Richard H. Brodhead: THE HARM OF THIS MAN

"Richard Brodhead: 'The Harm of This Man'"

In 2004 Yale University Press published an elegant little book, The Good of This Place, several speeches and essays by Richard H. Brodhead, outgoing Dean of Yale College and incoming President of Duke University. Never, perhaps, had an American university said farewell to an administrator with such an elegant going-away present. The Good of This Place sounds noble and ennobling, but even in 2004 there were warnings.

"What kind of person is it good to be?" Brodhead had asked in a 1994 speech, but what kind of man had he been in 1999, when a Yale student Suzanne Jovin, was murdered and New Haven police interviewed James Van de Velde, an untenured lecturer in the Department of Political Science, routinely asking him question because he was the advisor on her senior thesis?


In the Yale Daily News for 5 February 2004 in "The Unusual Suspect" the reporter Will Sullivan quoted Van de Velde's recollections about 10 January 1999:
"James Van de Velde said he had a message on his answering machine from Yale College Dean Richard Brodhead, telling him to come to Brodhead's office. When he arrived, he found Brodhead and [Linda] Lorimer waiting for him. '[Brodhead] began this strange soliloquy about the presumption of innocence,' Van de Velde said. 'I can always tell when Dick is nervous because he kind of rambles.' It was then that Van de Velde said Brodhead handed him a letter, telling him that he would not be teaching classes in the spring semester. 'I asked, "Do you really know what you're doing?"' Van de Velde said. . . . The next day, students arriving for Van de Velde's lecture found the words 'PoliSci 181b cancelled for Spring' written on the board.

That same day, Yale announced that police had named Van de Velde a suspect in the investigation. Until that moment, Van de Velde had achieved almost baffling success in the academic and political realms for such a young man. His fall would be just as dramatic." As Michael Rubin wrote in the National Review Online (10 December 2007), Richard Brodhead punished Van de Velde "for a crime, it turns out, he could not have committed (the DNA evidence exonerated him)."


In 2004 Van de Velde told Sullivan that he had "applied to over 100 academic positions since 1999 and has never been offered a job." He had hoped for a permanent teaching position at Yale. "Instead, he has developed a wandering lifestyle, drifting from job to job and place to place." Another interviewer, Paul Zielbauer, reported on 19 June 2001 in the New York Times that Van de Velde had told him simply, "'My life has been ruined."


Van de Velde sued Yale, particularly naming Brodhead, but the suit languished until 11 December 2007, when a federal judge resurrected Van de Velde's claims against Yale and the New Haven Police Department. Van de Velde's lawyer, David Grudberg, has been hoping to depose the defendants, including Brodhead, so that they will "have to speak, under oath, about the discussions that led to Van de Velde's firing." (Sullivan, "The Unusual Suspect"). Van de Velde has won an $80,000 settlement in his defamation suit against Quinnipiac University, which dismissed him from its broadcast journalism program after the murder. "The damage caused by the actions of the Quinnipiac officials was a very small fraction of the damage that's been done to James Van de Velde," Grudberg said, according to Sullivan. "Having your name and face beamed across the planet as a potential murderer, what would that be worth?" Yale may yet pay for Brodhead's rush to judgment but no amount of money will pay for the decade Van de Velde lived with his reputation destroyed.


Brodhead left one reputation in shreds when he left Yale. Two years after his arrival at Duke he left half a hundred families devastated. Michael Pressler, the lacrosse coach whom Brodhead forced to resign, and his wife, Sue, behaved heroically, but they suffered. The next year, 24 March 2007, their fifteen-year-old daughter Janet Pressler wrote a letter to Brodhead (published in It's Not About the Truth). She explained her feelings during the early media hostility toward the team: "I became depressed and withdrawn, not knowing what was in store for me and my family. . . . Out of fear for our safety at home, I went to live with a teammate . . . . Threats to our family were sent to my mother via email. To have our family threatened using such hateful and malicious language is something that I will never forget. Who was protecting us?" She challenged the man who had rushed to judgment: "you, Dr. Brodhead, did not believe in your players or your coach. Your public statement that my father's resignation was 'highly appropriate' clearly demonstrated your lack of faith in him, while casting a shadow of guilt over him in the media." She said sadly, "No apology or promise can restore the lives we led last year."


What the indicted lacrosse players and their families went through has not yet been told in any detail, although bits of their stories are woven through Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson's Until Proven Innocent (2007). Duke University paid out many millions of dollars to the three indicted players, Collin Finnerty, Reade Seligmann, and Dave Evans, because of the harm of this man, Richard Brodhead. No lacrosse player, I wager, and no one in the families of the lacrosse players, thought for a moment that the money made up for what they had suffered.

The LieStopper Joan Foster on 17 September 2006 (reprinted 29 September 2007) focused on Brodhead's refusal even to speak to the families of the lacrosse players. "'Brodhead would not meet with us.' These are families facing the crisis of their lives, their sons at risk, their world unraveling. Uncertainty, fear, confusion, and despair were the order of the day. These are members of the extended Duke family to which Brodhead is the "Father" figure. A good "Father" may have stern words or opposing positions that he feels he must deliver. He may have to disappoint or debate his family or flock. But not SEE them? Not deliver those words in person, face to face, with whatever grace he can muster? Incredible. . . . What does it say about this man to barricade himself behind closed doors at such a crucial moment?. . . The Duke Lacrosse Hoax, among many things, was the hour of testing for Brodhead's leadership and his courage. It was his archetypical moment in Time. That image of him, hours before he is to deliver a harsh statement about their sons, cowering from the parents, is one to remember always. It defines his leadership style. It reveals the man."

On 22 January 2007 in "Profiles in Courage: The Other Duke Lacrosse Moms" in the Friends of Duke University website, Joan Collins looked at the unindicted players and their families. Joan Collins prefaced her report with this paragraph: "When the hoax was born, the 'eclipse of justice' cast a wide shadow enveloping all the families of the 47 players of the Men’s 2006 Duke Lacrosse Team. People deal with difficult situations very differently, some privately and others more publicly. Whatever way they choose to deal with their pain should be respected. This article is based on conversations with five courageous mothers willing to share how the hoax has affected them and their families. At the onset, all made it very clear that their pain pales in comparison to that which the Finnerty, Seligmann and Evans families have experienced and continue to endure. None of them were looking for attention. Quite the opposite, they want their private lives back. However, all thought it important for people to recognize that so many families have been devastated by the hoax."

When Brodhead at last offered what he termed an apology (Duke University News & Communications, 29 September 2007), he 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 Duke needed early last year and needs now is a grown man capable of rising up in extraordinary circumstances and doing the right thing then, not someone who promises to consult a committee in the next crisis.


Is it time to "move on," now that the lacrosse players have been vindicated? Ask them, ask their families, if everything is miraculously back to normal. Ask Michael Pressler and his family how it felt in 2007 to be defamed anew, after having settled with Duke one time. Van de Velde has a life back, although far from the life he had envisioned in 1999.

I'll tell you my own experience. After Brodhead used sly innuendo and outright lie in the New York Times (23 June 2002) to create the impression that my biography of Melville was unreliable, I suffered for five years, while managing to do some good work. In October 2006, when I focused belatedly on the lacrosse case and realized that once again Brodhead was destroying reputations, I stopped everything and wrote a cool academic article on the truth about the lost books he suggested that I had made up, hoping readers would see the pattern of his reckless savaging of reputations.

My article was published fast, as academic writing goes, in the June 2007 Nineteenth-Century Literature. For five years the dreary cloud had hung over my reputation. The night in June 2007 when Michael Gaynor put on the Internet "Richard Brodhead Targeted Hershel Parker Before Lacrosse Players," I slept. I have slept well every night since then after five years of grief over the damage Brodhead and his followers had done to my reputation. Insurance policies have fatuous clauses about making you "whole." No one is ever "made whole" again after such damage as Brodhead inflicts.

It is rumored now that Brodhead wants to retire now while he has a few good years left for teaching. Perhaps everyone ought to evaluate just how safe he is to be let loose around students and colleagues anywhere.

Until Brodhead is turned out into a place where he can do little harm to others, the Internet will continue to fill up with comments such as this new one: "Brodhead's vacuous, soft response to the lacrosse team fiasco; his selfish, political calculations of a difficult situation; and his willingness to place his career above the greater community brings shame to us all." That is from Lt. Col. Stan Coerr '89, Newport, Rhode Island. Google Coerr and contrast him with the current President of Duke University.

Ironically, the greatest harm from Richard Brodhead may ultimately be the harm directed back upon himself. As long as the Internet lives, type in "Richard Brodhead" and words or phrases such as coward, craven, weak-kneed, liar, rush to judgment, pandering, contemptible and you will find eloquent comments In April 2011 type in “obstruction of justice” and “constructive fraud” and you will find ongoing charges against Brodhead. The long pattern of his behavior would make anyone reflect on the "The Harm of This Man" who was hired to embody "The Good of This Place."