When a planned career in baseball did not work out, University Professor Sol Gittleman turned to teaching. For several decades, he lived and breathed the inside of a college lecture hall and became one of the university's most recognizable faces.
So it comes to no surprise that the honor of delivering this year's commencement speech has been bestowed upon a faculty member who has achieved a legendary status among his colleagues and students at Tufts.
But Gittleman, the former provost of Tufts and the current Alice and Nathan Gantcher University Professor, comes from a far less academic-oriented background than one might think.
Gittleman grew up in the back of a candy store in Hoboken, N.J., with immigrant parents who wished for their children to receive a proper American college education.
"All they cared about was me getting an education," Gittleman said. "They didn't know anything about [college], and they didn't have a sense where or what a college was, but they knew my brother and I would get something that they didn't have." While his brother went into law, Gittleman had something else in mind: baseball.
His passion for baseball transformed into a dream of playing professional baseball as a shortstop for the New York Yankees. Before his high school graduation, Gittleman and his best friend Sydney, a basketball player, both decided to enroll mid-year into Drew University after receiving advice from his high school baseball coach, who had attended in the past.
At Drew, however, things did not go as well as Gittleman had hoped, and he did not make the team.
"I called up my coach and said, ‘What am I going to do now?'" Gittleman said.
"He said, ‘Major in German, and I'll take care of you; you can rate the infield and do just that,'" Gittleman said. From then on, Gittleman's career plan was set: He would go on to graduate school, work for a master's degree, then become a high-school teacher and coach baseball.
While working for his M.A. in comparative literature at Columbia University, Gittleman was determined to make the most out of his education. He took up summer jobs at various camps, and from then on, life, according to Gittleman, became "serendipitous." He met his future wife, Robyn, on the bus, and soon after was awarded one of his two Fulbright scholarships to study in Europe.
He married Robyn Gittleman, who is now the director of the Experimental College at Tufts. Together, they set off for Europe.
After returning to the United States, Sol Gittleman decided to continue pursuing his education.
"I thought to myself, I already have a master's degree, but maybe I can do better and get a Ph.D," he said.
The couple moved to Michigan, where he would teach at the University of Michigan. Back then, Sol Gittleman did not set out to be a college professor. "I went into my first class in 1957 — German 1 at the University of Michigan — and I was terrified," he said. "And I don't think I've ever lost the terror."
It was at that point when Sol Gittleman experienced a teaching spark, a driving motivation being his fear of failure.
But, having taught students for nearly 70 years, he said that he has yet to rid himself of this fear, noting that he only enjoys teaching when he knows that he has given a good class that engaged all of his students.
"I have been doing the same thing [all those past years]: I get a haircut every August and throw up every September," he said. "September is the start of a school year, it always scares me. When the classes start from kindergarten up it was always scary."
After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan, Sol Gittleman decided that he wanted to teach at a liberal arts college.
"I did not want to go to a research university. I said, ‘Lets go to a little liberal arts college,' so we drew a circle around New York City where our parents were and we wanted to be a minimum of a 100 miles away so they couldn't drop in on us and a maximum of 300 miles away so we could go home if we were hungry," he said. "We found 21 schools that fit our description, and Tufts was one of them."
In 1962, Mount Holyoke College was the first to hire Sol Gittleman, and he immediately jumped on the opportunity. However, he quickly grew tired of how small the school turned out to be.
"By the second cocktail party, we knew everybody in the faculty, and then I said ‘I think we need a bigger school,'" he said.
When Tufts sent a letter notifying him of an opening a year later, Sol Gittleman took the job in 1964, never thinking that he would stay for almost 50 years. He now teaches a 200-student class, Introduction to Yiddish Culture, as well as a small seminar called America and the National Pastime, which covers the history of baseball from the Civil War to the present.
Having seen the evolution of Tufts throughout his tenure, Sol Gittleman claims that the students have not changed one bit.
"I haven't changed that much. We haven't fully matured," he said. "We're hanging around with young people aged 18 to 21."
He noted, however, that the faculty has undergone a noticeable change as Tufts has become more research-oriented over the years. "Research almost didn't exist when I came here. I got a reduced teaching load because I published three articles," Sol Gittleman said. He was unable to do so in Mount Holyoke, where they forbade professors from publishing.
Since then, Sol Gittleman has written several books, including "Reynolds, Raschi and Lopat: New York's Big Three and the Great Yankee Dynasty of 1949-1953" (2007) and "An Entrepreneurial University: The Transformation of Tufts, 1976-2002" (2004).
His work has also expanded from far beyond the walls of the classroom. He is listed on the International Speakers Bureau, an association of 15,000 speakers worldwide, and has travelled across the globe to places including the United Arab Emirates, Hong Kong and South Africa, among others, to give speeches on topics ranging from baseball to religion to terrorism.
Sol Gittleman claims that his speeches are distinctly different from what he normally tells his students. "[My speeches] are for adults that need general education, because there are many that had huge educational gaps," he said.
Here at Tufts, he has something else for advice, especially for the seniors. "When [students] all get out of college, it's called commencement; it's the beginning," Sol Gittleman said.
"Students at Tufts don't need to hear much motivation; what characterizes them is their energy, their curiosity and their willingness to take on a lot of things they never seem to stop," he continued. "They always seem to go to the library. There's a world out there that everybody's got to understand."
