The world forgets too soon. I am re-posting this in tribute to James Van de Velde, whose suit against the New Haven Police Department and Yale University (naming Richard Brodhead) was finally settled.
19 March 2008
Richard Brodhead: Poster Boy for Ineptitude
As
Michael Gaynor's summarized in "Yes!!!! Wronged Lacrosse Players Suing
Duke," on 21 February 2008 "more than three dozen members of the 2006
Duke University men’s lacrosse team and members of their families filed suit
against Duke University, its President Richard Brodhead and other officials,
Duke’s medical center, and the City of Durham and city officials for emotional
distress and other injuries in connection with false rape charges and a corrupt
police investigation against team members in 2006."
At
the National Press Club news conference held to announce this lawsuit, Steven
Henkelman, speaking for many of the Plaintiffs, was self-controlled but passionate. The father of Erik Henkelman, a member of the
2006 Duke lacrosse team, Henkelman told why he and Erik joined in the new
lawsuit against many at Duke and Durham, including Richard Brodhead: "How
could Richard Brodhead as the President of Duke refuse to show even the most
basic courtesy and meet with lacrosse parents gathered in Durham on March 25th
[2006], the day he had orchestrated the abrupt cancellation the Georgetown game
with the visiting team already on the field, the day he would issue his first
guilt-implying press release featuring his – and I quote – 'sexual assault will
not be tolerated at Duke' headline? . .
. . Duke was in a 'damage control' mode; they were willing to sacrifice a few –
our sons - for the good of the institution. There was to be no support from
Dick Brodhead, Bob Steel or any Duke administrator for our sons."
Almost
before Henkelman had finished his eloquent
remarks, it seemed, Brodhead's Duke lawyers moved to silence parents,
individual players, and the lawyers for the Plaintiffs. Objecting to the existence of the Plaintiff's
website, www.dukelawsuit.com, the Duke lawyers singled out Mr. Henkelman for
speaking "in a manner calculated to engender sympathy." Brodhead had watched silently while Duke
professors called for the castration of lacrosse players, but Brodhead's
lawyers were offended when one father of one of the innocent players revealed
the depth of pain his son and the whole family suffered because of Brodhead's
pervasive ineptitude. Manipulative, exploitative father that he was, Henkelman had
spoken "in a manner calculated to engender sympathy"! Imagine!
In the chapter of Moby-Dick called "The Hyena" Melville describes the a
weird mood that may follow some grotesque turn amid bleak tragedy--something as
grotesque as Brodhead's lawyers being offended by Steven Henkelman's words. Melville wrote, "That odd sort of
wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme
tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just
before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of
the general joke." The only laughter you can emit is the raucous,
terrifying laughter of a hyena.
I
doubt that Mr. Henkelman is able to laugh about much in his situation, but what
the Duke lawyers are doing now does not merely point to Brodhead's
well-established tendency to rush to the wrong judgment and his well-documented
"almost willful disregard for the facts" (NEWSWEEK 10 September
2007), or his habitual disdain, or his Radney-Claggart-like jealousy of
brilliant young helmeted athletes, or his recurrent blindness to human agony
against which I presciently protested in FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS
(1984). No, what is happening now is
different: Brodhead is becoming the subject of humor, not heartwarming joyous
humor but sardonic, contemptuous humor.
He is being known not only for cold-heartedness, or even for what Stuart
Taylor and KC Johnson in UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT called his "moral
meltdown," but for something more damning in the 21st century--ineptitude.
Look away from Brodhead's cruelty toward
James Van de Velde as Dean of Yale College in 1999, when he could have moved to
protect the reputation of the brilliant young athletic scholar haplessly listed
by the inept local police as a suspect in a grisly murder, only because he was
the victim's adviser. Look instead at Brodhead's
own ineptness: now, almost a decade later, Van de Velde's lawsuit, which names Brodhead
as well as others at Yale and Yale itself, is reinstated and going forward--at
who knows what ultimate financial cost to Yale?
When Duke Trustee Robert Steel came
courting him to be President of Duke, vanity seems to have prevented Brodhead
from making a simple declaration--that he was not qualified to be president of
a great university. Now in 2008 Duke
University has paid for his ineptitude--a settlement with Michael Pressler, the
coach, which Brodhead's spokesman Burness violated, so that Pressler is now
suing for the first time; multi-million dollar settlements ($30,000,000 is
reported) with three lacrosse players; an October 2007 lawsuit by those three
most violated lacrosse players against the city of Durham, its police chief and others,
including the now-disbarred former District Attorney Mike Nifong, all of whom who relied on Brodhead to "disregard"
facts as they pursued their fraudulent
charges. On 18 December 2007 three non-indicted lacrosse players filed suit against
the district attorney, Durham, and Duke University (naming Brodhead). And now the 21 February 2008 lawsuit! What other Dean or President of
any great American university has proved so expensive to be let loose on a
campus, his character driving him to a pattern of blunders--blunders which
redefine the word "costly"?
Now everyone knows about Brodhead's ineptitude
as a supposed "scholar."
Merely look at his THE SCHOOL OF HAWTHORNE, where he gloats over the
vanished reputation of Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a writer who ought to have been
included as a prominent early student of Hawthorne! A critic ineptly takes on a
scholarly subject without doing the basic research! Clueless Brodhead!
Disdainful, yes, and unequipped to write the book, but, really, just hapless to
choose Aldrich to sneer at, Aldrich whose famous THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY opens
with a grand example of late-century homage to Hawthorne. Brodhead is a critic, not a scholar who has
absorbed previous knowledge and added to it.
In 2002 Brodhead was incapable of
telling the New York TIMES that as a mere critic he was unqualified to review
my biography based on earlier scholarship and containing vast amounts of new
information based on archival research.
Breezily defaming me as a "demon-researcher," he ignored
decades of scholarship in order to imply that I had fabricated crucial episodes
in Melville's life (his completing a book called THE ISLE OF THE CROSS in 1853
and his completing another called POEMS in 1860). To be lied about in the New
York TIMES was almost too much to bear; worse, I had to see Brodhead's lies
repeated by Andrew Delbanco and Elizabeth Schultz. Could Brodhead not have looked at the 1960 LETTERS
OF HERMAN MELVILLE and seen on p. 164 that Melville had completed a book in
1853 and on pp. 199 his instruction to his brother Allan about his new book:
"Let the title-page be simply, / Poems / by / Herman Melville" (a
letter first printed in 1922)? Could he
have not looked at the same letters in CORRESPONDENCE (1993), pages 249-250 and
343-344?
Or, if he had been in the slightest bit responsible,
could Brodhead not have looked at these documents quoted in the book he was
reviewing, HERMAN MELVILLE: A BIOGRAPHY, 1851-1891, on pages 145-155 and 418-426 and 443-444? No.
Not if the purpose of his review was to destroy my reputation. No.
Not if he was truly so incompetent as not to know how to read the
evidence before him or so irresponsible as not to read it at all. Brodhead led a ferocious team of false
accusers, all critics, like him, critics who had never done any archival
research. I was all but broken in
spirit: I was old, exhausted from many years of dedicated research and writing,
and I was undergoing surgery I had postponed in order to complete the second
volume of my biography. The lies, still
alive on the Internet in 2008, made entry into my eighth decade very painful.
Finally, late in 2006, realizing that
three lacrosse players might go to jail because of Brodhead, I began work on an
article published in the June 2007 Nineteenth-Century
Literature (out late July). Before
it came out, Michael Gaynor wondered aloud how good a scholar Brodhead really
was, and I e-mailed him about how Brodhead had filched from me my good name. Gaynor quoted me in his 7 June 2007
"Richard Brodhead Targeted Hershel Parker Before Lacrosse Players,"
where I broke my five years of silent suffering.
I still don't find what Brodhead did to
me at all funny, but I hear hyena laughter from many directions. Think of Ken Larrey trying to get Brodhead to
look at evidence of the sex show that played at Duke a few weeks ago, and
Brodhead averting his eyes, just as he had refused to look at evidence of the
lacrosse players' innocence. Listen to
the hyena laughter.
On 11 March
2008 Gadi
Dechter in the Baltimore SUN, "Multitalented Leader Sought to Fill Shoes,"
described the ground rules in the search for a new President of the Johns
Hopkins University. First do no harm by
hiring a Lawrence H. Summers or a Richard H. Brodhead: " . . . Duke University President Richard Brodhead has
received criticism for his handling of rape accusations falsely leveled against
members of the men's lacrosse team."
Will any group of trustees and other university officials in the
foreseeable future start a search without remembering the hastily-speaking
Summers and the costly Brodhead, the inept man with a long history of rushing
wildly to the wrong judgment? Ironically, Summers' fate propelled Brodhead
(terrified since 1986 of being blackened for political incorrectness) into
abasing himself before the Gang of 88.
Brodhead's name will be mentioned during searches for university
presidents accompanied by sounds between a snickering moan and a hyena laugh.
Even sports writers comprehend
Brodhead's ineptitude. In the 12 March
2008 Baltimore SUN Mike Preston wrote in "Sympathy
for Duke Disappears Thanks to NCAA" about "the boneheaded way"
Brodhead and his staff "handled the investigation into rape allegations
against three players. The allegations were eventually proven false and dropped
. . . . But aren't we forgetting someone? How about Duke president Richard
Brodhead? Wasn't he the guy who overreacted and tried to win the public
relations game back in 2006 when he canceled the season after eight games? Didn't
he play a major part in pressuring Pressler to leave town?" When the sports writer uses words like
bonehead, the word is out about Brodhead's ineptitude.
The admirable group called Duke Students
for an Ethical Duke on 12 March 2008 reported its close reading of the 18
December 2007 lawsuit in which Brodhead is a defendant. Brodhead's Director of Judicial Affairs,
Stephen Bryan, had cooked statistics against the lacrosse team: "As brief examples of
their absurdity, Bryan's statistics . . . held lacrosse players accountable for
'50% of noise violations and 33% of open container violations' . . . based on single instances of such
violations by lacrosse players." One
youth holding an open can becomes a third of all open container charges in
Durham! The hyena laughs again as it
circles around Richard Brodhead, the Poster Boy for
Ineptitude.
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