Talk to Biagio DiLieto, Mayor of New Haven, and he will assert that Yale's youngest president in nearly three generations is the messiah of New Haven.

"Relations between the city administration and the university have never been better," DiLieto says. "Bart Giamatti has a great deal of affinity for the people of this community."

The president is not averse, DiLieto says by way of example, to marching in New Haven's annual parades. Only recently, at the joint-sponsored "Community University Day," Giamatti pitted himself against DiLieto in a human chess match on the New Haven common.

Judging from a recent article in The New York Times Magazine, the most revered figure around Yale University these days is its president. If he's not busy strolling across campus with minority students and female college masters as pictured in the Times, the 43-year-old A. Bartlett Giammatti is probably out blasting the Moral Majority or making statements against the Reagan Administration's defense budget. It isn't for nothing that Giamatti has earned the title "The Outspoken President of Yale."

Moreover, if Derek Bok's image among students is aloof (if not among alumni), Giamatti seems exceptionally accessible to students. No other Ivy League president has office hours for students to come in and chat, and few--other than Giamatti--respond to student-written luncheon invitations.

Yet students at the nation's second oldest Ivy League school have mixed opinions of their glamorous president. Some Yalies charge that Giamatti fails to live up to the image he has garnered from extensive media coverage--an image some student leaders at Yale charge is quite different from his everyday demeanor.

"His level of accessibility is disgraceful," charges one student, Beth Pardo, a former president of Yale's College Council (YCC). "He does not want students in power, and that's his whole approach."

Kirk Scott, coordinator of Yale's Campaign against Militarism and the Draft, agrees: "It's hard to meet with him unless you're the president of the YCC," he says, adding that it took him two months to schedule an appointment with Giamatti.

Giamatti's supporters are as effusive in their praise as his detractors are in their complaints. "He's put us in the position to help ourselves," says Bryan Blaney, president of the Black Student Alliance. "Contact with him is pretty good."

Stacey D. Modell, president of the undergraduate School's Committee, says that Giamatti managed to find time to attend an Early Action Day luncheon, even after his secretary had called to cancel. "My faith [in Giamatti] was restored," she says.

But dispute over the young president runs to other issues besides that of accessibility. Some students allege that he sports a progressive attitude towards political issues, but is actually unreceptive to student opinion.

The most controversial example of this alleged duality occurred earlier this year when the Yale Glee Club--at the insistence of Giamatti and several other administrators--turned down a State Department invitation to record the Polish Solidarity Union anthem for broadcast on Voice of America.

"I'm perfectly happy to take on political matters in what seems to be the educational context of this place," Giamatti was quoted as saying.

Equally heated issues surrounding Giamatti concern internal campus politics. Giamatti declined to be interviewed on these issues either in person or by telephone, as did David Henson, Dean of Student Affairs.

The central concern that most student leaders expressed was the lack of support--both fiscally and administratively--from the University for organizations outside the residential colleges. Yale operates on a college system similar to Harvard's house system, the main difference being that students are assigned to colleges at the beginning of freshman year. Although students do not live in the residential colleges until the beginning of their sophomore year, both students and administration officials maintain that the residential colleges are an integral part of Yale life.