Williams colleagues,
I write with the promised commemoration of Trustee Emeritus Francis (Fay) Vincent ’60, who passed away recently at the age of 86.
As a former commissioner of Major League Baseball and head of Columbia Pictures, Fay has been widely eulogized in the national press. Obituaries and tributes in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal (to which he was a regular contributor), among others, tell the story of his life and career. I will summarize that story here, but will focus on Fay’s relationship with and contributions to Williams.
Fay attended Hotchkiss School and planned to follow in the footsteps of his father, a Yale football legend. But he was drawn to Williams after football coach Lenn Watters recruited him in 1956. He played right guard on the freshman squad under Coach Frank Navarro and, according to the Times obituary, dominated the line. Quarterback Jim Briggs ’60, reportedly said, “The first time we ran a sweep Fay was ahead of me. I said: I’m following that guy!” As captain, Fay led the team to an undefeated season, including a 30-10 victory over Amherst. But his life changed on December 10 of that first year, when a roommate and friend locked him into his bedroom on the fourth floor of Williams C as a prank. Fay tried to climb out of his window and into the room next door, but lost his footing on the icy ledge. He fell four stories onto bare ground. Surgeons replaced two inches of shattered vertebrae with the bone from his hip. By Fay’s own account, his youth, persistence and otherwise good health enabled him to gradually regain use of his legs against the odds. But he would never run or play football again.
The experience transformed him. “Before the fall I had been devoted to football,” Fay later wrote, “but afterward I turned to academics and became committed to my studies.” He overcame his medical challenges and took extra courses, graduating on time cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa. “I was in every honor society; I loved every minute of it,” he told the Times in a separate interview. “But to this day I still dream about playing football.”
As graduation approached, Fay applied to join the Jesuit order but was rejected due to his disability. He later said, “the Jesuits turned me down and I’ve teased them about it ever since because I’ve spent most of my adult life working with them on boards. And I always say to them, ‘How come I’m good enough for you now but I wasn’t good enough for you when I was a senior at Williams?’” He was not someone who would be easily put off.
With ordination out of the question, Fay instead attended Yale Law School and practiced corporate law. During the Carter Administration he was appointed associate director of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) Division of Corporate Finance. Shortly after joining the SEC, however, a chance reunion with an old Williams friend, Herb Allen, Jr. ’62, sparked his next change in direction.
Herb recalls, “We reconnected when Fay was representing someone on the opposite side of a transaction. It was a tough case, with a tough client. Fay struck me as solid, honest and deliberative.” The interaction inspired Herb, whose investment bank, Allen & Co., had purchased Columbia Pictures, to offer Fay a job as Columbia’s new president and chief executive—a huge career change for a corporate attorney and federal appointee. In an oral history for Williams, Fay described how he weighed the offer:
The best advice—and I forget who gave it to me—was, someone said, look Fay, suppose you fail, nobody’s going to expect you to succeed, so failure will be accepted. If you do fail you can go back and be a lawyer… And I thought that at age 39 or 40 I would be much happier taking a chance on this and failing than I would not knowing whether I could ever have succeeded at it. I think the lesson in life is you’re almost always able to live with the decisions you made to do something. You often regret the things you don’t do.
It turned out to be a good decision. With his commitment to integrity and character, Fay helped turn the company around significantly. When Coca-Cola purchased Columbia four years later, Fay became chairman and CEO of their entertainment business sector and then executive vice president of the organization’s entertainment ventures.
But another major change lay ahead. In 1988, Fay accepted an invitation from his good friend Bart Giamatti to help run Major League Baseball (MLB). Giamatti’s resume was as unusual as Fay’s, having been a professor of English Renaissance literature and president of Yale before joining the MLB as president and then commissioner. Fay partnered with Giamatti as his deputy commissioner, then assumed the commissioner’s role after his friend suffered a fatal heart attack a few months later.
If Fay were still with us, I would love for students to hear him talk about this remarkable career path, and how his academic and intellectual discipline, creative thinking and openness to possibility made it all possible. As he told seniors in his 1990 Baccalaureate address, “for most of you, what lies ahead is a series of decisions each of which will appear more permanent than it is. Be careful to preserve a flexible set of alternatives. I always urge that one not enter a vocational room unless there are several doors out of it.”
“He had a sense of the fun in life,” notes Trustee Emeritus Rick Smith ’55, who served alongside him on the Board. “Lots of people want to make their mark. But Fay had a sense of adventure, too. ‘Sure, running Major League Baseball sounds fun—why not do that?’”
Success in these diverse ventures (and adventures) led President Jack Sawyer to recruit Fay to the Williams Board of Trustees in 1970, when he was just 32 years old. He served until 1988, bridging the tenures of Presidents Sawyer, Chandler and Oakley. This was the era of implementing co-education; solidifying Williams’ finances and growing the endowment; investing in affordability and welcoming a more diverse student body; and continuing to strengthen our academic excellence. Fay earned a reputation as a thoughtful, strategic advisor and leader. As Trustee Emeritus Allan Fulkerson ’54 says, “when Fay spoke, you could tell he had something meaningful to say.” During this time he strongly supported the candidacies of Williams’ first two women trustees, biochemist Gail Walker Haslett and future U.S. Secretary of State Madeline Albright.
As chair of the Board’s Instruction Committee, Fay was meanwhile a key point of contact between the Board and college faculty. In addition to guiding the Committee’s formal attention to the Williams curriculum, he carried on Jack Sawyer’s practice of hosting small dinners for groups of faculty and Board members, a tradition that continues to this day. Fay said,
I made sure that I met with faculty; I made it a practice to read their books, to talk to them about what they were writing and I had an intellectual relationship with them so they didn’t think all trustees were just cigar-smoking capitalists who had no interest in ideas.
Trustee Emeritus Matt Nimetz ’60 was impressed by Fay’s commitment to faculty. “I had worked with Fay at the MLB, when he was commissioner and I was the league’s outside attorney,” Matt recalls. “He cared a lot about the players. And I saw some similarities in the way he cared about Williams faculty. He would arrive a day early for Board meetings just to have lunch with the deans or department chairs. He was a guiding force behind the faculty-Trustee dinners. And he took a personal interest in supporting more faculty housing. Fay saw Williams as essentially a teaching institution, with faculty playing a major role in governance. This made us different from other institutions, and he was devoted to respecting and nurturing that distinction.”
Williams recognized Fay with an honorary Doctor of Laws degree in 1990. In the early 2000s he funded the Fay Vincent, Jr. ’60 Catholic Faith and Culture lecture, which attracted a host of prominent guest speakers. He supported the Gaudino Fund and gave his own well-received Gaudino Lecture, “Failing to Succeed.” And he brought major league baseball players and national sportscasters to campus to meet with students, among many other contributions to the life of his alma mater.
Such philanthropy was deeply ingrained in Fay’s character. His close friend David Paresky ’60 recalls, “Fay and I had a lot in common: We were both on the freshman football team. We were both on full financial aid. We also agreed that, as the beneficiaries of somebody else’s generosity, we had an obligation to give back if we could. Fay did a great deal for Williams, some of it in ways of which most people aren’t even aware.”
Another friend, Steve Lewis ’60—former Williams provost and president emeritus of Carleton College—offered a vivid example of Fay’s generosity, “Some years ago one of our classmates died suddenly, leaving a teenage daughter,” Steve says. “At the memorial service, Fay asked the deceased’s brother about her circumstances and found out that there were very few resources set aside for her. Fay convinced our friends at the gathering to pull together the funds to take care of her education.” Similarly, when Fay learned that the son of a phlebotomist involved in his cancer treatment was struggling to afford college, he paid the young man’s tuition himself, as he noted in a 2024 Wall Street Journal column.
Fay was a strong supporter of other schools and organizations besides Williams, serving on the boards of Carleton College and Fairfield University and as board chair at Hotchkiss. He chaired the national committee that elected the first cohort of 17 individuals from the Negro Leagues and their predecessor organizations into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and raised funds to provide League retirees with health insurance and other support. He was honored by the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum for these contributions.
As many who corresponded with him can attest, Fay Vincent wrote as clearly as he thought, and as persuasively as he led. After his death, his editor at the Wall Street Journal lovingly memorialized the experience of working with him on his essays for the paper. He also wrote frequent columns for TCPalm.com, a USA Today publication in Florida, where he lived at the time. His columns there explored his wide range of interests, from baseball to politics, and from his meeting with Nobel Laureate Elie Weisel to his affinity for 1950s singer, TV and radio personality Julius La Rosa.
Fay disagreed with the college’s direction in his later years, part of a larger concern about higher education generally. His differences led him to part ways with Williams, a decision that his friends say was painful to him. This was someone who valued the life of the mind and the friendships that arise within a community of people thinking deeply together, at formative times in their lives. Immersion in that culture made an enormous, positive difference in Fay’s life. And so he argued, passionately and skillfully, for this approach and against anything that he felt compromised the ideal. His critiques were, characteristically, substantive rather than ideological. Even though he and I sometimes disagreed about particulars, it was impossible not to respect the integrity of his views and the depth of his love for this place.
As Fay told the graduates of the Class of 1990, “Williams is part of us and of our experience that knows no time, admits no completion and accepts no graduation.” He wanted us to know that a Williams education was for life. For him it was life, to a large extent. The self-described “scholarship kid from Waterbury, CT,” did a great deal to enhance the lives of those who came after him.
Our thoughts are with Fay’s family, colleagues, friends and classmates in this time of loss.
Maud