesn’t betray much when admitting problems:

On solving conflicts related to diversity: “That’s at the root of a lot of things, people not understanding differences.”

On the upcoming release of a survey assessing the ISU “campus climate”: “It’s clear that there’s work to do.”

Three-plus years — and it’s hard to imagine a start with more external challenges — haven’t soured Geoffroy in the least. He’s an optimist, but he’s a credible optimist — he believes what he says.

And part of his problem-solving philosophy, though it might seem pithy, is true enough: “I don’t believe that there is any situation that cannot be resolved if people want to work together to solve it.”

The exact steps of his plans weren’t obvious to us Friday, but we think Geoffroy retains that intangible quality of believability.