The Humanist

"Smart move," said a faculty member. "Instead of importing some managerial type, they got a humanist to soften the blow." The humanist in question is A. (for Angelo) Bartlett Giamatti, 39, a Yale professor of Renaissance literature, who last week was named 19th president of the university after a nine-month search almost as much talked about as David O. Selznick's pursuit of the perfect Scarlett O'Hara. The blow that he will have to soften is a painful but inevitable cutback on spending.

Saddled with a cumulative $16 million deficit, Giamatti will have to find ways to preserve Yale's excellence with a smaller exchequer. The new president's mandate, described somewhat bizarrely by William Bundy, presidential search committee head, is to redesign Yale into "the Cadillac Seville of education"--still a luxury model, but smaller and presumably somewhat less costly to keep up. He must also restore harmony between faculty and administration, now deep in what Yale Historian Peter Gay claims is a "we and they" cold war, and calm town-gown tensions exacerbated by a blue-collar strike. He must also placate Old Blues disaffected partly by years of unvarnished rejection letters to their children.

Several celebrated administrators from other colleges were therefore leery of the job. Harvard Dean Henry Rosovsky actually refused it. Even Giamatti needed convincing, though he is a Yaleman (Class of '60), son of a Yaleman (Class of '32) and a devoted alumnus. Says he: "I'm going to hate some of the things I'll have to do, and people are going to hate me."

"One of the advantages of having a young president," he has said, "is that he can remember a time when he was a non-tenured faculty member." He enjoys teaching so much that he resigned as master of Yale's Ezra Stiles College because it was cutting into his classroom time. Despite his reputation as a tough grader, his courses in epic poetry and Renaissance literature are favorites among students.

Giamatti questions experiments in unmarked or pass-fail courses that leave the best students unsure of where they stand. "Students are owed a sense that the faculty knows what is important," he says, which means "setting reasonable demands and holding to them." He wants a more structured curriculum, with more required and fewer optional courses. Long before he gave any thought to being Yale's president, he was in favor of curtailing many of the new seminars taught by outside "experts," including one on the role of sports in contemporary American society given by Howard Cosell.

In marked physical contrast to Kingman Brewster, his elegant and patrician predecessor, Giamatti is a chubby, shortish man, much given to wearing rumpled slacks and sports jackets topped on occasion by a Boston Red Sox cap. He is a baseball nut who recently explained that he never wanted to be president of anything except the American League.

Though his name will do him no harm in ethnic New Haven, the new president's background is not exactly working-class immigrant. He grew up in South Hadley, Mass., discussing Dante at the dinner table with his father, a professor of Italian at Mount Holyoke, and reached Yale via Phillips Academy in Andover. He also accepted a tap from Scroll and Key, one of Yale's secret societies. Kingman Brewster turned down Skull and Bones a generation earlier on grounds that it would be elitist to accept.

Giamatti will have some time before his formal installation to work alongside Acting President Hanna Gray, who does not leave for her new job as the University of Chicago's president until next June. "I really love this place, even if it's gushy to say that these days," says Giamatti. "But I'm absolutely convinced of the difficulties that lie ahead."

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