Giamatti's Morals and the Majority

. . .I want there to be no doubt about what I believe. I think winning is important. Winning has a joy and a discrete purity to it that cannot be replaced by anything else. Winning is important to any man's or woman's sense of satisfaction and well-being. Winning is not everything but it is something powerful, indeed beautiful, in itself, something as necessary to the strong spirit as striving to the healthy character. Let all of us without bashfulness assert what the Greeks would find it absurd to suppress.

When Yale president A. Bartlett Giamatti delivered his speech on what he deemed the propert role of athletics in the Ivy League, he stirred intense feelings and sparked strong reaction. The centerpiece of his April, 1980 address called for a curtailment of emphasis on sports in the Ivies. Several indignant alumni voiced disapproval; athletes wondered why Giamatti had said that varsity sports had lost "a sense of proportion" when interest seamed to be waning.

Less often quoted was Giamatti's articulate defense of "winning." Which comes about halfway through his remarks. And the reader of his newly published collection of essays, which contains his "Yale and Athletics" speech and 12 other pieces of the last five years, is left to wonder. Is this the president of Yale pandering to the alumni, pretending that he, too, worships winning--before forwarding his somewhat radical proposals? Or does he really believe that winning has "a discrete purity"?

The answer is probably yes on both counts. Giamatti has a highly refined passion for paradox, a humanist sensibility that is both invoked and evoked repeatedly in every essay, and on nearly every page of this elegantly written book. Winning and bit-time athletics have apparently gone hand-in-hand, but Giamatti is capable of drawing a sharp distinction between the two, and pointing out a hidden incompatibility. Yet perhaps the primary weakness--as well as the primary strength--of this collection is the difficulty the reader shares with Giamatti of reconciling the conflicting notions he posits.

Give Giamatti his due credit. Here he is, out front, trying to persuade government on the one hand that private universities deserve extensive funding because they contribute to the public interest; and on the other that government has proved too excessive in its regulatory requirements. In "The Apocalyptic Style," he urges Yale freshmen to pursue a liberal education for its own sake, warning against a "retreat into self-interest"--a not-so-thinly veiled reference to growing pre-professionalism. He says in the book's first essay. "The Private University and the Public Interest," that "the purpose of education, as opposed to information, is to lead us to some sense of citizenship, to some shared assumptions about individual freedoms and institutional needs..." He then bemoans the move "away from an education concerned at heart with ethical choice and civic effort and toward a view of schooling as immediately, intensely, insistently useful."

One is hard pressed to disagree. But this trend to pre-professionalism at private universities can be described as nothing more than an attempt by students to be "winners" in Giamatti's terms, an attempt to deal with the current economic situation--as the Yale alumni who heard his speech on athletics doubtless did. In their time--and experience that intrinsic satisfaction (I imagine) that comes from being rich. The "civic effort" can come later--as it does from "winning" Yale alumni who can afford to be generous.

Perhaps the collection's best essays focus on the deterioration of language and the debilitated position of the humanities in the hierarchy of academic priorities. In "Sentimentality," he contends that the most severe and lasting consequence of the tension of the '60s was the relegation of language to "neoprimitivism":

We shape ourselves and our institutions, and we and our institutions are shaped, through those individual acts of negotiation between ourselves and our language. Without a respect for its awesome power we can never find out who we are, and thus never have to leave the child's garden of feeling and enter the city--that is, become citizens.

"On Behalf of the Humanities" serves as both a chastisement of humanities faculties for allowing standards to slip, and a series of recommendations for coping with economic pressures. He calls for organization of interdisciplinary programs which place language in a historical, philosophical or sociological context--"Let the curriculum follow the mind, not restrain it." Clearly Giamatti feels most comfortable when discussing his own field (before assuming Yale's presidency in 1978, he was Whitney professor of English and comparative literature).

Giamatti's ideas are welded together by his forceful yet delicate style. Nearly every paragraph is quotable. Though his highly-publicized condemnation of the Moral Majority does not appear in this book (it doubtless will in his next), and though he is more concerned with the civic than the social dimension of education. Giamatti does not stay mute on contemporary problems. In "Power, Politics and a Sense of History"--a remarkably presumptuous title for a 4000-word essay--he declares.

Increasingly we elect, on the basis of powerful advertising campaigns, people who do not know how to do anything for anybody, whether it is having a street light installed or protecting a citizen against loss of liberty. Increasingly we elect people who are governed by their staffs, whom no one elects.

Education's failing in this respect, says Giamatti has been to propound the notion of research "free of values...a world where ideas are...freeze-dried commodities." He continues, "Our problem as a society is that we have fostered disconnectedness: we have created a false separateness between social research and policy making, thinking and politics, ideas and power." Giamatti's sole obsession in these essays--aside from a peculiar affinity to the word "assert," which he uses about once per page--seems to be the importance of education in developing a sense of citizenship. Referring to Plato's Statesman he writes that "education furthers the weaving of the web of the state, meshing as in a tapestry the various type of citizens..."

And he sincerely believes, as he says in his preface, "that education in America is a powerful force for good and is the way to arrive at a forceful public good." But while he often notes the tension between the public and the private, between the common good and the individual good, he also seems preoccupied with finding leaders, "to blend though and action, ideas with force and forceful ethical behavior." Now, it is obvious whence Giamatti thinks these leaders should come--from among the "winners," the elite of institutions such as Yale.

(And Harvard, though Giamatti never mentions it. In fact, while the presidents of Duke and Notre Dame are quoted on the book's jacket. Derek Bok's opinion is conspicuous in its absence. Bok's recent writings will be published this spring. Although Bok--in his open letters, annual reports and Commencement addresses--does not show the same humanist facility for language as Giamatti, his legal training would help him illuminate Giamatti's many generalizations which lack supporting evidence.)

Giamatti remains one of the most eloquent, entertaining and provocative spokesmen for education in America. But we should all pause to ask whether Giamatti's moral principles do not rest on a disguised litism. Those who question "the discrete purity" to winning may be losers, but as an equally integral part of society's fabric they have an equal right to help in "the weaving of the web of state." Even if they didn't go to Yale.