RICHARD H. BRODHEAD: SELECTIVE DEMONIZER

Richard Brodhead: Selective Demonizer

We live amid demonizers, judging from Google: "Some Methodists Are on a Mission to Demonize Israel"--"Far Right Uses Foley Scandal to Demonize Gays"--"Anti-Immigrant Groups Borrow Playbook of Hate Groups To Demonize Hispanics." We talk so much about demonizing that we tend to think of all demonizing as metaphorical. When Richard Brodhead as Dean of Yale College called me a "demon-researcher" in the New York Times on 23 June 2002, I did not take it literally. Belatedly, I believe that Brodhead was revealing more about himself than he realized, and that earlier at Yale and later as President of Duke University he has practiced an almost literal demonization, mainly of a particular class of people. I see the pattern in Melvillean terms.

Saturated in the Bible, Melville used Saul's jealousy of young David in portraying Radney and Claggart. In Moby-Dick, Ishmael, when telling "The Town-Ho's Story," elaborately accounts for Radney's jealousy of Steelkilt: "Now, as you well know, it is not seldom the case in this conventional world of ours--watery or otherwise; that when a person placed in command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he conceives an unconquerable dislike ad bitterness; and if he have a chance he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern's tower, and make a little heap of dust of it." Radney, "ugly as a mule," is jealousy of Steelkilt, "a tall and noble animal with a head like a Roman, and a flowing golden beard like the tasseled housings of your last viceroy's snorting charger; and a brain, and a heart, and a soul in him, gentlemen, which had made Steelkilt Charlemagne, had he been born son to Charlemagne's father."

Again, in Billy Budd, Melville explains that what first moved the master-at-arms Claggart against "the Handsome Sailor" was Billy's "significant personal beauty." Claggart's envy of Billy "struck deeper" than the "apprehensive jealousy that marred Saul's visage perturbedly brooding on the comely young David." At least twice, the pattern repeated by Brodhead involves jealousy of personal strength and beauty, but intermixed with something not in Melville, jealousy of unconventional intelligence based on real-world experience.

Brodhead never once went looking for a job in a tough competitive market, never adapted to the peculiarities of work-places around the country, never mixed it up intellectually and aesthetically with people other than his own teachers and fellow students and their kind. Older colleagues treat such an untested person with a mixture of pride and disdain: one of ours, yes, an exemplary New Critic, almost as good as we were at that age, but he couldn't leave the nest.

Such a cosseted professor at middle age may envy those who took a more strenuous and rewarding way, especially those who did such original work that they learned to think independently, and often to fight their way to higher salaries year by year. Then if such an untested person as Brodhead is put into a position of power, long suppressed phantoms, repressed envy for those who led a more adventurous life of body and mind, may disembark from his soul. He may turn corrosive envy into demonizing the envied, even as he revels in a newly acquired power to punish.

After a ghastly murder at Yale, Brodhead summoned the young instructor James Van de Velde into his office at Yale. Van de Velde was a brilliant teacher, a Marine, a man of world experience, a man with a burgeoning career as a television political talking head-- an athlete, a marathon man, a body builder, an expert in martial arts. Brodhead had a list of suspects from the New Haven Police Department (not a highly trained and famously ethical group) that included Van de Velde's name because he had an undeniable connection with the slain woman: he was advising her thesis on the threat posed by Osama ben Laden.


A dean who knew the world first hand might have called the athletic young scholar in and discussed how to handle the fantasies of the New Haven police, discussed what sort of statement he could issue to keep the teacher from being injured by incompetent police work and outrageous leaks to the press. "I'll come with you to your next class, if you like, and talk straight to the students about the gossip," he could have said. Instead, Brodhead, stuttering, fumbling, cancelled his class, and did not renew his appointment. At his lowest, Van de Velde declared that his life had been ruined. Brodhead treated Van de Velde as a demon who had to be banished from Yale.

Brodhead did not put himself on record as seeing Van de Velde as demon murderer, but in 2006, as President of Duke University, he publicly showed his hostility toward the Duke lacrosse players, particularly those falsely accused of gang raping a female black stripper. In March 2006 Brodhead accused the players of "bad behavior, boorish behavior, immature behavior, and inappropriate behavior." In an April 5 letter to the Duke community, he declared that the "acts the police are investigating" (real acts, not "alleged" acts, notice) were "only part of the problem." The "episode" had "brought to glaring visibility underlying issues" such as "concerns of women about sexual coercion and assault," "concerns about the culture of certain groups that regularly abuse alcohol and the attitudes these groups promote," and "concerns about the survival of the legacy of racism, the most hateful feature American history has produced." Worse, the lacrosse episode had highlighted "the deep structures of inequality in our society--inequalities of wealth, privilege, and opportunity (including educational opportunity), and the attitudes of superiority those inequalities breed." If the young men had not gang-raped the young woman (a mother working her way through college), whatever they did to her "was bad enough." What was bad of course was Brodhead's rush to judgment, like the Yale rush to condemn Van de Velde.


Van de Velde and the lacrosse players had in common high intellectual abilities (brilliance, in Van de Velde's case, and at least some of the lacrosse players) and physical agility and power. Van de Velde practiced martial arts which require headguard and faceguard. In Brodhead's fervid imagination had he worn his helmet when he went ravaging out into the New Haven darkness? And did Brodhead envision the lacrosse players as ancient warriors storming under Montefortino helmets, Thracian helmets, Agen-Port helmets?

Helmeted warriors, were they, unbelievably dangerous in their power, and all the more dangerous because they were excellent students and (except for hiring a stripper), gentlemanly young fellows. Brodhead the power to render all these stalwart young warriors impotent. He could fire their general, the altogether admirable Michael Pressler, the chief of the helmeted hoard, playing Richard II: "Therefore we banish you our territories!" He could toy with the helmeted lacrosse army, at first making them forfeit a game or two.

Then, Brodhead could echo Richard II at his haughtiest: "LET THEM LAY BY THEIR HELMETS AND THEIR SPEARS." That showed them: he could cancel the season, make them lay their helmets aside. Here was rich power--the President of Duke University as King Richard before his play-acting caught up with him and he was forced to abdicate.

When you are demonizing your victim, who may well be your superior in general pride of manhood, you seize your chance to pull down and pulverize that subaltern's tower, and make a little heap of dust of it. You do not search the records for mitigating or outright extenuating circumstances. There was no evidence against Van de Velde at all. Brodhead "took pains to avoid exposure" to the exonerating evidence at Duke.

"The parents assured Brodhead that the DA's files would show him that the criminal charges were false. Brodhead refused to look at them or assign a subordinate to look. Ironically, even as he went out of his way to avoid examining the discovery information, Brodhead publicly complained about his difficulties in having to base decisions on incomplete information" (Taylor and Johnson, Until Proven Innocent, 132-133).

Brodhead's selective blindness continues. In February 2008, when Duke welcomed a sex show to campus, he refused to look at documents about the show which Ken Larrey wanted to show him. Knowing the way Brodhead had turned his eyes away from proof of the lacrosse players' innocence, Larrey boldly read the document aloud to Brodhead.

How I fit in is harder to see. I am far older than Brodhead and never, even half a century or more ago, looked like Steelkilt or Billy. I had handsome older brothers, one who came out with the Cherokee and Choctaw predominant, the next pure German-Scot, while I was the dishwater blond with a broken nose, acne, and tuberculosis. However, I was the tallest, and in December 1996 when the New York Times Magazine printed a color picture of me in my study the writer declared me to be "handsome." Could the Times be wrong? Was that enough to incite jealousy?

Simply by conducting biographical research, all but forbidden at Yale since 1953, when Stanley T. Williams retired, was I threatening to a man whose career had been built on superficial "research"? Was he jealous, and fearful of having it known that his his own academic writing had been, after all, insubstantial? Was he half aware, already, that, for example, he had published The School of Hawthorne without having read widely enough to know just who the pupils really were, aside from a few long-famous white men?

Could Brodhead's calling me a "demon-researcher" be a witty exaggeration, a backhanded compliment, a nod to my hard work? No, he thought I was a demon because I worked in the archives, decade after decade, as no one had done at Yale since the great students of Williams in the 1940s.

Brodhead was naive, unguarded, in demonizing, slipping, as when an unsubtle dramatist has his Frankenstein's monster slip and call his maker "Father." In a slip like Brodhead's, Albert Rothenberg would say, material derived from unconscious sources is presented "directly" in the piece of writing. Brodhead's jealousy was such that he had to show that my demonic quest had ended in wreck like crazy Ahab's.

The way to do, for clever Brodhead, was to allege that I had invented two lost books I discussed, The Isle of the Cross (1853) and Poems (1860). I was a demonic-researcher who could not be trusted, after all my demonic work. In order to imply that I made up the books Brodhead had to shut his eyes to the evidence that earlier scholars had accumulated over the decades. The pattern is clear: he had to deny the existence of the great Yale scholars from the 1940s who had worked on the book Melville finished in 1853 (although I did not find the title until 1987) and all the other scholars, beginning in 1922, who had published and republished the documents about the book Melville called "Poems." On the pages of my biography were quoted new and old documents about The Isle of the Cross and old documents about Poems. Just as he turned away from the documents proving the innocence of the lacrosse players, just as he turned away from the documents about the sex show at Duke (where a performer kneeled on all fours with a lighted sparkler stuck in his rectum while "America the Beautiful" played), he shut his eyes to the evidence in order to demonize me. I mean he literally shut his eyes to the words on the pages of the book he was being paid to review! I mean, for instance, Herman Melville’s list of instructions about publishing POEMS! I was a fearsome researcher, a demon-researcher who had to be crushed into a little heap of dust.

In 2004 Duke needed someone who had a lifelong history of dealing deftly with tough, gnarled issues whether aesthetic, intellectual, social, or political. Duke needed someone capable of rising up in extraordinary circumstances and by God doing the right thing, right then, out of experience, powerful instinct, or innate majesty of soul. Instead, Duke got Richard H. Brodhead. He is what some of us always knew he was.

Now in April 2011 he faces the DISCOVERY process on strong charges of obstruction of justice and constructive fraud. Is James Van de Velde surprised? Is Michael Pressler surprised, are any of the falsely-accused lacrosse players surprised that Judge Beaty found strong reason to think these charges are sustainable in court? All that concerns me is how many of the 2006 documents will have proved impossible to lay hand on, just now, just at the moment the plaintiffs' lawyers need them for DISCOVERY.

Will there be new charges stemming from failure to produce documents? If so, who will be demonized then?