Bart Giamatti
Angelo Bartlett “Bart” Giamatti (/ˌdʒiːəˈmɑːti/ JEE-ə-MAH-tee; April 4, 1938 – September 1, 1989) was an American professor of English Renaissance literature, the president of Yale University, and the seventh Commissioner of Major League Baseball.
Bart Giamatti
Hanna Holborn Gray (Acting)
September 1, 1989 (aged 51)
Oak Bluffs, Massachusetts, U.S.
Yale University (BA, PhD)
President of Yale University (1978–1986)
National League President (1986–1989)
MLB Commissioner (April 1, 1989–September 1, 1989)
Giamatti served as Commissioner for only five months before dying suddenly of a heart attack. He is the shortest-tenured baseball commissioner in the sport's history and the only holder of the office not to preside over a full Major League Baseball season. Giamatti's most notable act as Commissioner was to negotiate the agreement resolving the Pete Rose betting scandal in which Rose was permitted to voluntarily withdraw from the sport to avoid further punishment.[1]
Personal life[edit]
Giamatti was born in Boston and grew up in South Hadley, Massachusetts, the son of Mary Claybaugh Walton (Smith College 1935) and Valentine John Giamatti.[2] His father was professor and chairman of the Department of Italian Language and Literature at Mount Holyoke College.[3] Giamatti's paternal grandparents were Italian immigrants Angelo Giammattei (Italian pronunciation: [dʒammatˈtɛi]) and Maria Lavorgna (Italian pronunciation: [laˈvɔrɲa; -orɲa]): his grandfather Angelo emigrated to the United States from Telese, near Benevento, Italy, around 1900.[4] Giamatti's maternal grandparents, from Wakefield, Massachusetts, were Helen Buffum (Davidson) and Bartlett Walton, who graduated from Phillips Academy Andover and Harvard College.[2] Giamatti attended South Hadley High School, spent his junior year at the American Overseas School of Rome, and graduated from Phillips Academy in 1956.[2] At Yale College, he was a member of Delta Kappa Epsilon (Phi chapter) and as a junior in 1960 was tapped by Scroll and Key,[5] a senior secret society. He graduated magna cum laude in 1960.[2]
In 1960, he married Toni Marilyn Smith, who taught English for more than 20 years at the Hopkins School in New Haven, Connecticut, until her death in 2004.[6] Together the couple had three children: actors Paul[7] and Marcus and jewelry designer Elena.
Yale[edit]
Giamatti stayed in New Haven to receive his doctorate in 1964, when he also published a volume of essays by Thomas G. Bergin he had co-edited with a philosophy graduate student, T. K. Seung. He became a professor of comparative literature at Yale University, an author, and master of Ezra Stiles College at Yale, a post to which he was appointed by his predecessor as Yale president, Kingman Brewster Jr.[2]
Giamatti taught briefly at Princeton but spent most of his academic life at Yale. His scholarly work focused on English Renaissance literature, particularly Edmund Spenser, and relationships between English and Italian Renaissance poets. His tenure as Stiles master ended in 1972.[2]
Giamatti served as president of Yale University from 1978 to 1986.[8] He was the youngest president of the university in its history and presided over the university during a bitter strike by its clerical and technical workers in 1984–1985. As university president, he refused student, faculty, and community demands to divest from apartheid South Africa. Giamatti prohibited students from playing Bladderball on campus after years of increasingly strange pranks and several student hospitalizations in 1982. He also served on the board of trustees of Mount Holyoke College for many years. Giamatti was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1980[9] and a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1982.[10]
Legacy[edit]
The Little League Eastern Regional Headquarters in Bristol, Connecticut is named after Giamatti.[18] One of the three awards given annually by Major League Baseball's Baseball Assistance Program is named the "Bart Giamatti Award".
Giamatti was inducted into the National Italian American Sports Hall of Fame in 1992.[19]
James Reston Jr. notes in his book Collision at Home Plate: The Lives of Pete Rose and Bart Giamatti that Giamatti suffered from Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease, an inherited neuromuscular disease affecting peripheral nerves.[20]
Neil Thomas Proto argues in his book Fearless: A. Bartlett Giamatti and the Battle for Fairness that Giamatti's early life with his parents and family in New Haven established the code of conduct about fairness that tempered his decision about Pete Rose. Proto also states that as president of Yale, Giamatti was a consequential force in changing Yale's once-harmful relationship with New Haven; in reintroducing Sterling Scholarships for New Haven high school students, which had been discontinued by his predecessors; in challenging the eugenics culture at Yale, which had spread nationally and affected Yale's view of urban renewal; and in challenging an admissions system that excluded applicants on the basis of race and religion. According to Proto, Giamatti believed the university's duty was to educate students in the civic responsibility of good citizenship, not the elitist imperative of creating "leaders."[2]