RICHARD H. BRODHEAD: AT WIT'S END

Richard H. Brodhead: At Wit's End

Sheela V. Pai in the 2000 YALE HERALD denied that Richard Brodhead was a faceless bureaucrat: "Because of his subtle humor and fun-loving personality, Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead, BR '68, GRD '72, is perhaps the most popular and approachable administrator here. . . . Brodhead enjoys being a public figure; he once dressed up as his wife in a Yale Symphony Orchestra Halloween show and has been known to take a turn in the Spring Fling dunk tank."

Who wouldn't want a great guy like that as President of Duke University? And he's not just high spirited, he's bright. "'He may be the smartest person I've ever met,' said John Burness, Duke's senior vice president for public affairs and government relations. 'He is a really deep thinker and it's fascinating to watch how he thinks and how he talks because he starts with the big picture and he works his way down to the points. He is so fast with his wit you just do a double-take sometimes.'" (IT'S NOT ABOUT THE TRUTH, by Don Yaeger with Mike Pressler, pp. 107-108).

Born a decade after Teflon was invented and a decade before it hit American kitchens, Brodhead went through his first six decades with a sleek veneer. Everything came easy. After graduation he stayed on at Yale as a graduate student then as an assistant and associate and full professor and Dean of Yale College. He was a known quantity. As the ghoulish black-gowned professors say in W. D. Snodgrass's "The Examination," he was "One of ours; one of ours. Yes. Yes."

The down side was that Brodhead was never challenged to think beyond what his teachers taught, and most of them, in the English Department, were New Critics who had never done any archival research such as Yale students of Stanley T. Williams had done in the 1940s. Brodhead could write criticism about as smoothly as his best teachers, but he wrote in a vacuum, since he had never been challenged to think about scholarly problems. All conceivable problems had been identified by 1950, leaving him with a pre-agreed upon body of novels to criticize and no need ever to ask questions about how the works came to exist in the form in which he was handed them or how books by dead white men came to be the books worth writing about.

For a long time the wider critical establishment (trained as New Critics, like him) covered up for Brodhead without even realizing they were covering up. None of his peers challenged THE SCHOOL OF HAWTHORNE (1986) on grounds that Brodhead wrote without any idea how big the school was or what students were enrolled in it. For more than two decades no one pointed out just how grotesque it was to jeer wittily at the poet Thomas Bailey Aldrich for becoming obscure, when a real scholar who knew a wide range of once-popular American novels would have put Aldrich into a chapter of the book for his florid homage to Hawthorne in THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY.

Like reviewers, Brodhead's institution was prepared to cover up for him. When he showed how fast he could rush to judgment on James Van de Velde, no one at Yale stopped him and asked him to come clean about the peculiar antipathy he was manifesting for the young instructor (so like that of Melville's Radney toward Steelkilt and Claggart toward Billy Budd). Was it because Van de Velde, a scholar-athlete, helmeted in practice of his martial arts, was his intellectual and moral as well as physical superior? Van de Velde's lawsuit against Yale and Brodhead is now reinstated and progressing.

As President of Duke University in 2006, Brodhead played Radney-Claggart on a grander scale when lacrosse players were falsely accused of rape. Apparently two factors governed him--first, an apparently irrational loathing of brilliant and handsome helmeted young athletes, and, second, abject terror of the representatives of Political Correctness. Interviewed by 60 Minutes, he declared that the night in question had been "an evening of highly unacceptable behavior whether or not the rape took place."


In July 2006, while three lacrosse players were under indictment for rape, Brodhead had regained his zestful humor, seizing a chance to display his powers as a critic. He excitedly told a reporter from the NEW YORKER that "all that had happened" reminded him of Brabantio's words after Roderigo shouts up to him that his daughter and the Moor are now "making the beast with two backs." Brabantio moans that it is not unlike his dream, something he perhaps should have anticipated: “Belief of it oppresses me already.”

Brodhead explicated this speech cleverly as explaining how Politically Correct people in Duke and Durham had responded to the accusations against the lacrosse players with the "absolute certainty that derives from the nature of the stereotypes.” His witty implication was that he, the Gang of 88, and all the anti-lacrosse-team marchers were so certain of the latent criminality of the lacrosse team that belief of their guilt suffused them simultaneously with their hearing the accusation of rape.

The wording is cleverly couched with some ambiguity, but Brodhead is surely saying that he and the Gang of 88 all leapt instantly to the belief that rich spoiled depraved white lacrosse players had raped an innocent young working mother, a black woman. No wonder marchers carried a wide purple and gold banner saying "CASTRATE": belief in the guilt of the lacrosse players had oppressed the marchers already, as it had Brodhead.

Thus brilliantly explicating and expatiating on Shakespeare, Brodhead convinced himself that the Gang of 88 and their supporters revealed "a dimension of our humanity." This was especially delightful to read when it was published, since Brodhead had previously revealed another dimension of his humanity by refusing to look at evidence offered by the players' parents and lawyers--not merely extenuating evidence ("Nothing extenuate," Othello had ordered) but outright exonerating evidence.

Belief of the lacrosse players' guilt oppressed Brodhead from the beginning, his clever statements show. For him, the case was about the "dehumanization" of social inferiors by the lacrosse players, all of whom were young men given "inequalities of wealth, privilege, and opportunity," and of course displaying "the attitudes of superiority those inequalities breed" (Until Proven Innocent, 140).

Brodhead, of course, displayed no such attitudes of superiority. In his 5 April 2006 "Letter to the Community" Brodhead bemoaned the "concerns of women about sexual coercion and assault" and his own "concerns about the survival of the legacy of racism." Whether or not he knew of the literary allusion to American Psycho, Brodhead denounced Ryan McFadyen's improperly seized e-mail about flaying a stripper (an admittedly stupid joke about a widely assigned book and movie) as "sickening and repulsive" and immediately suspended McFadyen.

Most memorably and wittily, in speaking to the Durham Chamber of Commerce (20 April 2006) Brodhead offered his considered judgment that even if lacrosse players had not raped anyone "whatever they did is bad enough"--bad enough to ruin their lives, bad enough that they deserved a 30-year jail sentence. Such mordant humor is in line with Burness's telling parents of lacrosse players, "I know everything I need to know," and, with his own characteristic wit, declaring that there were "two or three real bad actors on that team" (UPI 132).


Brodhead has tried to regain his old brilliant jollity. For evidence of his fast wit around the slower Burness, just look at how he described the new lacrosse coach, John Danowski, as a "Mensch" in contrast to Michael Pressler, the coach he arbitrarily fired! What a hoot! But was Burness conspicuously less fast of wit when he violated the confidential settlement agreement with Pressler and gleefully quoted Brodhead to a reporter for NEWSDAY (9 April 2006)? This witty Brodhead-Burness badinage has become legal history! Judge Howard Manning this April expressed himself from the bench as staggered that Burness had been "dumb enough" to violate the agreement this way!

Surprisingly, Brodhead may have been reverting to type (that is, to being a critic) by talking faster than he could think. If Burness was not lying, Brodhead really did speak scornfully of Pressler in Burness's presence when he ought to have known that his lieutenant was as loose of lip as at the waistline. The subtle humor of Brodhead and Burness seems to be lost on some people, for at least one dreary fellow (the victim of false accusations by Brodhead in a 23 June 2002 review in the New York TIMES) complains that the Yiddish word "Mensch" coming from the mouth of Richard Brodhead is like the word "Truth" coming out of the mouth Crystal Mangum, the stripper who falsely accused the lacrosse players of rape. And the joke got better when Duke settled Pressler’s suit!


It is a bit stunning to go from the high humor of Brodhead to the serious or even dour tone of Professor William L. Anderson in "Duke and Deceit: Brodhead's Folly" (18 October 2006): "While most of my articles have dealt with the misconduct of Durham County District Attorney Michael Nifong and the Durham Police Department, there is another player in this sorry tale who is almost as culpable, that being Duke University President Richard Brodhead. Despite having served time as an administrator at Yale University before coming to Duke, Brodhead has proven that he needs to be sent back to the minors. Furthermore, if federal investigators really cared about investigating crimes, Brodhead could find himself going to federal prison."

Anderson went on grimly: "in this piece I wish to concentrate on the behavior of Brodhead himself, who after Nifong is more responsible for this affair than any other person, save the false accuser herself. Moreover, I intend to establish that Brodhead very well might have been involved in the commission of felonies, and while I doubt he will face the kind of hard time that the wrongly-accused lacrosse players are facing, his conduct in this affair at very least should lead to his dismissal from Duke."


That was 2006. Anderson--that early--had identified very much the charges that the lawyers for three lacrosse players (Ryan McFadyen, Matthew Wilson, and Breck Archer) formulated in December 2007 in their lawsuit against Durham and Duke employees. They elaborate some serious charges--"BRODHEAD'S ACTS IN FURTHERANCE OF THE CONSPIRACY TO FABRICATE THE 'RACIST' DIMENSIONS TO MANGUM'S FALSE RAPE," for instance, and "BRODHEAD AND [Trustee] STEEL CONSCIOUSLY PARTICIPATING IN THE FRAMING OF THEIR OWN STUDENTS." As I have observed before, these are not accusations that Brodhead drifted and waffled and evaded and dithered like the stereotype of a cosseted professor suddenly dropped from his Ivory Tower. They are charges that he actively, knowingly (and with his subtle humor and usual dry wit?) engaged in criminal actions. The fact that Brodhead will not be brought to trial on these charges does not mean that they were frivolously mustered against him.

I must say that Brodhead's humor was undimmed in his belated apology to the long-vindicated lacrosse players (Duke University News & Communications, 29 September 2007). There Brodhead wittily sluffed off personal responsibility: "My colleagues in the Duke administration are going over all our procedures to see what we can learn from our experience. . . . To work through these difficulties and see that their lessons are learned not only here but around the country, we will be hosting a national conference of educators, lawyers and student affairs leaders to discuss best practices in this important field." What delicious humor--he will host a national conference instead of taking blame! I don't think the consequences of his actions have caught up with him, but he was laughing all the way, just then, to reappointment!

At last on 31 March 2011 Judge Beaty ruled that Richard H. Brodhead would go to trial on charges not of conspiracy but of the lighter charges of obstruction of justice and constructive fraud. Really low down baddies (perhaps, for instance, some reviewers who end up saying the same lies about a scholar!) commit conspiracy, but cleverer, lighthearted people like Brodhead may like the idea of a touch of obstruction, here and there, or just a little fraud in the failure to perform what was expected by the job definition. What a hoot to play at illegality! Perhaps Brodhead’s belief in his invulnerablity (or belief in the law’s delay) may suffuse him already, but to the rest of us he certainly isn't funny any more. At wit's end, what counts is character.