Andrew Van Dam 8 July 2022 in the Washington POST & Anne Nelson in TLS 15 July 2022 both talk about dangerous elitism in the academy

I bring back Richard Brodhead and Andrew Delbanco who are relevant to what Van Dam and Nelson say.

       Wikipedia does not mention Richard Brodhead’s lying about me in the New York Times on 23 June 2002 but it does mention his mistreatment of James Van de Velde in 1998 and 1999 and especially his mistreatment of the falsely accused Duke lacrosse players n 2006.

       In the 23 June 2002 New York Times Brodhead, then Dean of Yale College, identified me as a threatening anomaly. Weirdly, he claimed to know me better than I knew myself: "Many years ago Hershel Parker set out to write the biography to end all biographies about Herman Melville, a book in which everything that could be known about the writer would be pieced out and put on record." I remember very well what I set out to do. It was not what Brodhead said. What Brodhead so smugly asserted was only a fantasy which satisfied something in him.
       For Brodhead this imaginary "Hershel Parker" was not just a "researcher" (an occupation in itself offensive to his delicate critic's sensibilities) but a "demon researcher" with "a single-mindedness worthy of a Melville hero." The single-minded Captain Ahab was yanked out of his whaleboat by the whale line around his neck, the harpoon at the other end impaled in the fast-swimming Moby Dick.
       Around my neck were two whale lines, according to Brodhead, my "surmises" about two now lost books Melville had written but which, Brodhead slyly hinted (while outright lying about my relation to other Melville scholarship), I had simply fantasized. In Brodhead's fantasy, my own fantasy episodes were, after all my years of work, my substitute for documentable episodes in a writer's life. Saying "If this is true"; "If this is so" Brodhead fantasized a history of my career in which he glorified himself for being the one to expose my wishful fantasies.
       I was wholly innocent of Brodhead's sly insinuations and accusations that THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and POEMS were only surmised, only figments of my imagination. Since 1960 scholars had been sure Melville finished a book in 1853 (although it was 1987 before I found the title), and everyone had known most details about POEMS since 1922. Other reviewers (critics, like Brodhead, not scholars), Andrew Delbanco and Elizabeth Schultz, repeated the lies later in 2002, and all three of their reviews went glittering up on the Internet.
       What motivated them, these three people with reputations as Melville critics? Appallingly malicious ignorance or appallingly arrogant malice? Is the question academic? Is there any other way of accounting for their suggesting or implying that I made up THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and POEMS?
       Delbanco in 2002 was already priming himself to publish a critical biography of Melville; happily, between savaging me in 2002 and publishing the book in 2005 he learned somehow (from my book which he had reviewed so contemptuously in 2002?) that THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and POEMS were lost but had been real, and he dropped their titles into his book, with no reference to his having said that I merely surmised them. Would I make up such a story about the learned Mr. Delbanco? Could anyone? And in the uncorrected proofs of his book there was no mention of any debt to my biography.

       Slander like that from Brodhead and Delbanco can never be refuted. Instead, it spreads, as vile rumor always does, as when Alan Helms after reading Delbanco’s slurs decided that I was a “slippery fish” with evidence, a baseless second-hand accusation. What should have been a triumph in 2002 had turned into public shame. My reputation was trashed in 2002 by critics who knew nothing of historical, archival research and how to evaluate it.

       I am on Columbia University’s Pulitzer list in 1997 as a finalist but the reviewers in 2002, including a Columbia professor, knocked me out of that year’s competition by their lies. Elizabeth Schultz had piled on atop the boys in the Winter 2002 Common Review, saying I “contended” that Melville had completed “a novel, putatively titled The Isle of the Cross, and his first collection of poems.” What a vicious word the innocent “putatively” can become!

       Intelligent and learned enough to treat the hostile reviews for what they were worth, the Association of American Publishers gave me the highest honor, the R. R. Hawkins Award (the PROSE award), both in 1996 and again in 2002. For a long time no one else received the Hawkins Award twice. Has Robert Caro received it multiple times by now?

       Yes, I knew I had written the best biography in 1996, as the Association of American Publishers said. Thanks to reviewers at Columbia, the Pulitzer went to a short and easy work of fiction. Looking back from 28 October 1999, Trevor Butterworth in NewsWatch noted that in “Ireland and Britain the winner of the 1997 Pulitzer Prize for biography, Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes, was honestly, marketed as fiction.”

       To judge from Brodhead’s conventional dead-end New Critical HAWTHORNE, MELVILLE, AND THE NOVEL, a 1950s book published in the 70s, or from THE SCHOOL OF HAWTHORNE, a 1950s book published in the 80s, Richard H. Brodhead has not experienced a particularly rich imaginative life. Certainly, trained by New Critics to avoid biographical information, he displays no interest in the inner lives of his writers.
       Nevertheless, Brodhead indulged in fantasies about me, and the record suggests that he indulges in fantasies about other males who enter the academic world with training and interests different from his own. "Indulge" may not always be the right word, for some of his fantasies seem laced with fearful jealousy.
       Brodhead had a grudge against me, for in FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS (1984) I described him as writing bloodless, heartless New Criticism where all that counts is a body of words to practice criticism on. He had been, I thought, strangely blind to Melville's agony. I saw Brodhead at a conference in Pittsfield in 1991. A now cryptic note in my diary contrasts a brilliant woman with "the idiotic Brodhead." Perhaps my contempt for him showed somehow, then. I’m pretty sure a photograph I have of me talking earnestly to Maurice Sendak shows Brodhead back to back with Sendak.

       Sendak, a Melville lover enthralled with Jay Leyda’s The Melville Log, had come to Pittsfield, he said, because he knew I was enlarging the Log. We cut out one morning of speeches to see the replica of the Hawthorne house. Sendak joined us. Did Brodhead writhe in jealousy at my being a star of a vigorous panel in which I excited the audience with tidbits from my work on the biography? Many of these people really did care about biography. Here was a skill alien to him, the hated skill of biography, now suddenly popular—perhaps even more popular in the Pittsfield audience than the dreary New Critical readings were. Had he missed the boat, after all? Not a boat you can catch.
       Or did his jealousy have something to do with personal appearance, as it does with his treatment of James Van de Velde, the lacrosse team at Duke, and Michael Pressler? In 1991 I was 55 already, with snow-white hair--but a full head of it. I was 190, 6' 3", and I had run three to six miles almost every day for the previous fourteen years, time out for shoulder surgeries. I looked healthy, for an old guy, despite lung damage from early tuberculosis, and came across, the record of the session shows, as a man passionately committed to what had become a magnificent adventure, reading documents for myself, through the day and the middle of night after night, and discovering unknown episode after unknown episode in Melville’s life.
       Reading the printed record of the conference now, I think I must have projected unprofessional exuberance and a vibrant, even reckless vitality simply from the joy of sharing with a big audience of some old friends and strangers some of what I had been finding in my previous years of solitary researches. Obviously I was a man who had lived his intellectual life. I had not spent the 70s, say, in cowering down, keeping my nose clean, hoping for ultimate tenure, consoling myself with the tantalizing suggestion that I was in a “troth,” as the still unpromoted and still unpromoted and still unpromoted Brodhead had been.
       Is the pattern this: does Brodhead sets out to destroy vibrant, passionate men more intellectually daring and more physically daring than himself? I was never physically strong, but others of his disdain were. The handsome, muscular Yale instructor James Van de Velde was a non-ideologue with world-experience who had intruding upon Brodhead's safe, conventional Yale. He had been a White House appointee, and he had been in the U.S. Naval Intelligence Reserves. In the NATIONAL REVIEW 6 June 2006 Michael Rubin explained that Van de Velde became "the subject of personal jealousy and political animosity" at Yale. In the AMERICAN SPECTATOR for 19 June 2006 Clinton W. Taylor called him "certainly an anomaly," the way Brodhead treated me.
       Van de Velde was a bodybuilder and an expert in martial arts, including dangerous sports which demanded helmet or face mask. After the hapless New Haven police named him to the press in 1998 as someone they had questioned about the murder of one of his students, Brodhead arbitrarily fired him. Could any rational person, given the timeline of the slain student's last hours and Van de Velde's history and behavior, have taken him seriously as a suspect? Something about Van de Velde's muscular physique, I suspect, and something about his probing unconventional intellect, combined to set off fearful jealousy and lurid imaginings in Brodhead. In fantasies did he provide Van de Velde with a knife and send him ravening out into the streets? Vibrant and powerful as he had been, Van de Velde was slow to rebound from the loss of his career and his reputation, but his lawsuit against Yale and Brodhead was reinstated and ongoing.
       In 2006, when Duke lacrosse players were accused of raping and sodomizing a black stripper, Brodhead was not for a moment realistic and dispassionate. His reaction suggests that he had previously regarded the lacrosse players with irrational disdain. They all played a contact sport--a game that required a helmet as some of Van de Velde’s sports had done--and yet they were academically superior. It was not fair: they were like a swarm of muscular brilliant younger Van de Veldes come back to torment him! For Brodhead the lacrosse players were all fit objects of general disdain, and the worst culprits among them should have faced trial and punishment.
       Look at some of his statements: "Physical coercion and sexual assault are unacceptable in any setting and have no place at Duke." "Racism and its hateful language have no place in this community. I am sorry the woman and her friend were subjected to such abuse." "There is a body of behavior that's already established, and it's there for us to deal with, and every day we learn more about it. It's just time to take action on what's there before our eyes." “Before our eyes”? This is the man who (I said in 1984) was blind to human agony--he had closed “his eyes to the agony that lay behind Melville’s decision to record his rage against his reviewers and his fears about the death of his career as a writer.” I read Brodhead’s new book very carefully back then, in 1983 or so, while suffering myself for Melville, and saw him as utterly aloof from Melville’s agony.
       Brodhead trashed the reputations of the lacrosse players in his notorious 20 April 2006 comment to the Durham Chamber of Commerce: "If our students did what is alleged it is appalling to the worst degree. If they didn't do it, whatever they did was bad enough." The lacrosse players were "bad actors" according to Brodhead's spokesman John Burness. They were fantasy villains storming out in their helmets raping and plundering and even (oh, what horror!) urinating from precipices. They were imagined, not the real Duke students whom Brodhead should have been protecting from false accusations and false prosecution. Brodhead handed them over to the wolves, as he had tossed Van de Velde to the New Haven--well, bumbling curs, not really wolves, but able to savage a reputation.
       Michael Pressler, the Duke lacrosse coach, was by any rational definition a man's man, and as a coach was absolutely dedicated and honorable. He was middle-aged in 2006, married, the father of two daughters, but, as an admirer said, he had been, when younger, the kind of young man you pray that your daughter will bring home. Is there anything better you can say about a man? His reputation was spotless. After forcing Pressler to resign, Brodhead spoke contemptuously to John Burness, calling Pressler's replacement a "Mensch," the day to Pressler's night. How did the white-bread professor think he had earned the chutzpah to deny that Pressler was a Mensch? Pressler sued Duke for breaking the terms of settlement. Brodhead's co-defendant Burness was rebuked by a judge, already, for repeating Brodhead's remark to a journalist, and the judge even wondered aloud from the bench how anyone could be so stupid. Duke settled with Pressler (dollar amount not announced.) Brodhead cost his universities big money.
       Brodhead’s substitute coach seems to be a decent man, but he was simply not of Pressler's stature, and to slur Pressler this way reveals something troublingly irrational about Brodhead--a kind of trembling bravado against powerful men. And that misapplied word Mensch!
       What was swirling about in his murky fantasy world when Brodhead told Burness that Pressler was decidedly not a Mensch? Why, the word "Mensch" coming from the mouth of Richard Brodhead is like the word "chastity" coming from the mouth of the false accuser of the lacrosse players.
       The rational world knows better. Bryant University hired Pressler and in August 2008 gave him an extension to make his contract run 7 years more.  President Machtley said, "Coach Pressler is not only a highly successful coach, but an accomplished and respected educator." Then in September 2008 came the news that Pressler was named head coach of the U.S. men's team for world competition in 2010 at the Federation of International Lacrosse Championship games. Was Brodhead, sued by Pressler for breaking the settlement, in touch with reality enough to understand just how the rest of the world sees Michael Pressler? Or is he still mired in his lonely fantasy biography of Pressler?
       Something strange goes on in Brodhead around powerful younger men like Van de Velde and Pressler or apparently powerful old men like me, and something even weirder goes on when Brodhead confronts scholastically brilliant helmeted youths, some of them downright beautiful.
       As Dean of Yale College and President of Duke University, Brodhead, like Melville's Radney, was in a position to strike out against those he fantasized about. Does Brodhead fantasize about the rare academic Steelkilts who loom up in his safe world, men "very significantly his superior in general pride of manhood," so that he tries to destroy their reputations, which means destroying their lives?
       Many of Brodhead’s victims, including Van de Velde and me, have felt, at times, that our lives were ruined because of his lies; some of the lacrosse players have said they felt the same way. Even Pressler endured a dark period, jobless, his reputation besmeared.
       After years of private agony at the savaging of my reputation, I began speaking out. I did not sue him. Brodhead, I believe, has been a defendant in more ongoing significant lawsuits than any university president in American history. Duke has already settled with three lacrosse players for an amount rumored at between $18,000,000 and $30,000,000--all because Brodhead out of his irrational jealous loathing of lacrosse players (oh, those brilliant beautiful young helmeted athletes) could not bring himself to protect them. What his slurs of the non-indicted lacrosse players may yet cost Duke and Brodhead himself! What a cost Brodhead and Yale may yet pay for Brodhead's fantasies of James Van de Velde! You have to wonder if other murky fantasy biographies are swirling around in Brodhead's brain now, involving still other people with natures and powers superior to his. At night does he pore over and over a lurid library of his fantasy biographies? One would not want to live in his head.
       One would not want to live in Brodhead’s head in April 2011, when he knew that Judge Beaty had found strong evidence that he was guilty of obstruction of justice and constructive fraud—evidence strong enough to move two cases toward the potentially devastating DISCOVERY process.
       In 2006 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. And now all the world knows what he is.      

       He was not done with me. In 2013 . . . .

       The 11 February 2013 Chronicle of Higher Education gave a whole page to my MELVILLE BIOGRAPHY: AN INSIDE NARRATIVE. Much of the article is accurate reporting of a telephone conversation with me. But there was a clearly deliberate decision NOT to report the actual grievance I had against Brodhead and Delbanco. As I just said, they lied about me, saying I had made up lost Melville books. Brodhead said I alone in my "black hole" had imagined the 1860 POEMS. Delbanco said that because I had merely surmised THE ISLE OF THE CROSS (1853) and POEMS (1860) I could not be trusted anywhere in either volume of my biography. (As you also know, Delbanco casually mentioned the existence of these book lost books in his 2005 book, with no explanation of how he had learned of them.)

       Instead of saying at the outset, "Parker protests against lies that damaged his reputation," as the draft I saw did, someone at the Chronicle decided to cut that and instead solicit words from Brodhead and Delbanco. The Chronicle (remember this is the Chronical of Higher Education) says that I found myself "at odds with such Melville scholars as Richard Brodhead (who raised questions about Parker's 'editorial principles' in The New York Times) and Andrew Delbanco (who, while criticizing Parker's misreading of sex and sin, did declare, in The New York Review of Books, that 'Parker's biography is written with love and devotion'). Critics' skepticism centered on two issues: the name of a lost Melville story ('The Isle of the Cross') and the importance of an 1860 manuscript called 'Poems.'"

       This was interpolated at the last day or two by someone high up in the Chronicle of HIGHER Education. It is simply not true. These are new lies. Brodhead had not raised questions about editorial principle at all. Did he know what an editorial principle was? Where did the censor come up with “love and devotion”? And the writer of the new opening calls Brodhead a “scholar.” He was never a scholar. He was a critic.

       What should we make of scholarly effort in THE JOURNALS OF CHARLES W. CHESNUTT as edited by Richard H. Brodhead (1993)? There had been a still-mysterious challenge to Brodhead’s THE SCHOOL OF HAWTHORNE (1986) for dealing only with Dead White Men. This was a press’s reviewer, apparently, a just-at-the-last-minute-before-publication challenge. To meet this unspecified criticism, Brodhead composed a thickly veiled argument in his 1986 Preface acknowledging that we should "extend the range of our literary attentions out beyond canonical boundaries" (viii) but, it seems, he did not rethink his manuscript. Nevertheless, the challenge to his Dead White Men view of literature terrified Brodhead, who did not dare to be left far behind in matters of gender, race, and class. Very interestingly, years later he cannily pre-dated his own fascination with multiculturalism, making it earlier than THE SCHOOL OF HAWTHORNE, not later.

       What you see in the Acknowledgments to the Chesnutt book is a critic desperately trying to sound like a real scholarly researcher but not being able to do the job, even for a selection of the meager journals: "Kevis Goodman gave expert aid in transcribing parts of the second and third journals. Jeffrey and Christa Sammons deciphered Chesnutt's old-style German script with cheerful efficiency. LaJean P. Carruth brought her skills to bear on journal passages kept in Pittman shorthand. . . . Daisy Maxwell's extraordinary command of local archival materials made it possible to identify many otherwise inscrutable figures and episodes from Chesnutt's Fayetteville years. . . ." And so on! Scholars are supposed to be the experts! Local Librarians and Local Historians are not supposed to do work for real scholars! And no scholar strews his pages with "illegible" and "indecipherable." Almost every scholar will throw up his or her hands sometimes, but then he or she declares that a word is still “undeciphered.” Your dim-witted second cousin can come along and glance at the line and say, "Oh, that line reads so-and-so, what was the word that bothered you?" The importance of the trivial edition of Chesnutt's journals is that Brodhead needed to have serious street creds with multiculturalism, but could not undertake and complete successfully a serious job. He is a critic, not a scholar.

       What was so hard for the editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education about admitting that the dean of Yale College and a chaired professor at Columbia lied? Well, something is so hard that it made the CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION falsify what I say in the book and further falsify what Brodhead and Delbanco actually did. What does this say about corruption at the top, at elitist universities? Why couldn't the Chronicle use words like "falsification" and "misrepresentation" even if they are unwilling to say "lies"? Why INVENT issues between me and Brodhead and Delbanco rather than identifying the real issues? This gets to big questions about the state of "higher education"! The Ivy League protects itself.

       All through the election of 2016 Donald Trump lied and lied and lied. This was back when every reporter had to give equal time to lies if not more time to lies than truth. No one ever talked about false statements, did they? In 2020 some few reporters, it seemed, began to call out liars. Then before and after the election Trump persuaded his followers that the election had been stolen by the Democrats. He still goes about making speeches about the stolen election.

       But in July 2022 Trump lawyers have hit on a defense. He “subjectively believes” that he really won the election in 2020 and therefore cannot lie when he claims the election was stolen. Well, I have come to believe that Richard Brodhead may “subjectively believe” that he needs to make no apology to Van De Velde, to me, to the Lacrosse players, to Pressler. Does he subjectively believes that he did not lie about us?

       On 8 July 2022 Andrew Van Dam in the Washington Post asserted: “People from elite backgrounds increasingly dominate academia, data shows. First-generation academics were always rare, Now they’re vanishing.” Van Dam is writing on economics in particular but also on “academia in general,” claiming that it has “quietly become the province of an insular elite, a group likely to have had little exposure to the travails of America’s vast middle class.” They took safe jobs where they could do minimal work and get tenure and live quietly. The reason people from “elite backgrounds dominate academia” is that they don’t need the money. The economist John List, who was from a lower class, emphasizes that “the chosen people at birth don’t have a monopoly on innovative ideas.” In fact, they are apt to have fewer ideas. Professor List says, “Step back and ask yourself: How many . . . ideas did we lose because of exclusivity? Many future breakthroughs will come from individuals with off-the-beaten-path histories.”

      One of the most telling revelations Brodhead ever made about himself is in refusing to take the Kraken Pierre as a challenge to visualize what Melville had  finished when he took it to the Harpers at the very end of 1851 or the first day of 1852. The book was designed as a challenge to think. Brodhead said, oh, wittily, “Thanks but no thanks.” He really said that. He was not about to rethink anything.

       Anne Nelson, in the TLS 15 July 2022 reviews Charles Eaton’s Bankers in the Ivory Tower to show that a “new chapter has emerged in the character of elite colleges and universities--notably, but not exclusively, the Ivy League institutions of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia.” Elite colleges, Eaton shows, “boast of advances in racial diversity,” but the numbers disappoint. Nelson cites a 2017 report in the New York Times “that five of the Ivy League schools had more students from the top 1 percent of the income scale than from the bottom 60 percent.”

       A Dean of Yale Students in 2002 who lies about me is to be protected. Even years later, in 2013, someone in the leadership of the Chronicle of Higher Education intervenes at the last minute to telephone Brodhead then change what I wrote to another outright lie. They protect their own, and set me up for mockery because nothing I am quoted as saying makes sense without the initial description of Brodhead and others saying I invented The Isle of the Cross and Poems. They posed as the careful skeptical scholars while I was the fantasist. In truth, they were ignorant or simply malicious in falsely accusing me. They did not know the most basic bit of Melville scholarship, data included in The Melville Log (1951) or the 1969 expansion which I supervised. Information is irrelevant to interpretation. Why, the 1951 Log has a document about the 1860 Poems not known in the long 1922 article that first revealed it.

       The Historical Note in the 1988 Northwestern-Newberry Moby-Dick contains astonishing new information, from the 1983 trove of documents, about the days and hours around the meeting of Melville and Hawthorne in 1850. Delbanco’s Winter 1992 essay “Melville in the ’80s” treats only pieces of literary criticism, nothing scholarly, not even the 1988 Moby-Dick. He does not consider real scholarship, real revelations. If he had considered it worthy of his notice he might have included it in his review essay on Melville in the 1980s. Brodheads and Delbanco still represent where Melville scholarship is in the most elite universities.