"Richard H. Brodhead: Troth and Consequences"
I am reposting this from Sunday, March 13, 2011 because of Judge Beaty's decision on April 1st to let the charges of "obstruction of justice" and "constructive fraud" to go ahead against President Brodhead. This article will make more sense than ever in the light of my new article on "Constructive Fraud." As we have seen over the last few years, there are disturbing recurrent patterns in Brodhead's literary criticism, treatment of employees, treatment of scholars, and treatment of students.
RICHARD H. BRODHEAD: TROTH & CONSEQUENCES
Long-festering resentments may lie behind the reckless rush to the wrong judgments which Brodhead displayed toward James Van de Velde, Hershel Parker, and Coach Pressler and the falsely accused lacrosse players at Duke.
In "The Education of Richard Brodhead: Continuity and Change over Dean's 40 years at Yale" (Yale HERALD, 20 February 2004), Matthew Ferraro said farewell to a fixture who would soon become President of Duke University. Behind closed doors, Brodhead reflected confidentially on the years after his arrival as a freshman in 1964. Brodhead had "experienced the uncertainty of the '70s as a young untenured, if popular, professor, but stayed on despite offers from other universities." He had felt constrained by the emphasis on poetry and European writers: "He calls his decision to study and teach mostly novels in his adult life 'my own act of revolt.'" [Brodhead did not, of course, revolt to the point of rethinking how novels were studied in the 1960s and early 1970s, only as perfect New Critical artifacts.] After he completed his PhD, at Yale, Brodhead "won a choice appointment to the Yale junior faculty and began teaching," but "not everything was rosy." There were "disappointments." Brodhead remembered the 1970s "as an 'incredibly dispiriting time.'" Because of inflation, faculty salaries fell 30% in buying power, and "chances at professional advancement at Yale did not look particularly promising in a department that had not tenured anyone in years." To Ferraro, behind those closed doors, Brodhead spoke with unusual candor: "It was not fun. And you might say it was particularly not fun to be an untenured professor in a university where it didn't seem like anyone would ever get promoted."
During the 1970s, Brodhead said, he was offered tenured positions at two other universities but turned both down. His patience, or passivity, ultimately paid off: "In 1980, Brodhead was awarded tenure after an excruciatingly complex process. 'That was, you can say, the beginning of a new phase of my life' he said." Ferraro passes over Brodhead's intriguing comment on the "excruciatingly complex process." It was excruciating to Brodhead, presumably, but we are not told how it was complex. "Brodhead was surprised" at being granted tenure, Ferraro says, without explaining why he was surprised. Even tenure did not make Brodhead comfortable: "Despite being tenured, however, he was not yet a full professor. Unhappy with his department, he seriously considered an offer to 'rebuild a notable English program somewhere else,' he said. He met with then-Dean Howard Lamar . . . who convinced him to stay." Lamar told Ferraro: "Of course he had no reason to worry, but I couldn't tell him that." Lamar, said Brodhead, "led me to understand that I was in a troth, and he led me to see that life might be better sometime, and soon after it was." Brodhead was named a full professor in 1985.
Brodhead had stayed on, despite a humiliatingly slow and “complex” process by which Yale decided to grant him tenure but to leave him for some years "in a troth," living on hints that the lover would take him as a bride in a legitimate public marriage. Meanwhile, the lover, Yale, could make overtures to or entertain overtures from any young, alien, trendy, and disturbingly nubile candidate on the annual marriage market. In the end, patience, passivity, deference, hunkering down and keeping his nose clean, had paid off, and Brodhead soon became chairman of the English Department and then Dean of Yale College. Everything was all right at last?
No, the "excruciatingly complex process" during which, untenured, Brodhead taught alongside his tenured teachers, many of whom were less popular with students than he, had scarred Brodhead. He had kept his mouth shut too often and too long for him to be easy with himself and his colleagues even when tenure was finally granted him without promotion to full professor. Perhaps no one can understand just how he felt. I can understand better than most. At Northwestern I took my MA and PhD in four years, as Brodhead did at Yale (Ferraro marveled at the speed!). After two years at Urbana as an assistant professor I was hired back at Northwestern, still as an assistant professor. Nominally teaching half time while working half time on the new Melville Project at the Newberry Library, I worked full time on the Melville Project, taught passionately, and picked up a few dollars from teaching novels to the Glencoe Literary Ladies. On the Melville Edition I had weighty responsibilities but no authority. That was the mid-1960s, the high triumph of the New Criticism, which stressed final product instead of process. The dominant textual theory, which also stressed final product, was perfect in the cases of simple correction but, I found, could not apply to authorial revision. I began asking questions about the creative process, but had no one to talk to until the Faulkner scholar James B. Meriwether came back to Chicago. In the years since his last visit we had worked our way to similar conclusions, I on Melville, he on Faulkner. We talked for hours about the creative process and sober second thoughts, and the next day I started looking for a job. The chairman had reneged on a promised raise, confident that I was trapped. To be free to rethink the dominant literary and textual theories I could not stay on where I had been a graduate student. When the chairman offered a raise and tenure, he was too late.
What if Brodhead had taken one of his offers and gone away from Yale in the 1970s? What if he had encountered faculty members who were unlike him, perhaps even some men (or women) from a lower social class? What if he had been forced to stand his ground on principles and define intellectual turf worth defending? What if he had encountered students who were not male, white, and wealthy, as his first students at Yale were? What if rather than enduring the "excruciatingly complex" process of becoming tenured at Yale he had taken earlier tenure elsewhere and had knocked about a bit, learning to deal with people quite unlike the adolescent buddies from Andover who proved to be his lifelong friends?
Had he left Yale, Brodhead might not have given rein to the demeaning and ultimately damning psychological quirks that are in the process of destroyed his reputation. For his reputation IS being destroyed. He settled with three formerly indicted Duke lacrosse players for a figure cited variously as between $18,000,000 and $30,000,000. He is being sued for his rush to judgment at Yale (James Van de Velde's lawsuit, naming Brodhead, having been reinstated in December 2007). He was sued by Michael Pressler, the Duke lacrosse coach he fired, for violating terms of their agreement, and Duke settled with Pressler. He is being sued by three unindicted lacrosse players. He is being sued by more than thirty lacrosse players and family members for charges involving criminal conspiracies. Damningly, he had exhibited the "extraordinary moral meltdown" described in the Taylor-Johnson book, UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT (p. 122). Brodhead will never regain a high reputation, not after the long delayed DISCOVERY PROCESSES are pushed through—and this is all aside from his strange search for an “intermediate explanation” of Dr. Anil Potti’s false claim to have been a Rhodes Scholar and the faked science with which he was treating real human beings with cancer until late in 2010.
Meanwhile, Brodhead's reputation as a scholar is being examined by a man he defamed in the New York TIMES on 23 June 2002. There he called me a "demon researcher" who showed "a single-mindedness worthy of a Melvillean hero," presumably Ahab, the captain of a doomed ship. After years of archival work I had merely "surmised" the existence of two lost books of Melville's. In fact scholars had known much about one of the books since 1960 and all about the other book since 1922. Brodhead's own academic "work" disintegrates at a skeptical touch, sometimes grotesquely, as when I pointed out that Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a man he jeered at for losing his reputation, ought to have been featured as a star pupil in THE SCHOOL OF HAWTHORNE (along with such women as Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote novels influenced by Hawthorne).
Brodhead had coasted to a high reputation as he had coasted through life. But something bad happened during those years of waiting, of being "in a troth." Brodhead soured. Later, when chances arose, he rushed precipitously to the wrong judgments, as if eager to punish the innocent. Brodhead fired James Van de Velde at Yale when the inept New Haven police let it be known that they had questioned him in the murder of a student. All the evidence pointed away from Van de Velde, but he had been the student's adviser, and police had questioned him. That was enough for Brodhead.
In the 1 April 2001 Hartford COURANT Les Gura described Van de Velde as a top student and athlete who graduated from Yale in 1982, then took his doctorate in international security studies from Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. In Van de Velde's "top secret government security clearance as a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve," he took "government and education positions in the U.S. and abroad for the State Department." After real-life adventures such as Brodhead had never known, Van de Velde went back to Yale in 1993 as dean of Saybrook College. "In the spring of 1997," Gura reported, "he took a leave from Yale on a Navy assignment to help monitor the status of peace in Bosnia from a base in Italy." At the time of his firing, Van de Velde was a lecturer in Yale's political science department. "With his training and combined government and education backgrounds," he was preparing to become "a television commentator on foreign affairs who also could find time to be a college lecturer."
Van de Velde had remained an athlete, a proficient even in martial arts which required the use of face masks or helmets. He was regularly described as a "handsome" man. He was flexible, adaptable, resourceful, variously competent, not a timid, cosseted man trying to believe he was really "in a troth." Was he, to Brodhead, unbearably manly? Wielding his new power, Brodhead recklessly fired him. Van de Velde told Gura,"my life is destroyed yet there is nothing I have ever done that I feel ashamed of."
As for me, I was a "demon researcher" and Brodhead, like most of his New Critical teachers, had no idea what research was. In a 1984 book, FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS, I had challenged both the New Criticism and the dominant textual theory and incidentally had pointed out Brodhead's coldness in closing his eyes to Melville's agony in enlarging PIERRE, cheerful that he was left a New Critical text to toy with. Did he know how unlike him I was, a Depression Okie and Texan, forced to drop out of high school, a railroad telegrapher for seven years until I left Texas on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship? Was I someone who could be easily sacrificed, kept from a Pulitzer in 2003 after being one of two finalists in 1997? For I was sacrificed by Brodhead, Andrew Delbanco, and Elizabeth Schultz, critics who declared that I was not to be trusted, when the evidence of my statements was right there on the pages of the book they were being paid to review. My health suffered for five years. I did not sleep one night without feeling the pain from the false accusations. In 2007 I began speaking out, and never lost sleep over the lies again. During all the nine years from 2002 until today, the Brodhead-Delbanco-Schultz reviews have been blazoned on the Internet., freshly defaming me every day. Not one of these critics has apologized.
At Duke, we know, Brodhead once again rushed to the wrong judgment, firing the admirable lacrosse coach and prejudicing the public against the falsely accused lacrosse players by saying that whatever they did was "bad enough." As at Yale, his victims were young, healthy, and handsome men, some from families more wealthy even than those of Brodhead and his friends at Andover and Yale. Again, they were athletes in a sport which involved bodily contact and the wearing of helmets. All of them were academic achievers, and some were brilliant. Do Homeric or Shakespearean memories haunt Brodhead, so that he sees himself as Thersites in contrast to Hector or Achilles?
Seeking to understand Brodhead's strange antipathy to brilliant handsome young athletes, I can best compare him to Radney in MOBY-DICK, so irrationally determined to pulverize Steelkilt, his superior in brains and physique, or Claggart, so jealous of the handsome and innocent Billy Budd. Did the "incredibly dispiriting" 1970s enrage Brodhead so that when he gained power he used it arbitrarily against those of whom he was fiercely jealous--usually men younger, brighter, more resourceful, and far more athletic than he was? The man who fired Van de Velde, led a trio of character assassins against me (for a non-scholarly would-be biographer and another Melville critic echoed Brodhead false accusations about merely “surmising” two lost Melville books), and turned his back on the Duke lacrosse coach, the players, and their parents--this man should never have been granted the power to inflict harm. Brodhead was already damaged goods. The lawsuits against Brodhead, Duke, and Durham have been unconscionably delayed. Van de Velde’s suit against Brodhead and Yale is reinstated but unconscionably delayed.
Now in 2011 it is clear that Duke, Potti, and others will be slapped with malpractice suits by the cancer patients who underwent actual treatment based on phony science—the cancer patients or surviving members of their families. Dr. Anil Potti faked his resume and mislead his colleagues into signing papers in which he faked science. He and his colleagues published papers in respected journals which purported to show how to select cancer treatment by analyzing an individual patient's genomic information--boutique analysis and treatment available only at Duke! Biostatisticians at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center tried to warn the Duke administration that Potti's results could not be duplicated, but the administrators sat on the information. Luckily, sciences are still more honest than literary criticism, so the Texans persisted, and in the last months Potti and his colleagues have renounced their own papers, including one in NATURE MEDICINE and one in the NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE. Some weeks ago now, long after evidence was clear that Potti had faked his credentials and was every day treating real cancer patients with faked science, Brodhead wistfully hoped that there could be some “intermediate explanation” for Potti’s difficulties. That phrasing will be remembered by those whose cancers advanced while they were being “treated” by faked science. Where will the culpability end? Where will the human suffering end?
At least, science still (in the end) seems to be held to a high standard. Literary reviewing, literary criticism, is held to no standard at all. Has Brodhead ever thought of renouncing one of his publications, asking, for example, the New York Times to mark one of his reviews as withdrawn because untrue? No, Brodhead learned how to write conventional literary criticism very early but he learned no standards for scholarship at Charles Feidelson's Yale. Does he reflect on the parallels between faked scientific expertise and faked expertise in literary scholarship now that Potti is exposed? Did he see himself at risk when he tried to deflect examination of Potti's bad publicity? There will be some sort of punishment for Potti, and certainly punishment for Duke as a result of the actions of Potti and his associates, but there is no punishment for a reviewer who in the New York Times fakes knowledge of scholarship, who passes himself off as competent to review a book based on archival research and on the whole course of research on Herman Melville.
But will there, after all, as DISCOVERY proceeds in April 2011, be punishment for Richard H. Brodhead's "constructive fraud" in one case and "obstruction of justice" in another? Think about Brodhead's position as President of Duke University, the judge having decided that "conspiracy" charges would be too hard to prove but deciding that there is ample evidence for DISCOVERY to proceed on the charges of "constructive fraud" and "obstruction of justice." Will emails be located after 5 years time? Have a few honest faculty members at Duke saved emails from the start, such as the one which urges everyone to get their stories straight? Can even a figurehead function in such a perfect storm all brought down by his own behavior on his own head?
Showing posts with label Michael Pressler. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michael Pressler. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Monday, May 2, 2011
Richard H. Brodhead: The Duke of Disdain
Richard H. Brodhead: The Duke of Disdain
Although history is replete with records of those in high office who manifest feelings of contemptuous aversion to others of a lower and vulnerable standing, in the twenty-first century haughty disdain is not apt to take the top place in the list of qualifications for being an American university dean or presidency. Yet Richard H. Brodhead as Dean of Yale College and after 2004 as President of Duke University has repeatedly allowed disdain to color his writings and dead literary people and his treatment of real human beings. I have become something of an authority on Brodhead's character after 23 June 2002 when he disdainfully defamed me while ignoring the work of my mentors and other scholars in his New York TIMES review of the second volume of my biography of Melville.
Perhaps the best way of seeing Brodhead's disdain in its unforced, natural form is to look at it when it is not directed at living persons such as the Yale instructor James Van de Velde, me and my older Melville colleagues, or Duke’s lacrosse coach, Michael Pressler, and the Duke lacrosse players and their families.
I point to Brodhead's THE SCHOOL OF HAWTHORNE (1986), where one trips hard against this remarkably invidious and quite gratuitous comment: "Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a once-admired poet more forgotten now than even the word 'limbo' can suggest, found his poetical vocation while reading Longfellow."
As someone who knows first hand just how much pain Brodhead's snide innuendo can inflict, I wince at the disdain in this sentence as I retype it. Poor Aldrich! Not even lying in limbo--still more forgotten than that! Here his elitist contempt masks Brodhead's own ignorance, for his disdain is grotesquely misapplied.
Yes, popular writers fall out of favor, and may become neglected if not wholly forgotten. But this egregious slurring of Thomas Bailey Aldrich (whose THE STORY OF A BAD BOY, at least, ought to awaken kind memories in an English professor) exposes something shameful.
Brodhead is gratuitously slurring a man he should have been reading. While preparing a book called THE SCHOOL OF HAWTHORNE a genuine scholar at Yale, inching down the aisles of the Sterling Memorial Library while compulsively reading old novels, would have seized on that very Thomas Bailey Aldrich's THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY, not poetry but a (once) popular novel.
Brodhead ought to have known the book, for it shows Aldrich as a proud member of the school of Hawthorne. THE STILLWATER TRAGEDYopens with a passage written in loving homage to Hawthorne's set piece in THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES on the passage of the night and the morning while a corpse awaits discovery. Brodhead's arrogant ignorance pokes out through his disdain.
When disdain forms a dark pillar of your character you may often neglect to do the basic homework which a research topic demands. Brodhead wrote a book about dead white men whom he could link to Hawthorne, and famous dead white men at that. Anyone who knew American literature would have known not just about Aldrich as a member of the school of Hawthorne but would also have known about other men, no longer famous, who were in Hawthorne's classroom, as well as women, including the famous Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Brodhead had not read Stowe's Hawthorne-influenced New England novels, or else he would have made them part of his book. Brodhead simply did not know who attended "the school of Hawthorne," and he ruined the topic for anyone else. Because the august Oxford University Press published his book, no one else is going to publish a better book called THE REAL SCHOOL OF HAWTHORNE.
Michael Rubin on 6 June 2006 in the NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE accused Brodhead of having "a history of allowing public relations to trump principle." Rubin explained the Yale precedent: "On December 4, 1998, senior Suzanne Jovin was found stabbed to death and left at an intersection in a neighborhood adjacent to the Yale campus which housed many Yale professors and graduate students." Brodhead, acting for Yale, was obsessed with avoiding adverse publicity. Rubin continued, "When Jovin was murdered, justice took a backseat to damage control. Within days New Haven police and Yale officials publicly fingered political scientist James Van de Velde, Jovin’s senior essay adviser."
According to Rubin, "Yale administrators did not care that there was neither evidence nor motive linking Van de Velde to Jovin. Her body had been found a half-mile from his house. Just as at Duke, Brodhead spoke eloquently about the principles of due process, but moved to subvert it. Citing the New Haven Police Department’s naming of Van de Velde among 'a pool of suspects,' Brodhead cancelled Van de Velde’s spring-term lecture, explaining that 'the cancellation of the course doesn’t follow from a judgment or a prejudgment of his hypothetical involvement in the Jovin case.' As at Duke, Brodhead insisted that due process would prevail. Despite Van de Velde’s stellar student reviews and distinguished record, Brodhead then let his contract lapse. Van de Velde left New Haven, his career in shambles."
Disdain was at work in Brodhead's treatment of the Yale instructor James Van de Velde. According to one of Van de Velde's students, Clinton W. Taylor, Van de Velde was an anomaly at Yale: "He was a star lecturer and had been a residential college dean. He was also a former White House appointee under George H. W. Bush and a member of the U.S. Naval Intelligence Reserves. Most Yale professors lean to the left of the student body; few in the political-science and international-relations departments have real-world experience.”
Van de Velde was the subject of personal jealousy and political animosity. Many faculty members -- including Brodhead -- looked askance at his desire to emphasize practical policymaking over theory. Some questioned, for example, his willingness to help Jovin write -- in 1998 -- about the threat posed by Osama bin Laden to the U.S. to be unscholarly. From an academic point-of-view, Van de Velde was a black sheep." Debbie Schlussel in WordNetDaily wrote on 20 July 2001 that Van de Velde's life has been "bludgeoned": "Van de Velde is alive, but Yale has unjustly taken his life and dreams away from him. Academic freedom be damned."
"A handsome, popular professor," according to his student Taylor, "Van de Velde's courses, like 'International Drug Trafficking: National Security Dimensions and Drug Control Strategies,' were cited by Spin Magazine as among the coolest in American collegiate life, and he got rave reviews from students. He'd also begun a promising career as a television commentator on national security issues." At Yale, according to Schlussel, "all things good and decent, all of Van de Velde's wunderkind achievements and accolades made him a target – of colleagues, of Yale, of the NHPD. With a strong tinge of jealousy, they were out to get the ascendant handsome, young, connected, Republican white male. The nerve of this man to invade Yale's political science department – populated by aging liberal academics – and to actually become a popular professor to boot."
Physically Van de Velde was no cosseted, genteel junior appointee as Brodhead had been in the 1970s. According to the blogger Patriotlad, Van de Velde's "schedule was all work, study, and working out." Van de Velde could take care of himself physically and intellectual but he was no match for the politically and institutionally powerful Brodhead.
Brodhead was disdainful of James Van de Velde in part, surely, because he was a real-world non-ideologue who was intruding upon safe, conventional Yale beliefs. Brodhead himself was an eminently safe man, having been an undergraduate at Yale, graduate student at Yale, assistant professor at Yale, and successively promoted until he became Dean of Yale College. What's wrong with that?
In Brodhead's case, it meant that he never learned how to learn to do research. He learned how to be a critic, not how to be a scholar, a person who actively adds to knowledge. The New Criticism had been dominant at Yale since 1953, when Charles Feidelson replaced Stanley T. Williams, the teacher of the great Melville graduate students of the 1940s. After Feidelson, scholarly research all but died at Yale as one critical dissertation after another was written.
The original New Critics of the 1940s, including some who taught at Yale, had been trained as scholars, but Yale became a place where those who had never done scholarly research taught those who would never do scholarly research, and would be distrustful and hostile toward it. Even aside from the disaster of having each Yale generation farther and farther from real scholarly work, it's always bad for a school to hire its own. It guarantees that no new literary approaches will be attempted, it perpetuates old values and approaches. It discourages fresh thought.
Such coddling was unintentionally devastating to a favored student like Brodhead, for it deprived him of the necessity to test himself in job market and to face the challenge of dealing with a non-homogeneous set of colleagues in another part of the country. (I speak from the experience of having been hired back at Northwestern, finding out after two years that I was expected not to think non-authorized thoughts about literary creativity, and setting myself the goal of getting out fast.) Brodhead had been pampered all his academic life—to his great detriment.
On June 6, 2006 , as the Lacrosse Hoax was unravelling, when it was becoming clear that the rape accusation against Duke lacrosse players was false, Rubin summarized: "On March 25, Duke University President Richard Brodhead issued a statement declaring, 'Physical coercion and sexual assault are unacceptable in any setting and have no place at Duke.' Of course, he issued the caveat, 'People are presumed innocent until proven guilty,' but on campuses today, such presumption is secondary. On April 5, Brodhead canceled the lacrosse team’s season and promised an investigation of the culture of college athletes as well as Duke’s own response. The lacrosse coach resigned." The coach, Michael Pressler, in fact had been forced to resign, and later successfully sued Duke for his mistreatment and co-wrote an account of the experience, IT'S NOT ABOUT THE TRUTH. Still later, when Brodhead slurred Pressler disdainfully in violation of their agreement and his underling James Burness repeated the slur to a reporter, Pressler successfully sued Duke University, making Duke pay for its having hired the Duke of Disdain.
Rubin went on to explain how "Brodhead’s willingness to offer up a sacrificial lamb undercut justice in other ways." Rubin pointed out: "Brodhead has never apologized." He concluded: "If Brodhead recognizes his error in the Jovin case, he should apologize to Van de Velde, its other victim. That he repeats his mistakes—at Yale canceling a class; at Duke, a lacrosse season—does his leadership a disservice. Although just yesterday [Rubin was writing on 6 June 2006] he agreed to allow a 'probationary' reinstatement of the lacrosse team, at Duke, he has affirmed those who, with accusations of racism and adherence to political correctness, demanded premature action. He has treated the accused cavalierly. Justice should take its course. Brodhead need not act until the charges are dismissed or a verdict returned. But, if then, it transpires that he has once again tarred the innocent, he can prove his leadership with an apology or a resignation."
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, the Duke of Disdain.
Will the current DISCOVERY process in two lawsuits bring forth more examples of Brodhead’s disdain for his students and selected PC targets as we learn just how he obstructed justice and just how he engaged in constructive fraud (the two charges going to trial)?
Although history is replete with records of those in high office who manifest feelings of contemptuous aversion to others of a lower and vulnerable standing, in the twenty-first century haughty disdain is not apt to take the top place in the list of qualifications for being an American university dean or presidency. Yet Richard H. Brodhead as Dean of Yale College and after 2004 as President of Duke University has repeatedly allowed disdain to color his writings and dead literary people and his treatment of real human beings. I have become something of an authority on Brodhead's character after 23 June 2002 when he disdainfully defamed me while ignoring the work of my mentors and other scholars in his New York TIMES review of the second volume of my biography of Melville.
Perhaps the best way of seeing Brodhead's disdain in its unforced, natural form is to look at it when it is not directed at living persons such as the Yale instructor James Van de Velde, me and my older Melville colleagues, or Duke’s lacrosse coach, Michael Pressler, and the Duke lacrosse players and their families.
I point to Brodhead's THE SCHOOL OF HAWTHORNE (1986), where one trips hard against this remarkably invidious and quite gratuitous comment: "Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a once-admired poet more forgotten now than even the word 'limbo' can suggest, found his poetical vocation while reading Longfellow."
As someone who knows first hand just how much pain Brodhead's snide innuendo can inflict, I wince at the disdain in this sentence as I retype it. Poor Aldrich! Not even lying in limbo--still more forgotten than that! Here his elitist contempt masks Brodhead's own ignorance, for his disdain is grotesquely misapplied.
Yes, popular writers fall out of favor, and may become neglected if not wholly forgotten. But this egregious slurring of Thomas Bailey Aldrich (whose THE STORY OF A BAD BOY, at least, ought to awaken kind memories in an English professor) exposes something shameful.
Brodhead is gratuitously slurring a man he should have been reading. While preparing a book called THE SCHOOL OF HAWTHORNE a genuine scholar at Yale, inching down the aisles of the Sterling Memorial Library while compulsively reading old novels, would have seized on that very Thomas Bailey Aldrich's THE STILLWATER TRAGEDY, not poetry but a (once) popular novel.
Brodhead ought to have known the book, for it shows Aldrich as a proud member of the school of Hawthorne. THE STILLWATER TRAGEDYopens with a passage written in loving homage to Hawthorne's set piece in THE HOUSE OF THE SEVEN GABLES on the passage of the night and the morning while a corpse awaits discovery. Brodhead's arrogant ignorance pokes out through his disdain.
When disdain forms a dark pillar of your character you may often neglect to do the basic homework which a research topic demands. Brodhead wrote a book about dead white men whom he could link to Hawthorne, and famous dead white men at that. Anyone who knew American literature would have known not just about Aldrich as a member of the school of Hawthorne but would also have known about other men, no longer famous, who were in Hawthorne's classroom, as well as women, including the famous Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Brodhead had not read Stowe's Hawthorne-influenced New England novels, or else he would have made them part of his book. Brodhead simply did not know who attended "the school of Hawthorne," and he ruined the topic for anyone else. Because the august Oxford University Press published his book, no one else is going to publish a better book called THE REAL SCHOOL OF HAWTHORNE.
Michael Rubin on 6 June 2006 in the NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE accused Brodhead of having "a history of allowing public relations to trump principle." Rubin explained the Yale precedent: "On December 4, 1998, senior Suzanne Jovin was found stabbed to death and left at an intersection in a neighborhood adjacent to the Yale campus which housed many Yale professors and graduate students." Brodhead, acting for Yale, was obsessed with avoiding adverse publicity. Rubin continued, "When Jovin was murdered, justice took a backseat to damage control. Within days New Haven police and Yale officials publicly fingered political scientist James Van de Velde, Jovin’s senior essay adviser."
According to Rubin, "Yale administrators did not care that there was neither evidence nor motive linking Van de Velde to Jovin. Her body had been found a half-mile from his house. Just as at Duke, Brodhead spoke eloquently about the principles of due process, but moved to subvert it. Citing the New Haven Police Department’s naming of Van de Velde among 'a pool of suspects,' Brodhead cancelled Van de Velde’s spring-term lecture, explaining that 'the cancellation of the course doesn’t follow from a judgment or a prejudgment of his hypothetical involvement in the Jovin case.' As at Duke, Brodhead insisted that due process would prevail. Despite Van de Velde’s stellar student reviews and distinguished record, Brodhead then let his contract lapse. Van de Velde left New Haven, his career in shambles."
Disdain was at work in Brodhead's treatment of the Yale instructor James Van de Velde. According to one of Van de Velde's students, Clinton W. Taylor, Van de Velde was an anomaly at Yale: "He was a star lecturer and had been a residential college dean. He was also a former White House appointee under George H. W. Bush and a member of the U.S. Naval Intelligence Reserves. Most Yale professors lean to the left of the student body; few in the political-science and international-relations departments have real-world experience.”
Van de Velde was the subject of personal jealousy and political animosity. Many faculty members -- including Brodhead -- looked askance at his desire to emphasize practical policymaking over theory. Some questioned, for example, his willingness to help Jovin write -- in 1998 -- about the threat posed by Osama bin Laden to the U.S. to be unscholarly. From an academic point-of-view, Van de Velde was a black sheep." Debbie Schlussel in WordNetDaily wrote on 20 July 2001 that Van de Velde's life has been "bludgeoned": "Van de Velde is alive, but Yale has unjustly taken his life and dreams away from him. Academic freedom be damned."
"A handsome, popular professor," according to his student Taylor, "Van de Velde's courses, like 'International Drug Trafficking: National Security Dimensions and Drug Control Strategies,' were cited by Spin Magazine as among the coolest in American collegiate life, and he got rave reviews from students. He'd also begun a promising career as a television commentator on national security issues." At Yale, according to Schlussel, "all things good and decent, all of Van de Velde's wunderkind achievements and accolades made him a target – of colleagues, of Yale, of the NHPD. With a strong tinge of jealousy, they were out to get the ascendant handsome, young, connected, Republican white male. The nerve of this man to invade Yale's political science department – populated by aging liberal academics – and to actually become a popular professor to boot."
Physically Van de Velde was no cosseted, genteel junior appointee as Brodhead had been in the 1970s. According to the blogger Patriotlad, Van de Velde's "schedule was all work, study, and working out." Van de Velde could take care of himself physically and intellectual but he was no match for the politically and institutionally powerful Brodhead.
Brodhead was disdainful of James Van de Velde in part, surely, because he was a real-world non-ideologue who was intruding upon safe, conventional Yale beliefs. Brodhead himself was an eminently safe man, having been an undergraduate at Yale, graduate student at Yale, assistant professor at Yale, and successively promoted until he became Dean of Yale College. What's wrong with that?
In Brodhead's case, it meant that he never learned how to learn to do research. He learned how to be a critic, not how to be a scholar, a person who actively adds to knowledge. The New Criticism had been dominant at Yale since 1953, when Charles Feidelson replaced Stanley T. Williams, the teacher of the great Melville graduate students of the 1940s. After Feidelson, scholarly research all but died at Yale as one critical dissertation after another was written.
The original New Critics of the 1940s, including some who taught at Yale, had been trained as scholars, but Yale became a place where those who had never done scholarly research taught those who would never do scholarly research, and would be distrustful and hostile toward it. Even aside from the disaster of having each Yale generation farther and farther from real scholarly work, it's always bad for a school to hire its own. It guarantees that no new literary approaches will be attempted, it perpetuates old values and approaches. It discourages fresh thought.
Such coddling was unintentionally devastating to a favored student like Brodhead, for it deprived him of the necessity to test himself in job market and to face the challenge of dealing with a non-homogeneous set of colleagues in another part of the country. (I speak from the experience of having been hired back at Northwestern, finding out after two years that I was expected not to think non-authorized thoughts about literary creativity, and setting myself the goal of getting out fast.) Brodhead had been pampered all his academic life—to his great detriment.
On June 6, 2006 , as the Lacrosse Hoax was unravelling, when it was becoming clear that the rape accusation against Duke lacrosse players was false, Rubin summarized: "On March 25, Duke University President Richard Brodhead issued a statement declaring, 'Physical coercion and sexual assault are unacceptable in any setting and have no place at Duke.' Of course, he issued the caveat, 'People are presumed innocent until proven guilty,' but on campuses today, such presumption is secondary. On April 5, Brodhead canceled the lacrosse team’s season and promised an investigation of the culture of college athletes as well as Duke’s own response. The lacrosse coach resigned." The coach, Michael Pressler, in fact had been forced to resign, and later successfully sued Duke for his mistreatment and co-wrote an account of the experience, IT'S NOT ABOUT THE TRUTH. Still later, when Brodhead slurred Pressler disdainfully in violation of their agreement and his underling James Burness repeated the slur to a reporter, Pressler successfully sued Duke University, making Duke pay for its having hired the Duke of Disdain.
Rubin went on to explain how "Brodhead’s willingness to offer up a sacrificial lamb undercut justice in other ways." Rubin pointed out: "Brodhead has never apologized." He concluded: "If Brodhead recognizes his error in the Jovin case, he should apologize to Van de Velde, its other victim. That he repeats his mistakes—at Yale canceling a class; at Duke, a lacrosse season—does his leadership a disservice. Although just yesterday [Rubin was writing on 6 June 2006] he agreed to allow a 'probationary' reinstatement of the lacrosse team, at Duke, he has affirmed those who, with accusations of racism and adherence to political correctness, demanded premature action. He has treated the accused cavalierly. Justice should take its course. Brodhead need not act until the charges are dismissed or a verdict returned. But, if then, it transpires that he has once again tarred the innocent, he can prove his leadership with an apology or a resignation."
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, the Duke of Disdain.
Will the current DISCOVERY process in two lawsuits bring forth more examples of Brodhead’s disdain for his students and selected PC targets as we learn just how he obstructed justice and just how he engaged in constructive fraud (the two charges going to trial)?
Sunday, May 1, 2011
"Richard H. Brodhead: Troth and Consequences"
"Richard H. Brodhead: Troth and Consequences"
I am reposting this from Sunday, March 13, 2011 because of Judge Beaty's decision on April 1st to let the charges of "obstruction of justice" and "constructive fraud" to go ahead against President Brodhead. This article will make more sense than ever in the light of my new article on "Constructive Fraud." As we have seen over the last few years, there are disturbing recurrent patterns in Brodhead's literary criticism, treatment of employees, treatment of scholars, and treatment of students.
RICHARD H. BRODHEAD: TROTH & CONSEQUENCES
Long-festering resentments may lie behind the reckless rush to the wrong judgments which Brodhead displayed toward James Van de Velde, Hershel Parker, and Coach Pressler and the falsely accused lacrosse players at Duke.
In "The Education of Richard Brodhead: Continuity and Change over Dean's 40 years at Yale" (Yale HERALD, 20 February 2004), Matthew Ferraro said farewell to a fixture who would soon become President of Duke University. Behind closed doors, Brodhead reflected confidentially on the years after his arrival as a freshman in 1964. Brodhead had "experienced the uncertainty of the '70s as a young untenured, if popular, professor, but stayed on despite offers from other universities." He had felt constrained by the emphasis on poetry and European writers: "He calls his decision to study and teach mostly novels in his adult life 'my own act of revolt.'" [Brodhead did not, of course, revolt to the point of rethinking how novels were studied in the 1960s and early 1970s, only as perfect New Critical artifacts.] After he completed his PhD, at Yale, Brodhead "won a choice appointment to the Yale junior faculty and began teaching," but "not everything was rosy." There were "disappointments." Brodhead remembered the 1970s "as an 'incredibly dispiriting time.'" Because of inflation, faculty salaries fell 30% in buying power, and "chances at professional advancement at Yale did not look particularly promising in a department that had not tenured anyone in years." To Ferraro, behind those closed doors, Brodhead spoke with unusual candor: "It was not fun. And you might say it was particularly not fun to be an untenured professor in a university where it didn't seem like anyone would ever get promoted."
During the 1970s, Brodhead said, he was offered tenured positions at two other universities but turned both down. His patience, or passivity, ultimately paid off: "In 1980, Brodhead was awarded tenure after an excruciatingly complex process. 'That was, you can say, the beginning of a new phase of my life' he said." Ferraro passes over Brodhead's intriguing comment on the "excruciatingly complex process." It was excruciating to Brodhead, presumably, but we are not told how it was complex. "Brodhead was surprised" at being granted tenure, Ferraro says, without explaining why he was surprised. Even tenure did not make Brodhead comfortable: "Despite being tenured, however, he was not yet a full professor. Unhappy with his department, he seriously considered an offer to 'rebuild a notable English program somewhere else,' he said. He met with then-Dean Howard Lamar . . . who convinced him to stay." Lamar told Ferraro: "Of course he had no reason to worry, but I couldn't tell him that." Lamar, said Brodhead, "led me to understand that I was in a troth, and he led me to see that life might be better sometime, and soon after it was." Brodhead was named a full professor in 1985.
Brodhead had stayed on, despite a humiliatingly slow and “complex” process by which Yale decided to grant him tenure but to leave him for some years "in a troth," living on hints that the lover would take him as a bride in a legitimate public marriage. Meanwhile, the lover, Yale, could make overtures to or entertain overtures from any young, alien, trendy, and disturbingly nubile candidate on the annual marriage market. In the end, patience, passivity, deference, hunkering down and keeping his nose clean, had paid off, and Brodhead soon became chairman of the English Department and then Dean of Yale College. Everything was all right at last?
No, the "excruciatingly complex process" during which, untenured, Brodhead taught alongside his tenured teachers, many of whom were less popular with students than he, had scarred Brodhead. He had kept his mouth shut too often and too long for him to be easy with himself and his colleagues even when tenure was finally granted him without promotion to full professor. Perhaps no one can understand just how he felt. I can understand better than most. At Northwestern I took my MA and PhD in four years, as Brodhead did at Yale (Ferraro marveled at the speed!). After two years at Urbana as an assistant professor I was hired back at Northwestern, still as an assistant professor. Nominally teaching half time while working half time on the new Melville Project at the Newberry Library, I worked full time on the Melville Project, taught passionately, and picked up a few dollars from teaching novels to the Glencoe Literary Ladies. On the Melville Edition I had weighty responsibilities but no authority. That was the mid-1960s, the high triumph of the New Criticism, which stressed final product instead of process. The dominant textual theory, which also stressed final product, was perfect in the cases of simple correction but, I found, could not apply to authorial revision. I began asking questions about the creative process, but had no one to talk to until the Faulkner scholar James B. Meriwether came back to Chicago. In the years since his last visit we had worked our way to similar conclusions, I on Melville, he on Faulkner. We talked for hours about the creative process and sober second thoughts, and the next day I started looking for a job. The chairman had reneged on a promised raise, confident that I was trapped. To be free to rethink the dominant literary and textual theories I could not stay on where I had been a graduate student. When the chairman offered a raise and tenure, he was too late.
What if Brodhead had taken one of his offers and gone away from Yale in the 1970s? What if he had encountered faculty members who were unlike him, perhaps even some men (or women) from a lower social class? What if he had been forced to stand his ground on principles and define intellectual turf worth defending? What if he had encountered students who were not male, white, and wealthy, as his first students at Yale were? What if rather than enduring the "excruciatingly complex" process of becoming tenured at Yale he had taken earlier tenure elsewhere and had knocked about a bit, learning to deal with people quite unlike the adolescent buddies from Andover who proved to be his lifelong friends?
Had he left Yale, Brodhead might not have given rein to the demeaning and ultimately damning psychological quirks that are in the process of destroyed his reputation. For his reputation IS being destroyed. He settled with three formerly indicted Duke lacrosse players for a figure cited variously as between $18,000,000 and $30,000,000. He is being sued for his rush to judgment at Yale (James Van de Velde's lawsuit, naming Brodhead, having been reinstated in December 2007). He was sued by Michael Pressler, the Duke lacrosse coach he fired, for violating terms of their agreement, and Duke settled with Pressler. He is being sued by three unindicted lacrosse players. He is being sued by more than thirty lacrosse players and family members for charges involving criminal conspiracies. Damningly, he had exhibited the "extraordinary moral meltdown" described in the Taylor-Johnson book, UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT (p. 122). Brodhead will never regain a high reputation, not after the long delayed DISCOVERY PROCESSES are pushed through—and this is all aside from his strange search for an “intermediate explanation” of Dr. Anil Potti’s false claim to have been a Rhodes Scholar and the faked science with which he was treating real human beings with cancer until late in 2010.
Meanwhile, Brodhead's reputation as a scholar is being examined by a man he defamed in the New York TIMES on 23 June 2002. There he called me a "demon researcher" who showed "a single-mindedness worthy of a Melvillean hero," presumably Ahab, the captain of a doomed ship. After years of archival work I had merely "surmised" the existence of two lost books of Melville's. In fact scholars had known much about one of the books since 1960 and all about the other book since 1922. Brodhead's own academic "work" disintegrates at a skeptical touch, sometimes grotesquely, as when I pointed out that Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a man he jeered at for losing his reputation, ought to have been featured as a star pupil in THE SCHOOL OF HAWTHORNE (along with such women as Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote novels influenced by Hawthorne).
Brodhead had coasted to a high reputation as he had coasted through life. But something bad happened during those years of waiting, of being "in a troth." Brodhead soured. Later, when chances arose, he rushed precipitously to the wrong judgments, as if eager to punish the innocent. Brodhead fired James Van de Velde at Yale when the inept New Haven police let it be known that they had questioned him in the murder of a student. All the evidence pointed away from Van de Velde, but he had been the student's adviser, and police had questioned him. That was enough for Brodhead.
In the 1 April 2001 Hartford COURANT Les Gura described Van de Velde as a top student and athlete who graduated from Yale in 1982, then took his doctorate in international security studies from Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. In Van de Velde's "top secret government security clearance as a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve," he took "government and education positions in the U.S. and abroad for the State Department." After real-life adventures such as Brodhead had never known, Van de Velde went back to Yale in 1993 as dean of Saybrook College. "In the spring of 1997," Gura reported, "he took a leave from Yale on a Navy assignment to help monitor the status of peace in Bosnia from a base in Italy." At the time of his firing, Van de Velde was a lecturer in Yale's political science department. "With his training and combined government and education backgrounds," he was preparing to become "a television commentator on foreign affairs who also could find time to be a college lecturer."
Van de Velde had remained an athlete, a proficient even in martial arts which required the use of face masks or helmets. He was regularly described as a "handsome" man. He was flexible, adaptable, resourceful, variously competent, not a timid, cosseted man trying to believe he was really "in a troth." Was he, to Brodhead, unbearably manly? Wielding his new power, Brodhead recklessly fired him. Van de Velde told Gura,"my life is destroyed yet there is nothing I have ever done that I feel ashamed of."
As for me, I was a "demon researcher" and Brodhead, like most of his New Critical teachers, had no idea what research was. In a 1984 book, FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS, I had challenged both the New Criticism and the dominant textual theory and incidentally had pointed out Brodhead's coldness in closing his eyes to Melville's agony in enlarging PIERRE, cheerful that he was left a New Critical text to toy with. Did he know how unlike him I was, a Depression Okie and Texan, forced to drop out of high school, a railroad telegrapher for seven years until I left Texas on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship? Was I someone who could be easily sacrificed, kept from a Pulitzer in 2003 after being one of two finalists in 1997? For I was sacrificed by Brodhead, Andrew Delbanco, and Elizabeth Schultz, critics who declared that I was not to be trusted, when the evidence of my statements was right there on the pages of the book they were being paid to review. My health suffered for five years. I did not sleep one night without feeling the pain from the false accusations. In 2007 I began speaking out, and never lost sleep over the lies again. During all the nine years from 2002 until today, the Brodhead-Delbanco-Schultz reviews have been blazoned on the Internet., freshly defaming me every day. Not one of these critics has apologized.
At Duke, we know, Brodhead once again rushed to the wrong judgment, firing the admirable lacrosse coach and prejudicing the public against the falsely accused lacrosse players by saying that whatever they did was "bad enough." As at Yale, his victims were young, healthy, and handsome men, some from families more wealthy even than those of Brodhead and his friends at Andover and Yale. Again, they were athletes in a sport which involved bodily contact and the wearing of helmets. All of them were academic achievers, and some were brilliant. Do Homeric or Shakespearean memories haunt Brodhead, so that he sees himself as Thersites in contrast to Hector or Achilles?
Seeking to understand Brodhead's strange antipathy to brilliant handsome young athletes, I can best compare him to Radney in MOBY-DICK, so irrationally determined to pulverize Steelkilt, his superior in brains and physique, or Claggart, so jealous of the handsome and innocent Billy Budd. Did the "incredibly dispiriting" 1970s enrage Brodhead so that when he gained power he used it arbitrarily against those of whom he was fiercely jealous--usually men younger, brighter, more resourceful, and far more athletic than he was? The man who fired Van de Velde, led a trio of character assassins against me (for a non-scholarly would-be biographer and another Melville critic echoed Brodhead false accusations about merely “surmising” two lost Melville books), and turned his back on the Duke lacrosse coach, the players, and their parents--this man should never have been granted the power to inflict harm. Brodhead was already damaged goods. The lawsuits against Brodhead, Duke, and Durham have been unconscionably delayed. Van de Velde’s suit against Brodhead and Yale is reinstated but unconscionably delayed.
Now in 2011 it is clear that Duke, Potti, and others will be slapped with malpractice suits by the cancer patients who underwent actual treatment based on phony science—the cancer patients or surviving members of their families. Dr. Anil Potti faked his resume and mislead his colleagues into signing papers in which he faked science. He and his colleagues published papers in respected journals which purported to show how to select cancer treatment by analyzing an individual patient's genomic information--boutique analysis and treatment available only at Duke! Biostatisticians at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center tried to warn the Duke administration that Potti's results could not be duplicated, but the administrators sat on the information. Luckily, sciences are still more honest than literary criticism, so the Texans persisted, and in the last months Potti and his colleagues have renounced their own papers, including one in NATURE MEDICINE and one in the NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE. Some weeks ago now, long after evidence was clear that Potti had faked his credentials and was every day treating real cancer patients with faked science, Brodhead wistfully hoped that there could be some “intermediate explanation” for Potti’s difficulties. That phrasing will be remembered by those whose cancers advanced while they were being “treated” by faked science. Where will the culpability end? Where will the human suffering end?
At least, science still (in the end) seems to be held to a high standard. Literary reviewing, literary criticism, is held to no standard at all. Has Brodhead ever thought of renouncing one of his publications, asking, for example, the New York Times to mark one of his reviews as withdrawn because untrue? No, Brodhead learned how to write conventional literary criticism very early but he learned no standards for scholarship at Charles Feidelson's Yale. Does he reflect on the parallels between faked scientific expertise and faked expertise in literary scholarship now that Potti is exposed? Did he see himself at risk when he tried to deflect examination of Potti's bad publicity? There will be some sort of punishment for Potti, and certainly punishment for Duke as a result of the actions of Potti and his associates, but there is no punishment for a reviewer who in the New York Times fakes knowledge of scholarship, who passes himself off as competent to review a book based on archival research and on the whole course of research on Herman Melville.
But will there, after all, as DISCOVERY proceeds in April 2011, be punishment for Richard H. Brodhead's "constructive fraud" in one case and "obstruction of justice" in another? Think about Brodhead's position as President of Duke University, the judge having decided that "conspiracy" charges would be too hard to prove but deciding that there is ample evidence for DISCOVERY to proceed on the charges of "constructive fraud" and "obstruction of justice." Will emails be located after 5 years time? Have a few honest faculty members at Duke saved emails from the start, such as the one which urges everyone to get their stories straight? Can even a figurehead function in such a perfect storm all brought down by his own behavior on his own head?
Posted by Hershel Parker at 8:37 PM
I am reposting this from Sunday, March 13, 2011 because of Judge Beaty's decision on April 1st to let the charges of "obstruction of justice" and "constructive fraud" to go ahead against President Brodhead. This article will make more sense than ever in the light of my new article on "Constructive Fraud." As we have seen over the last few years, there are disturbing recurrent patterns in Brodhead's literary criticism, treatment of employees, treatment of scholars, and treatment of students.
RICHARD H. BRODHEAD: TROTH & CONSEQUENCES
Long-festering resentments may lie behind the reckless rush to the wrong judgments which Brodhead displayed toward James Van de Velde, Hershel Parker, and Coach Pressler and the falsely accused lacrosse players at Duke.
In "The Education of Richard Brodhead: Continuity and Change over Dean's 40 years at Yale" (Yale HERALD, 20 February 2004), Matthew Ferraro said farewell to a fixture who would soon become President of Duke University. Behind closed doors, Brodhead reflected confidentially on the years after his arrival as a freshman in 1964. Brodhead had "experienced the uncertainty of the '70s as a young untenured, if popular, professor, but stayed on despite offers from other universities." He had felt constrained by the emphasis on poetry and European writers: "He calls his decision to study and teach mostly novels in his adult life 'my own act of revolt.'" [Brodhead did not, of course, revolt to the point of rethinking how novels were studied in the 1960s and early 1970s, only as perfect New Critical artifacts.] After he completed his PhD, at Yale, Brodhead "won a choice appointment to the Yale junior faculty and began teaching," but "not everything was rosy." There were "disappointments." Brodhead remembered the 1970s "as an 'incredibly dispiriting time.'" Because of inflation, faculty salaries fell 30% in buying power, and "chances at professional advancement at Yale did not look particularly promising in a department that had not tenured anyone in years." To Ferraro, behind those closed doors, Brodhead spoke with unusual candor: "It was not fun. And you might say it was particularly not fun to be an untenured professor in a university where it didn't seem like anyone would ever get promoted."
During the 1970s, Brodhead said, he was offered tenured positions at two other universities but turned both down. His patience, or passivity, ultimately paid off: "In 1980, Brodhead was awarded tenure after an excruciatingly complex process. 'That was, you can say, the beginning of a new phase of my life' he said." Ferraro passes over Brodhead's intriguing comment on the "excruciatingly complex process." It was excruciating to Brodhead, presumably, but we are not told how it was complex. "Brodhead was surprised" at being granted tenure, Ferraro says, without explaining why he was surprised. Even tenure did not make Brodhead comfortable: "Despite being tenured, however, he was not yet a full professor. Unhappy with his department, he seriously considered an offer to 'rebuild a notable English program somewhere else,' he said. He met with then-Dean Howard Lamar . . . who convinced him to stay." Lamar told Ferraro: "Of course he had no reason to worry, but I couldn't tell him that." Lamar, said Brodhead, "led me to understand that I was in a troth, and he led me to see that life might be better sometime, and soon after it was." Brodhead was named a full professor in 1985.
Brodhead had stayed on, despite a humiliatingly slow and “complex” process by which Yale decided to grant him tenure but to leave him for some years "in a troth," living on hints that the lover would take him as a bride in a legitimate public marriage. Meanwhile, the lover, Yale, could make overtures to or entertain overtures from any young, alien, trendy, and disturbingly nubile candidate on the annual marriage market. In the end, patience, passivity, deference, hunkering down and keeping his nose clean, had paid off, and Brodhead soon became chairman of the English Department and then Dean of Yale College. Everything was all right at last?
No, the "excruciatingly complex process" during which, untenured, Brodhead taught alongside his tenured teachers, many of whom were less popular with students than he, had scarred Brodhead. He had kept his mouth shut too often and too long for him to be easy with himself and his colleagues even when tenure was finally granted him without promotion to full professor. Perhaps no one can understand just how he felt. I can understand better than most. At Northwestern I took my MA and PhD in four years, as Brodhead did at Yale (Ferraro marveled at the speed!). After two years at Urbana as an assistant professor I was hired back at Northwestern, still as an assistant professor. Nominally teaching half time while working half time on the new Melville Project at the Newberry Library, I worked full time on the Melville Project, taught passionately, and picked up a few dollars from teaching novels to the Glencoe Literary Ladies. On the Melville Edition I had weighty responsibilities but no authority. That was the mid-1960s, the high triumph of the New Criticism, which stressed final product instead of process. The dominant textual theory, which also stressed final product, was perfect in the cases of simple correction but, I found, could not apply to authorial revision. I began asking questions about the creative process, but had no one to talk to until the Faulkner scholar James B. Meriwether came back to Chicago. In the years since his last visit we had worked our way to similar conclusions, I on Melville, he on Faulkner. We talked for hours about the creative process and sober second thoughts, and the next day I started looking for a job. The chairman had reneged on a promised raise, confident that I was trapped. To be free to rethink the dominant literary and textual theories I could not stay on where I had been a graduate student. When the chairman offered a raise and tenure, he was too late.
What if Brodhead had taken one of his offers and gone away from Yale in the 1970s? What if he had encountered faculty members who were unlike him, perhaps even some men (or women) from a lower social class? What if he had been forced to stand his ground on principles and define intellectual turf worth defending? What if he had encountered students who were not male, white, and wealthy, as his first students at Yale were? What if rather than enduring the "excruciatingly complex" process of becoming tenured at Yale he had taken earlier tenure elsewhere and had knocked about a bit, learning to deal with people quite unlike the adolescent buddies from Andover who proved to be his lifelong friends?
Had he left Yale, Brodhead might not have given rein to the demeaning and ultimately damning psychological quirks that are in the process of destroyed his reputation. For his reputation IS being destroyed. He settled with three formerly indicted Duke lacrosse players for a figure cited variously as between $18,000,000 and $30,000,000. He is being sued for his rush to judgment at Yale (James Van de Velde's lawsuit, naming Brodhead, having been reinstated in December 2007). He was sued by Michael Pressler, the Duke lacrosse coach he fired, for violating terms of their agreement, and Duke settled with Pressler. He is being sued by three unindicted lacrosse players. He is being sued by more than thirty lacrosse players and family members for charges involving criminal conspiracies. Damningly, he had exhibited the "extraordinary moral meltdown" described in the Taylor-Johnson book, UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT (p. 122). Brodhead will never regain a high reputation, not after the long delayed DISCOVERY PROCESSES are pushed through—and this is all aside from his strange search for an “intermediate explanation” of Dr. Anil Potti’s false claim to have been a Rhodes Scholar and the faked science with which he was treating real human beings with cancer until late in 2010.
Meanwhile, Brodhead's reputation as a scholar is being examined by a man he defamed in the New York TIMES on 23 June 2002. There he called me a "demon researcher" who showed "a single-mindedness worthy of a Melvillean hero," presumably Ahab, the captain of a doomed ship. After years of archival work I had merely "surmised" the existence of two lost books of Melville's. In fact scholars had known much about one of the books since 1960 and all about the other book since 1922. Brodhead's own academic "work" disintegrates at a skeptical touch, sometimes grotesquely, as when I pointed out that Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a man he jeered at for losing his reputation, ought to have been featured as a star pupil in THE SCHOOL OF HAWTHORNE (along with such women as Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote novels influenced by Hawthorne).
Brodhead had coasted to a high reputation as he had coasted through life. But something bad happened during those years of waiting, of being "in a troth." Brodhead soured. Later, when chances arose, he rushed precipitously to the wrong judgments, as if eager to punish the innocent. Brodhead fired James Van de Velde at Yale when the inept New Haven police let it be known that they had questioned him in the murder of a student. All the evidence pointed away from Van de Velde, but he had been the student's adviser, and police had questioned him. That was enough for Brodhead.
In the 1 April 2001 Hartford COURANT Les Gura described Van de Velde as a top student and athlete who graduated from Yale in 1982, then took his doctorate in international security studies from Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. In Van de Velde's "top secret government security clearance as a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve," he took "government and education positions in the U.S. and abroad for the State Department." After real-life adventures such as Brodhead had never known, Van de Velde went back to Yale in 1993 as dean of Saybrook College. "In the spring of 1997," Gura reported, "he took a leave from Yale on a Navy assignment to help monitor the status of peace in Bosnia from a base in Italy." At the time of his firing, Van de Velde was a lecturer in Yale's political science department. "With his training and combined government and education backgrounds," he was preparing to become "a television commentator on foreign affairs who also could find time to be a college lecturer."
Van de Velde had remained an athlete, a proficient even in martial arts which required the use of face masks or helmets. He was regularly described as a "handsome" man. He was flexible, adaptable, resourceful, variously competent, not a timid, cosseted man trying to believe he was really "in a troth." Was he, to Brodhead, unbearably manly? Wielding his new power, Brodhead recklessly fired him. Van de Velde told Gura,"my life is destroyed yet there is nothing I have ever done that I feel ashamed of."
As for me, I was a "demon researcher" and Brodhead, like most of his New Critical teachers, had no idea what research was. In a 1984 book, FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS, I had challenged both the New Criticism and the dominant textual theory and incidentally had pointed out Brodhead's coldness in closing his eyes to Melville's agony in enlarging PIERRE, cheerful that he was left a New Critical text to toy with. Did he know how unlike him I was, a Depression Okie and Texan, forced to drop out of high school, a railroad telegrapher for seven years until I left Texas on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship? Was I someone who could be easily sacrificed, kept from a Pulitzer in 2003 after being one of two finalists in 1997? For I was sacrificed by Brodhead, Andrew Delbanco, and Elizabeth Schultz, critics who declared that I was not to be trusted, when the evidence of my statements was right there on the pages of the book they were being paid to review. My health suffered for five years. I did not sleep one night without feeling the pain from the false accusations. In 2007 I began speaking out, and never lost sleep over the lies again. During all the nine years from 2002 until today, the Brodhead-Delbanco-Schultz reviews have been blazoned on the Internet., freshly defaming me every day. Not one of these critics has apologized.
At Duke, we know, Brodhead once again rushed to the wrong judgment, firing the admirable lacrosse coach and prejudicing the public against the falsely accused lacrosse players by saying that whatever they did was "bad enough." As at Yale, his victims were young, healthy, and handsome men, some from families more wealthy even than those of Brodhead and his friends at Andover and Yale. Again, they were athletes in a sport which involved bodily contact and the wearing of helmets. All of them were academic achievers, and some were brilliant. Do Homeric or Shakespearean memories haunt Brodhead, so that he sees himself as Thersites in contrast to Hector or Achilles?
Seeking to understand Brodhead's strange antipathy to brilliant handsome young athletes, I can best compare him to Radney in MOBY-DICK, so irrationally determined to pulverize Steelkilt, his superior in brains and physique, or Claggart, so jealous of the handsome and innocent Billy Budd. Did the "incredibly dispiriting" 1970s enrage Brodhead so that when he gained power he used it arbitrarily against those of whom he was fiercely jealous--usually men younger, brighter, more resourceful, and far more athletic than he was? The man who fired Van de Velde, led a trio of character assassins against me (for a non-scholarly would-be biographer and another Melville critic echoed Brodhead false accusations about merely “surmising” two lost Melville books), and turned his back on the Duke lacrosse coach, the players, and their parents--this man should never have been granted the power to inflict harm. Brodhead was already damaged goods. The lawsuits against Brodhead, Duke, and Durham have been unconscionably delayed. Van de Velde’s suit against Brodhead and Yale is reinstated but unconscionably delayed.
Now in 2011 it is clear that Duke, Potti, and others will be slapped with malpractice suits by the cancer patients who underwent actual treatment based on phony science—the cancer patients or surviving members of their families. Dr. Anil Potti faked his resume and mislead his colleagues into signing papers in which he faked science. He and his colleagues published papers in respected journals which purported to show how to select cancer treatment by analyzing an individual patient's genomic information--boutique analysis and treatment available only at Duke! Biostatisticians at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center tried to warn the Duke administration that Potti's results could not be duplicated, but the administrators sat on the information. Luckily, sciences are still more honest than literary criticism, so the Texans persisted, and in the last months Potti and his colleagues have renounced their own papers, including one in NATURE MEDICINE and one in the NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE. Some weeks ago now, long after evidence was clear that Potti had faked his credentials and was every day treating real cancer patients with faked science, Brodhead wistfully hoped that there could be some “intermediate explanation” for Potti’s difficulties. That phrasing will be remembered by those whose cancers advanced while they were being “treated” by faked science. Where will the culpability end? Where will the human suffering end?
At least, science still (in the end) seems to be held to a high standard. Literary reviewing, literary criticism, is held to no standard at all. Has Brodhead ever thought of renouncing one of his publications, asking, for example, the New York Times to mark one of his reviews as withdrawn because untrue? No, Brodhead learned how to write conventional literary criticism very early but he learned no standards for scholarship at Charles Feidelson's Yale. Does he reflect on the parallels between faked scientific expertise and faked expertise in literary scholarship now that Potti is exposed? Did he see himself at risk when he tried to deflect examination of Potti's bad publicity? There will be some sort of punishment for Potti, and certainly punishment for Duke as a result of the actions of Potti and his associates, but there is no punishment for a reviewer who in the New York Times fakes knowledge of scholarship, who passes himself off as competent to review a book based on archival research and on the whole course of research on Herman Melville.
But will there, after all, as DISCOVERY proceeds in April 2011, be punishment for Richard H. Brodhead's "constructive fraud" in one case and "obstruction of justice" in another? Think about Brodhead's position as President of Duke University, the judge having decided that "conspiracy" charges would be too hard to prove but deciding that there is ample evidence for DISCOVERY to proceed on the charges of "constructive fraud" and "obstruction of justice." Will emails be located after 5 years time? Have a few honest faculty members at Duke saved emails from the start, such as the one which urges everyone to get their stories straight? Can even a figurehead function in such a perfect storm all brought down by his own behavior on his own head?
Posted by Hershel Parker at 8:37 PM
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Richard H. Brodhead: Poster Boy for Ineptitude
Can Brodhead Stop his Ears against Melville's Hyena Laughter?
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 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. Duke University has paid for his ineptitude with a settlement with Michael Pressler, the lacrosse coach. The Brodhead stupidly slurred Pressler, and his spokesman Burness repeated slur to a reporter, so that that Pressler sued and Duke settled again.
Multi-million dollar settlements with three indicted lacrosse players have been made. An October 2007 lawsuit was filed 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 then the 21 February 2008 lawsuit!
After years of delay, in April 2011 Judge Beaty has allowed one charge in each of two cases to go forward against Brodhead: obstruction of justice in one and constructive fraud in another. The DISCOVERY process is at last proceeding.
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 the poet (as he says) 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, and as such is prone to embarrassing stumbles as his innate disdain intrudes where a scholar would have performed respectful research.
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). In order to slander me Brodhead ignored the life’s work of many older scholars who had shown that Melville finished a book in 1853 (although I found the title as late as 1987) and that Melville had tried to get POEMS published, and left it, he thought, in the care of people who would see that it was published. 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 2011, 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 early in 2008, while Brodhead averted 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!
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. "
And then the horrific Potti scandal where false science was the basis of the medical treatment of real suffering human beings, and Brodhead was sure there was some “intermediate explanation” between fraud and what—incompetence?—for Potti’s falsifying “scientific” research. Does Brodhead hear the hyena laughing at the man who lied about my scholarship in the New York TIMES and told the world that only I had ever heard of POEMS, when everyone had known about it since 1922? Potti and Brodhead, brothers under the skin, incompetents who falsely claimed expertise they did not have (in Brodhead's case, for example,competency to call the roll of students in the school of Hawthorne or competency to review a biography based on documentary evidence), pretenders to scholarship: the hyena laughs.
Then Brodhead's Kunshan boondoggle which Fact Checker is so lucidly analyzing in the Duke Chronicle . . . When will the hyena stop laughing?
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 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. Duke University has paid for his ineptitude with a settlement with Michael Pressler, the lacrosse coach. The Brodhead stupidly slurred Pressler, and his spokesman Burness repeated slur to a reporter, so that that Pressler sued and Duke settled again.
Multi-million dollar settlements with three indicted lacrosse players have been made. An October 2007 lawsuit was filed 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 then the 21 February 2008 lawsuit!
After years of delay, in April 2011 Judge Beaty has allowed one charge in each of two cases to go forward against Brodhead: obstruction of justice in one and constructive fraud in another. The DISCOVERY process is at last proceeding.
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 the poet (as he says) 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, and as such is prone to embarrassing stumbles as his innate disdain intrudes where a scholar would have performed respectful research.
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). In order to slander me Brodhead ignored the life’s work of many older scholars who had shown that Melville finished a book in 1853 (although I found the title as late as 1987) and that Melville had tried to get POEMS published, and left it, he thought, in the care of people who would see that it was published. 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 2011, 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 early in 2008, while Brodhead averted 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!
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. "
And then the horrific Potti scandal where false science was the basis of the medical treatment of real suffering human beings, and Brodhead was sure there was some “intermediate explanation” between fraud and what—incompetence?—for Potti’s falsifying “scientific” research. Does Brodhead hear the hyena laughing at the man who lied about my scholarship in the New York TIMES and told the world that only I had ever heard of POEMS, when everyone had known about it since 1922? Potti and Brodhead, brothers under the skin, incompetents who falsely claimed expertise they did not have (in Brodhead's case, for example,competency to call the roll of students in the school of Hawthorne or competency to review a biography based on documentary evidence), pretenders to scholarship: the hyena laughs.
Then Brodhead's Kunshan boondoggle which Fact Checker is so lucidly analyzing in the Duke Chronicle . . . When will the hyena stop laughing?
Sunday, April 3, 2011
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."
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."
Saturday, April 2, 2011
RICHARD H. BRODHEAD: THE FANTASY BIOGRAPHIES OF A LITERARY CRITIC
In the 23 June 2002 NEW YORK TIMES Richard 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. 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 about POEMS since 1922. Other reviewers (critics, like Brodhead, not scholars), Andrew Delbanco and Elizabeth Schultz, repeated the lies, and all three of their reviews went glittering up on the Internet.
What motivated them, these three people with high 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 biography of Melville; happily, between savaging me in 2002 and publishing the book in 2005 he learned that THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and POEMS were lost but had been real, and 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?]
To judge from the 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, 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 must have seen Brodhead at a conference in Pittsfield in 1991, for a now cryptic note in my diary contrasts a brilliant woman with "the idiotic Brodhead." Perhaps my contempt for him showed then. Or did he 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? Here was a skill alien to him, the hated skill of biography, now suddenly popular—perhaps even more popular in the Pittsfield audience then dreary New Critical readings. Had he missed the boat, after all?
Or did his jealousy have something to do with personal appearance, as it does with his treatment of James Van de Velde, Michael Pressler, and the lacrosse team at Duke? 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. 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 the printed record 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 old friends and strangers some of what I had been finding in my solitary researches. Obviously I was a man who had lived his 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.”
Is the pattern that Brodhead sets out to destroy vibrant, passionate men more intellectually daring and more physically daring than himself? 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."
Van de Velde was a bodybuilder and an expert in martial arts, including dangerous sports which demanded helmet or face mask. After the incompetent New Haven police named him to the press 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 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 is now reinstated and ongoing.
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 already regarded the lacrosse players with irrational disdain. They all played a contact sport--a game that required a helmet--and yet 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."
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 urinating from precipices rather than 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 wolves.
Michael Pressler, the 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 the kind of young man you pray that your daughter will bring home. 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. 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.)
The substitute coach seems to be a decent man, but he is simply not of Pressler's stature, and to slur Pressler this way reveals something troublingly irrational about Brodhead.
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 in August 2008 gave Pressler an extension to make his contract run 7 years from now. As 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 powerful old men like me, and something even weirder goes on when Brodhead confronts scholastically brilliant helmeted youths.
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 as Steelkilts, men "very significantly his superior in general pride of manhood," and to try to destroy their reputations, which meant destroying their lives.
Many of his victims, including Van de Velde and me, have felt, at times, that our lives were ruined because of the lies; some of the lacrosse players have said they felt the same way. Even Pressler endured a dark period, jobless, his reputation besmeared.
After five years of private agony at the savaging of my reputation, I began speaking out, and now Brodhead is 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 brilliant 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.
Thus far this piece is from something I wrote in 2007. One would not want to live in Brodhead’s head in April 2011, now that he knows that Judge Beaty has 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 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. And now all the world knows what he is.
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 about POEMS since 1922. Other reviewers (critics, like Brodhead, not scholars), Andrew Delbanco and Elizabeth Schultz, repeated the lies, and all three of their reviews went glittering up on the Internet.
What motivated them, these three people with high 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 biography of Melville; happily, between savaging me in 2002 and publishing the book in 2005 he learned that THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and POEMS were lost but had been real, and 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?]
To judge from the 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, 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 must have seen Brodhead at a conference in Pittsfield in 1991, for a now cryptic note in my diary contrasts a brilliant woman with "the idiotic Brodhead." Perhaps my contempt for him showed then. Or did he 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? Here was a skill alien to him, the hated skill of biography, now suddenly popular—perhaps even more popular in the Pittsfield audience then dreary New Critical readings. Had he missed the boat, after all?
Or did his jealousy have something to do with personal appearance, as it does with his treatment of James Van de Velde, Michael Pressler, and the lacrosse team at Duke? 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. 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 the printed record 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 old friends and strangers some of what I had been finding in my solitary researches. Obviously I was a man who had lived his 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.”
Is the pattern that Brodhead sets out to destroy vibrant, passionate men more intellectually daring and more physically daring than himself? 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."
Van de Velde was a bodybuilder and an expert in martial arts, including dangerous sports which demanded helmet or face mask. After the incompetent New Haven police named him to the press 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 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 is now reinstated and ongoing.
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 already regarded the lacrosse players with irrational disdain. They all played a contact sport--a game that required a helmet--and yet 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."
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 urinating from precipices rather than 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 wolves.
Michael Pressler, the 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 the kind of young man you pray that your daughter will bring home. 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. 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.)
The substitute coach seems to be a decent man, but he is simply not of Pressler's stature, and to slur Pressler this way reveals something troublingly irrational about Brodhead.
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 in August 2008 gave Pressler an extension to make his contract run 7 years from now. As 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 powerful old men like me, and something even weirder goes on when Brodhead confronts scholastically brilliant helmeted youths.
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 as Steelkilts, men "very significantly his superior in general pride of manhood," and to try to destroy their reputations, which meant destroying their lives.
Many of his victims, including Van de Velde and me, have felt, at times, that our lives were ruined because of the lies; some of the lacrosse players have said they felt the same way. Even Pressler endured a dark period, jobless, his reputation besmeared.
After five years of private agony at the savaging of my reputation, I began speaking out, and now Brodhead is 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 brilliant 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.
Thus far this piece is from something I wrote in 2007. One would not want to live in Brodhead’s head in April 2011, now that he knows that Judge Beaty has 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 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. And now all the world knows what he is.
"RICHARD H. BRODHEAD: HAPLESS REVENGER"
Richard H. Brodhead: Hapless Revenger
In the June 2007 issue of NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE and in MELVILLE: THE MAKING OF THE POET (2008) I belatedly protested against three reviewers of my 2002 HERMAN MELVILLE: A BIOGRAPHY, 1851-1891, all of whom had implied or claimed outright that I had made up two lost books that Melville wrote, THE ISLE OF THE CROSS (1853) and POEMS (1860). Ever since 1960 scholars had known for sure that Melville finished a book in 1853, although it was 1987 before I discovered the title; since 1922 Melville scholars had known all about POEMS, including Melville's twelve-point memo to his brother on the publication of his verses. The leader of this pack of critics, in the 23 June 2002 NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, was the then Dean of Yale College, Richard Brodhead. Snarling behind him were Andrew Delbanco in the NEW REPUBLIC and Elizabeth Schultz in the COMMON REVIEW. None of them had performed archival research on Melville, and apparently none of them had bothered to read Melville's letters or any biography published after 1921. Apparently they had not read the book they were supposedly reviewing! What a pack of character assassins! For, as Delbanco bluntly put it, if I had fantasized the existence of two lost books then I was to be trusted nowhere. None of them has ever apologized, but Delbanco in a 2005 book blandly talked about THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and POEMS quite as if he had known of their existence from earliest childhood.
I kept silent for five years during which I never once slept peacefully through a whole night. Well into 2006, I realized that Brodhead had rushed to judgment about the Duke lacrosse players and was destroying their reputations. It was 2002 all over again, and worse--for three players were in danger of being imprisoned for 30 years. I began writing what became the 2007 article, "THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and POEMS: Lost Melville Books and the Indefinite Afterlife of Error," and the Introduction to the 2008 book. By "indefinite afterlife" I meant the persistence of lies on the Internet. The false accusations by Brodhead, Delbanco, and Schultz remain there, untagged with the Melvillean warning, "NO TRUST." Beginning in the fall of 2007, I have experimented with putting Truth out on the Internet on LieStoppers: will this Internet Truth last as long as falsehood? Will my blog last as long as Brodhead’s lies about POEMS in the New York TIMES or Delbanco’s in THE NEW REPUBLIC?
I see now that Richard Brodhead's malignity in 2002 may be his way of taking revenge for a footnote in my FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS: LITERARY AUTHORITY IN AMERICAN FICTION (1984, pp. 28-29). When I drafted that passage a quarter century ago, it was after trying for a decade to clarify the chronology of the composition of Melville's PIERRE. I don't recall reading what I quoted from Brodhead and I don't recall writing the footnote, but I can tell by its anomalous character (the only such footnote in the book) that I had been appalled, as I still am, by Brodhead's fixation on literature as something that exists for him to write facile criticism on and by his cold-heartedness toward the author.
The footnote was to this comment: "Melville's PIERRE is also [like PUDD'NHEAD WILSON] the result of two very different and imperfectly combined creative processes, the second one destructive of part of the achievement of the first." In the footnote I wrote:
"While most critics find unity at all costs even in books known to have a strange compositional history, now and again a critic of the post-New Criticism generation . . . is content to place less stock in formal perfection. Richard Brodhead, in particular, has displayed a remarkable tolerance toward Melville's altering the direction of PIERRE half way through the book as we know it. Brodhead observes, as Leon Howard and many others had done, that the second half of PIERRE has little to do with the first, then with mild benignity decides that 'Melville was wise not to let a foolish consistency keep him from exploring the subjects and methods he does' (in 'Chronometricals and Horologicals,' 'Young America in Literature,' and 'The Church of the Apostles') even though 'their inclusion has a curious effect on the book's narration.' Brodhead knows the book is split in two. Rather than demanding a verbal icon, however, he makes the best of a bad situation, finding interest where he can--but at the cost of closing 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, even if doing so meant wrecking what might well have been the most tightly unified work he had yet written." Then I cited Brodhead's HAWTHORNE, MELVILLE, AND THE NOVEL" (1976), p. 182.
Before 1984, had anyone ever expressed even mild skepticism about anything Brodhead had published? Certainly he was not regularly held to high standards by scholarly reviewers, for none of the enthusiastic early critics of another book, THE SCHOOL OF HAWTHORNE (1986) knew that Brodhead had not bothered to call the roll in that school--had not bothered to find that the room was not, like his Andover and early years at Yale, all male. (Brodhead had not read Harriet Beecher Stowe's New England novels, among other once popular books influenced by Hawthorne.) Having previously seen only flattery from reviewers and critics, was Brodhead incensed by my 1984 footnote?
In 1995 I did something more than a little outrageous in an attempt to help people think through many new pieces of evidence about the composition of PIERRE. Enlisting Maurice Sendak as illustrator, I edited a version of PIERRE so as to recreate something close to what existed when Melville finished the book and accepted a ruinous contract for it, before he stuffed the manuscript with wholly extraneous material such as that which Brodhead had been pleased to practice his literary criticism on. I hoped that anyone who loved MOBY-DICK would want to know what Melville himself thought, at least early in the composition, would be a greater book, a Kraken book to his THE WHALE (the title Melville used for MOBY-DICK until after sheets had been shipped to England). The KRAKEN edition, a nonce text for Sendak to illustrate, was meant to allow the reader to glimpse the work which Melville thought would be a psychological voyage more profound than MOBY-DICK. As the dust jacket said, "Melville scholar Hershel Parker has long believed that the psychological stature of MOBY-DICK could best be understood in the light of the original, shorter version of PIERRE, in his opinion 'surely the finest psychological novel anyone had yet written in English.' MOBY-DICK and the reconstructed PIERRE are at last revealed as complexly interlinked companion studies of the moods of thought--the TYPEE and OMOO of depth psychology." Of course the edition was not offered "as 'definitive' but merely as supplementary" to the standard text.
You would have thought I had burned every copy of the 1852 PIERRE! On 7 January 1996 Brodhead vented his rage in "The Book That Ruined Melville" (the NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW "Bookend"). Unsurprisingly, the article is peppered with factual errors (according to Brodhead, THE CONFIDENCE-MAN was published in 1856 and 20 is half of 50), and with opinions which Brodhead offers as fact (MOBY-DICK started without an Ahab). Granting that the "Kraken" edition "may bear a close relation to what the book looked like at a certain stage of its history," Brodhead asked rhetorically, "but even if it does, since when did readers feel they should have access to every stage of a work's evolution?" Of course I was not talking about several absolutely irrecoverable stages but one "certain stage"--the stage at which the book was complete, at which the Harpers had looked it over and decided that they would publish it at a punitive royalty, and the parties had agreed on a contract--all in the first days of 1852.
Brodhead's "Bookend" reveals an appalling lack of curiosity. Taking the KRAKEN edition as an attempt to recreate a book greater than the PIERRE we have known, he opts for the "original" (by which he means not the book as "originally completed" but as published). Brodhead shows no interest in learning what Melville had attempted in PIERRE as he first completed it. He also showed no interest in or sympathy for the forces that drove Melville to write the pages on Pierre as an author, that "harrowing reckoning of the meaning of his own career." Words like "harrowing" are in his vocabulary, but as in the 1976 book, Brodhead is happy to have such painful pages to criticize--the more the better, fodder for his conventional essays.
Protected, cosseted all his academic career despite the pinch of inflation in the dark 1970s (which he perceives as his own Great Depression), Brodhead seems haplessly unaware of how ordinary people suffer. On 1 May 1851, Melville, already a debtor, went disastrously into new debt, betting everything on the success of MOBY-DICK. With that book he had horrendous luck, for in London the little epilogue got lost in the shuffling when the table of contents was split into three and the etymology and extracts were moved to the back of the third volume. Some English reviewers commented scathingly on Melville's ineptitude--What? first person novel and no survivors of the PEQUOD? The two English reviews reprinted here in time to harm Melville were among the most hostile, and the one printed twice in Boston did not say precisely what was so very wrong with the catastrophe. No one holding MOBY-DICK could say, "Hey, here's an epilogue and Ishmael survives!"
Many of the American reviews had been ferocious, calling Melville blasphemous and insane. In January 1852 it was clear that MOBY-DICK was not selling as well as some of Melville's earlier books. How could Melville make the second semi-annual interest payment on the loan he had taken out in May? He had not made a living at 50 cents on the dollar after costs and now had agreed to take 20 cents on the dollar. And there were other distressing events, all in the first week or so of 1852, surely including a confrontation with his friend Evert Duyckinck over PIERRE, since right then he wrote the Duyckinck brothers mockingly into the manuscript. As we have seen in UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT (p. 92 is a good example) other people's suffering means nothing to Brodhead.
I suspect that Brodhead remembered the one honest criticism he had ever received, my 1984 footnote about his blindness to Melville's agony. He extracted revenge in the "Bookend" and extracted his full measure of revenge in his 23 June 2002 review. He was not adept enough to wreak vengeance without inflicting wounds on himself, for he exposed his ignorance of all Melville scholarship since 1922. Or was he deliberately pretending not to know all the work on which I was building and that which I had discovered? Could he not read the quotations from the documents on the pages of my biography? Brodhead was Dean of Yale College and he could get away with any false allegation, he must have thought. He had gotten rid of James Van de Velde, hadn't he? In 2002 no one would question him or Andrew Delbanco or Elizabeth Schultz, his cohorts in savaging my reputation.
Along with James Van de Velde and with Michael Pressler and his family, and with the 2006 Duke lacrosse players and their families, I ask simply: HOW CAN RICHARD BRODHEAD LIVE WITH HIMSELF? Melville knew that kind of man. His conclusion, as I will explain in another article, was that they suffered from a defect in the region of the heart.
Now, in April 2011, in two cases going forward, Richard H. Brodhead will face evidence that he is guilty of “constructive fraud” (see my post on that subject) and of “obstruction of justice”—something taken rather more seriously as fraudent publications and obstruction of scholarship.
In the June 2007 issue of NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE and in MELVILLE: THE MAKING OF THE POET (2008) I belatedly protested against three reviewers of my 2002 HERMAN MELVILLE: A BIOGRAPHY, 1851-1891, all of whom had implied or claimed outright that I had made up two lost books that Melville wrote, THE ISLE OF THE CROSS (1853) and POEMS (1860). Ever since 1960 scholars had known for sure that Melville finished a book in 1853, although it was 1987 before I discovered the title; since 1922 Melville scholars had known all about POEMS, including Melville's twelve-point memo to his brother on the publication of his verses. The leader of this pack of critics, in the 23 June 2002 NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, was the then Dean of Yale College, Richard Brodhead. Snarling behind him were Andrew Delbanco in the NEW REPUBLIC and Elizabeth Schultz in the COMMON REVIEW. None of them had performed archival research on Melville, and apparently none of them had bothered to read Melville's letters or any biography published after 1921. Apparently they had not read the book they were supposedly reviewing! What a pack of character assassins! For, as Delbanco bluntly put it, if I had fantasized the existence of two lost books then I was to be trusted nowhere. None of them has ever apologized, but Delbanco in a 2005 book blandly talked about THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and POEMS quite as if he had known of their existence from earliest childhood.
I kept silent for five years during which I never once slept peacefully through a whole night. Well into 2006, I realized that Brodhead had rushed to judgment about the Duke lacrosse players and was destroying their reputations. It was 2002 all over again, and worse--for three players were in danger of being imprisoned for 30 years. I began writing what became the 2007 article, "THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and POEMS: Lost Melville Books and the Indefinite Afterlife of Error," and the Introduction to the 2008 book. By "indefinite afterlife" I meant the persistence of lies on the Internet. The false accusations by Brodhead, Delbanco, and Schultz remain there, untagged with the Melvillean warning, "NO TRUST." Beginning in the fall of 2007, I have experimented with putting Truth out on the Internet on LieStoppers: will this Internet Truth last as long as falsehood? Will my blog last as long as Brodhead’s lies about POEMS in the New York TIMES or Delbanco’s in THE NEW REPUBLIC?
I see now that Richard Brodhead's malignity in 2002 may be his way of taking revenge for a footnote in my FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS: LITERARY AUTHORITY IN AMERICAN FICTION (1984, pp. 28-29). When I drafted that passage a quarter century ago, it was after trying for a decade to clarify the chronology of the composition of Melville's PIERRE. I don't recall reading what I quoted from Brodhead and I don't recall writing the footnote, but I can tell by its anomalous character (the only such footnote in the book) that I had been appalled, as I still am, by Brodhead's fixation on literature as something that exists for him to write facile criticism on and by his cold-heartedness toward the author.
The footnote was to this comment: "Melville's PIERRE is also [like PUDD'NHEAD WILSON] the result of two very different and imperfectly combined creative processes, the second one destructive of part of the achievement of the first." In the footnote I wrote:
"While most critics find unity at all costs even in books known to have a strange compositional history, now and again a critic of the post-New Criticism generation . . . is content to place less stock in formal perfection. Richard Brodhead, in particular, has displayed a remarkable tolerance toward Melville's altering the direction of PIERRE half way through the book as we know it. Brodhead observes, as Leon Howard and many others had done, that the second half of PIERRE has little to do with the first, then with mild benignity decides that 'Melville was wise not to let a foolish consistency keep him from exploring the subjects and methods he does' (in 'Chronometricals and Horologicals,' 'Young America in Literature,' and 'The Church of the Apostles') even though 'their inclusion has a curious effect on the book's narration.' Brodhead knows the book is split in two. Rather than demanding a verbal icon, however, he makes the best of a bad situation, finding interest where he can--but at the cost of closing 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, even if doing so meant wrecking what might well have been the most tightly unified work he had yet written." Then I cited Brodhead's HAWTHORNE, MELVILLE, AND THE NOVEL" (1976), p. 182.
Before 1984, had anyone ever expressed even mild skepticism about anything Brodhead had published? Certainly he was not regularly held to high standards by scholarly reviewers, for none of the enthusiastic early critics of another book, THE SCHOOL OF HAWTHORNE (1986) knew that Brodhead had not bothered to call the roll in that school--had not bothered to find that the room was not, like his Andover and early years at Yale, all male. (Brodhead had not read Harriet Beecher Stowe's New England novels, among other once popular books influenced by Hawthorne.) Having previously seen only flattery from reviewers and critics, was Brodhead incensed by my 1984 footnote?
In 1995 I did something more than a little outrageous in an attempt to help people think through many new pieces of evidence about the composition of PIERRE. Enlisting Maurice Sendak as illustrator, I edited a version of PIERRE so as to recreate something close to what existed when Melville finished the book and accepted a ruinous contract for it, before he stuffed the manuscript with wholly extraneous material such as that which Brodhead had been pleased to practice his literary criticism on. I hoped that anyone who loved MOBY-DICK would want to know what Melville himself thought, at least early in the composition, would be a greater book, a Kraken book to his THE WHALE (the title Melville used for MOBY-DICK until after sheets had been shipped to England). The KRAKEN edition, a nonce text for Sendak to illustrate, was meant to allow the reader to glimpse the work which Melville thought would be a psychological voyage more profound than MOBY-DICK. As the dust jacket said, "Melville scholar Hershel Parker has long believed that the psychological stature of MOBY-DICK could best be understood in the light of the original, shorter version of PIERRE, in his opinion 'surely the finest psychological novel anyone had yet written in English.' MOBY-DICK and the reconstructed PIERRE are at last revealed as complexly interlinked companion studies of the moods of thought--the TYPEE and OMOO of depth psychology." Of course the edition was not offered "as 'definitive' but merely as supplementary" to the standard text.
You would have thought I had burned every copy of the 1852 PIERRE! On 7 January 1996 Brodhead vented his rage in "The Book That Ruined Melville" (the NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW "Bookend"). Unsurprisingly, the article is peppered with factual errors (according to Brodhead, THE CONFIDENCE-MAN was published in 1856 and 20 is half of 50), and with opinions which Brodhead offers as fact (MOBY-DICK started without an Ahab). Granting that the "Kraken" edition "may bear a close relation to what the book looked like at a certain stage of its history," Brodhead asked rhetorically, "but even if it does, since when did readers feel they should have access to every stage of a work's evolution?" Of course I was not talking about several absolutely irrecoverable stages but one "certain stage"--the stage at which the book was complete, at which the Harpers had looked it over and decided that they would publish it at a punitive royalty, and the parties had agreed on a contract--all in the first days of 1852.
Brodhead's "Bookend" reveals an appalling lack of curiosity. Taking the KRAKEN edition as an attempt to recreate a book greater than the PIERRE we have known, he opts for the "original" (by which he means not the book as "originally completed" but as published). Brodhead shows no interest in learning what Melville had attempted in PIERRE as he first completed it. He also showed no interest in or sympathy for the forces that drove Melville to write the pages on Pierre as an author, that "harrowing reckoning of the meaning of his own career." Words like "harrowing" are in his vocabulary, but as in the 1976 book, Brodhead is happy to have such painful pages to criticize--the more the better, fodder for his conventional essays.
Protected, cosseted all his academic career despite the pinch of inflation in the dark 1970s (which he perceives as his own Great Depression), Brodhead seems haplessly unaware of how ordinary people suffer. On 1 May 1851, Melville, already a debtor, went disastrously into new debt, betting everything on the success of MOBY-DICK. With that book he had horrendous luck, for in London the little epilogue got lost in the shuffling when the table of contents was split into three and the etymology and extracts were moved to the back of the third volume. Some English reviewers commented scathingly on Melville's ineptitude--What? first person novel and no survivors of the PEQUOD? The two English reviews reprinted here in time to harm Melville were among the most hostile, and the one printed twice in Boston did not say precisely what was so very wrong with the catastrophe. No one holding MOBY-DICK could say, "Hey, here's an epilogue and Ishmael survives!"
Many of the American reviews had been ferocious, calling Melville blasphemous and insane. In January 1852 it was clear that MOBY-DICK was not selling as well as some of Melville's earlier books. How could Melville make the second semi-annual interest payment on the loan he had taken out in May? He had not made a living at 50 cents on the dollar after costs and now had agreed to take 20 cents on the dollar. And there were other distressing events, all in the first week or so of 1852, surely including a confrontation with his friend Evert Duyckinck over PIERRE, since right then he wrote the Duyckinck brothers mockingly into the manuscript. As we have seen in UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT (p. 92 is a good example) other people's suffering means nothing to Brodhead.
I suspect that Brodhead remembered the one honest criticism he had ever received, my 1984 footnote about his blindness to Melville's agony. He extracted revenge in the "Bookend" and extracted his full measure of revenge in his 23 June 2002 review. He was not adept enough to wreak vengeance without inflicting wounds on himself, for he exposed his ignorance of all Melville scholarship since 1922. Or was he deliberately pretending not to know all the work on which I was building and that which I had discovered? Could he not read the quotations from the documents on the pages of my biography? Brodhead was Dean of Yale College and he could get away with any false allegation, he must have thought. He had gotten rid of James Van de Velde, hadn't he? In 2002 no one would question him or Andrew Delbanco or Elizabeth Schultz, his cohorts in savaging my reputation.
Along with James Van de Velde and with Michael Pressler and his family, and with the 2006 Duke lacrosse players and their families, I ask simply: HOW CAN RICHARD BRODHEAD LIVE WITH HIMSELF? Melville knew that kind of man. His conclusion, as I will explain in another article, was that they suffered from a defect in the region of the heart.
Now, in April 2011, in two cases going forward, Richard H. Brodhead will face evidence that he is guilty of “constructive fraud” (see my post on that subject) and of “obstruction of justice”—something taken rather more seriously as fraudent publications and obstruction of scholarship.
"Richard H. Brodhead: Troth and Consequences"
I am reposting this from Sunday, March 13, 2011 because of Judge Beaty's decision this week to let the charges of "obstruction of justice" and "constructive fraud" to go ahead against President Brodhead. This article will make more sense than ever in the light of my new article on "Constructive Fraud." As we have seen over the last few years, there are disturbing recurrent patterns in Brodhead's literary criticism, treatment of employees, treatment of scholars, and treatment of students.
RICHARD H. BRODHEAD: TROTH & CONSEQUENCES
Long-festering resentments may lie behind the reckless rush to the wrong judgments which Brodhead displayed toward James Van de Velde, Hershel Parker, and Coach Pressler and the falsely accused lacrosse players at Duke.
In "The Education of Richard Brodhead: Continuity and Change over Dean's 40 years at Yale" (Yale HERALD, 20 February 2004), Matthew Ferraro said farewell to a fixture who would soon become President of Duke University. Behind closed doors, Brodhead reflected confidentially on the years after his arrival as a freshman in 1964. Brodhead had "experienced the uncertainty of the '70s as a young untenured, if popular, professor, but stayed on despite offers from other universities." He had felt constrained by the emphasis on poetry and European writers: "He calls his decision to study and teach mostly novels in his adult life 'my own act of revolt.'" [Brodhead did not, of course, revolt to the point of rethinking how novels were studied in the 1960s and early 1970s, only as perfect New Critical artifacts.] After he completed his PhD, at Yale, Brodhead "won a choice appointment to the Yale junior faculty and began teaching," but "not everything was rosy." There were "disappointments." Brodhead remembered the 1970s "as an 'incredibly dispiriting time.'" Because of inflation, faculty salaries fell 30% in buying power, and "chances at professional advancement at Yale did not look particularly promising in a department that had not tenured anyone in years." To Ferraro, behind those closed doors, Brodhead spoke with unusual candor: "It was not fun. And you might say it was particularly not fun to be an untenured professor in a university where it didn't seem like anyone would ever get promoted."
During the 1970s, Brodhead said, he was offered tenured positions at two other universities but turned both down. His patience, or passivity, ultimately paid off: "In 1980, Brodhead was awarded tenure after an excruciatingly complex process. 'That was, you can say, the beginning of a new phase of my life' he said." Ferraro passes over Brodhead's intriguing comment on the "excruciatingly complex process." It was excruciating to Brodhead, presumably, but we are not told how it was complex. "Brodhead was surprised" at being granted tenure, Ferraro says, without explaining why he was surprised. Even tenure did not make Brodhead comfortable: "Despite being tenured, however, he was not yet a full professor. Unhappy with his department, he seriously considered an offer to 'rebuild a notable English program somewhere else,' he said. He met with then-Dean Howard Lamar . . . who convinced him to stay." Lamar told Ferraro: "Of course he had no reason to worry, but I couldn't tell him that." Lamar, said Brodhead, "led me to understand that I was in a troth, and he led me to see that life might be better sometime, and soon after it was." Brodhead was named a full professor in 1985.
Brodhead had stayed on, despite a humiliatingly slow and “complex” process by which Yale decided to grant him tenure but to leave him for some years "in a troth," living on hints that the lover would take him as a bride in a legitimate public marriage. Meanwhile, the lover, Yale, could make overtures to or entertain overtures from any young, alien, trendy, and disturbingly nubile candidate on the annual marriage market. In the end, patience, passivity, deference, hunkering down and keeping his nose clean, had paid off, and Brodhead soon became chairman of the English Department and then Dean of Yale College. Everything was all right at last?
No, the "excruciatingly complex process" during which, untenured, Brodhead taught alongside his tenured teachers, many of whom were less popular with students than he, had scarred Brodhead. He had kept his mouth shut too often and too long for him to be easy with himself and his colleagues even when tenure was finally granted him without promotion to full professor. Perhaps no one can understand just how he felt. I can understand better than most. At Northwestern I took my MA and PhD in four years, as Brodhead did at Yale (Ferraro marveled at the speed!). After two years at Urbana as an assistant professor I was hired back at Northwestern, still as an assistant professor. Nominally teaching half time while working half time on the new Melville Project at the Newberry Library, I worked full time on the Melville Project, taught passionately, and picked up a few dollars from teaching novels to the Glencoe Literary Ladies. On the Melville Edition I had weighty responsibilities but no authority. That was the mid-1960s, the high triumph of the New Criticism, which stressed final product instead of process. The dominant textual theory, which also stressed final product, was perfect in the cases of simple correction but, I found, could not apply to authorial revision. I began asking questions about the creative process, but had no one to talk to until the Faulkner scholar James B. Meriwether came back to Chicago. In the years since his last visit we had worked our way to similar conclusions, I on Melville, he on Faulkner. We talked for hours about the creative process and sober second thoughts, and the next day I started looking for a job. The chairman had reneged on a promised raise, confident that I was trapped. To be free to rethink the dominant literary and textual theories I could not stay on where I had been a graduate student. When the chairman offered a raise and tenure, he was too late.
What if Brodhead had taken one of his offers and gone away from Yale in the 1970s? What if he had encountered faculty members who were unlike him, perhaps even some men (or women) from a lower social class? What if he had been forced to stand his ground on principles and define intellectual turf worth defending? What if he had encountered students who were not male, white, and wealthy, as his first students at Yale were? What if rather than enduring the "excruciatingly complex" process of becoming tenured at Yale he had taken earlier tenure elsewhere and had knocked about a bit, learning to deal with people quite unlike the adolescent buddies from Andover who proved to be his lifelong friends?
Had he left Yale, Brodhead might not have given rein to the demeaning and ultimately damning psychological quirks that are in the process of destroyed his reputation. For his reputation IS being destroyed. He settled with three formerly indicted Duke lacrosse players for a figure cited variously as between $18,000,000 and $30,000,000. He is being sued for his rush to judgment at Yale (James Van de Velde's lawsuit, naming Brodhead, having been reinstated in December 2007). He was sued by Michael Pressler, the Duke lacrosse coach he fired, for violating terms of their agreement, and Duke settled with Pressler. He is being sued by three unindicted lacrosse players. He is being sued by more than thirty lacrosse players and family members for charges involving criminal conspiracies. Damningly, he had exhibited the "extraordinary moral meltdown" described in the Taylor-Johnson book, UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT (p. 122). Brodhead will never regain a high reputation, not after the long delayed DISCOVERY PROCESSES are pushed through—and this is all aside from his strange search for an “intermediate explanation” of Dr. Anil Potti’s false claim to have been a Rhodes Scholar and the faked science with which he was treating real human beings with cancer until late in 2010.
Meanwhile, Brodhead's reputation as a scholar is being examined by a man he defamed in the New York TIMES on 23 June 2002. There he called me a "demon researcher" who showed "a single-mindedness worthy of a Melvillean hero," presumably Ahab, the captain of a doomed ship. After years of archival work I had merely "surmised" the existence of two lost books of Melville's. In fact scholars had known much about one of the books since 1960 and all about the other book since 1922. Brodhead's own academic "work" disintegrates at a skeptical touch, sometimes grotesquely, as when I pointed out that Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a man he jeered at for losing his reputation, ought to have been featured as a star pupil in THE SCHOOL OF HAWTHORNE (along with such women as Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote novels influenced by Hawthorne).
Brodhead had coasted to a high reputation as he had coasted through life. But something bad happened during those years of waiting, of being "in a troth." Brodhead soured. Later, when chances arose, he rushed precipitously to the wrong judgments, as if eager to punish the innocent. Brodhead fired James Van de Velde at Yale when the inept New Haven police let it be known that they had questioned him in the murder of a student. All the evidence pointed away from Van de Velde, but he had been the student's adviser, and police had questioned him. That was enough for Brodhead.
In the 1 April 2001 Hartford COURANT Les Gura described Van de Velde as a top student and athlete who graduated from Yale in 1982, then took his doctorate in international security studies from Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. In Van de Velde's "top secret government security clearance as a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve," he took "government and education positions in the U.S. and abroad for the State Department." After real-life adventures such as Brodhead had never known, Van de Velde went back to Yale in 1993 as dean of Saybrook College. "In the spring of 1997," Gura reported, "he took a leave from Yale on a Navy assignment to help monitor the status of peace in Bosnia from a base in Italy." At the time of his firing, Van de Velde was a lecturer in Yale's political science department. "With his training and combined government and education backgrounds," he was preparing to become "a television commentator on foreign affairs who also could find time to be a college lecturer."
Van de Velde had remained an athlete, a proficient even in martial arts which required the use of face masks or helmets. He was regularly described as a "handsome" man. He was flexible, adaptable, resourceful, variously competent, not a timid, cosseted man trying to believe he was really "in a troth." Was he, to Brodhead, unbearably manly? Wielding his new power, Brodhead recklessly fired him. Van de Velde told Gura,"my life is destroyed yet there is nothing I have ever done that I feel ashamed of."
As for me, I was a "demon researcher" and Brodhead, like most of his New Critical teachers, had no idea what research was. In a 1984 book, FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS, I had challenged both the New Criticism and the dominant textual theory and incidentally had pointed out Brodhead's coldness in closing his eyes to Melville's agony in enlarging PIERRE, cheerful that he was left a New Critical text to toy with. Did he know how unlike him I was, a Depression Okie and Texan, forced to drop out of high school, a railroad telegrapher for seven years until I left Texas on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship? Was I someone who could be easily sacrificed, kept from a Pulitzer in 2003 after being one of two finalists in 1997? For I was sacrificed by Brodhead, Andrew Delbanco, and Elizabeth Schultz, critics who declared that I was not to be trusted, when the evidence of my statements was right there on the pages of the book they were being paid to review. My health suffered for five years. I did not sleep one night without feeling the pain from the false accusations. In 2007 I began speaking out, and never lost sleep over the lies again. During all the nine years from 2002 until today, the Brodhead-Delbanco-Schultz reviews have been blazoned on the Internet., freshly defaming me every day. Not one of these critics has apologized.
At Duke, we know, Brodhead once again rushed to the wrong judgment, firing the admirable lacrosse coach and prejudicing the public against the falsely accused lacrosse players by saying that whatever they did was "bad enough." As at Yale, his victims were young, healthy, and handsome men, some from families more wealthy even than those of Brodhead and his friends at Andover and Yale. Again, they were athletes in a sport which involved bodily contact and the wearing of helmets. All of them were academic achievers, and some were brilliant. Do Homeric or Shakespearean memories haunt Brodhead, so that he sees himself as Thersites in contrast to Hector or Achilles?
Seeking to understand Brodhead's strange antipathy to brilliant handsome young athletes, I can best compare him to Radney in MOBY-DICK, so irrationally determined to pulverize Steelkilt, his superior in brains and physique, or Claggart, so jealous of the handsome and innocent Billy Budd. Did the "incredibly dispiriting" 1970s enrage Brodhead so that when he gained power he used it arbitrarily against those of whom he was fiercely jealous--usually men younger, brighter, more resourceful, and far more athletic than he was? The man who fired Van de Velde, led a trio of character assassins against me (for a non-scholarly would-be biographer and another Melville critic echoed Brodhead false accusations about merely “surmising” two lost Melville books), and turned his back on the Duke lacrosse coach, the players, and their parents--this man should never have been granted the power to inflict harm. Brodhead was already damaged goods. The lawsuits against Brodhead, Duke, and Durham have been unconscionably delayed. Van de Velde’s suit against Brodhead and Yale is reinstated but unconscionably delayed.
Now in 2011 it is clear that Duke, Potti, and others will be slapped with malpractice suits by the cancer patients who underwent actual treatment based on phony science—the cancer patients or surviving members of their families. Dr. Anil Potti faked his resume and mislead his colleagues into signing papers in which he faked science. He and his colleagues published papers in respected journals which purported to show how to select cancer treatment by analyzing an individual patient's genomic information--boutique analysis and treatment available only at Duke! Biostatisticians at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center tried to warn the Duke administration that Potti's results could not be duplicated, but the administrators sat on the information. Luckily, sciences are still more honest than literary criticism, so the Texans persisted, and in the last months Potti and his colleagues have renounced their own papers, including one in NATURE MEDICINE and one in the NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE. Some weeks ago now, long after evidence was clear that Potti had faked his credentials and was every day treating real cancer patients with faked science, Brodhead wistfully hoped that there could be some “intermediate explanation” for Potti’s difficulties. That phrasing will be remembered by those whose cancers advanced while they were being “treated” by faked science. Where will the culpability end? Where will the human suffering end?
At least, science still (in the end) seems to be held to a high standard. Literary reviewing, literary criticism, is held to no standard at all. Has Brodhead ever thought of renouncing one of his publications, asking, for example, the New York Times to mark one of his reviews as withdrawn because untrue? No, Brodhead learned how to write conventional literary criticism very early but he learned no standards for scholarship at Charles Feidelson's Yale. Does he reflect on the parallels between faked scientific expertise and faked expertise in literary scholarship now that Potti is exposed? Did he see himself at risk when he tried to deflect examination of Potti's bad publicity? There will be some sort of punishment for Potti, and certainly punishment for Duke as a result of the actions of Potti and his associates, but there is no punishment for a reviewer who in the New York Times fakes knowledge of scholarship, who passes himself off as competent to review a book based on archival research and on the whole course of research on Herman Melville.
But will there, after all, as DISCOVERY proceeds in April 2011, be punishment for Richard H. Brodhead's "constructive fraud" in one case and "obstruction of justice" in another? Think about Brodhead's position as President of Duke University, the judge having decided that "conspiracy" charges would be too hard to prove but deciding that there is ample evidence for DISCOVERY to proceed on the charges of "constructive fraud" and "obstruction of justice." Will emails be located after 5 years time? Have a few honest faculty members at Duke saved emails from the start, such as the one which urges everyone to get their stories straight? Can even a figurehead function in such a perfect storm all brought down by his own behavior on his own head?
RICHARD H. BRODHEAD: TROTH & CONSEQUENCES
Long-festering resentments may lie behind the reckless rush to the wrong judgments which Brodhead displayed toward James Van de Velde, Hershel Parker, and Coach Pressler and the falsely accused lacrosse players at Duke.
In "The Education of Richard Brodhead: Continuity and Change over Dean's 40 years at Yale" (Yale HERALD, 20 February 2004), Matthew Ferraro said farewell to a fixture who would soon become President of Duke University. Behind closed doors, Brodhead reflected confidentially on the years after his arrival as a freshman in 1964. Brodhead had "experienced the uncertainty of the '70s as a young untenured, if popular, professor, but stayed on despite offers from other universities." He had felt constrained by the emphasis on poetry and European writers: "He calls his decision to study and teach mostly novels in his adult life 'my own act of revolt.'" [Brodhead did not, of course, revolt to the point of rethinking how novels were studied in the 1960s and early 1970s, only as perfect New Critical artifacts.] After he completed his PhD, at Yale, Brodhead "won a choice appointment to the Yale junior faculty and began teaching," but "not everything was rosy." There were "disappointments." Brodhead remembered the 1970s "as an 'incredibly dispiriting time.'" Because of inflation, faculty salaries fell 30% in buying power, and "chances at professional advancement at Yale did not look particularly promising in a department that had not tenured anyone in years." To Ferraro, behind those closed doors, Brodhead spoke with unusual candor: "It was not fun. And you might say it was particularly not fun to be an untenured professor in a university where it didn't seem like anyone would ever get promoted."
During the 1970s, Brodhead said, he was offered tenured positions at two other universities but turned both down. His patience, or passivity, ultimately paid off: "In 1980, Brodhead was awarded tenure after an excruciatingly complex process. 'That was, you can say, the beginning of a new phase of my life' he said." Ferraro passes over Brodhead's intriguing comment on the "excruciatingly complex process." It was excruciating to Brodhead, presumably, but we are not told how it was complex. "Brodhead was surprised" at being granted tenure, Ferraro says, without explaining why he was surprised. Even tenure did not make Brodhead comfortable: "Despite being tenured, however, he was not yet a full professor. Unhappy with his department, he seriously considered an offer to 'rebuild a notable English program somewhere else,' he said. He met with then-Dean Howard Lamar . . . who convinced him to stay." Lamar told Ferraro: "Of course he had no reason to worry, but I couldn't tell him that." Lamar, said Brodhead, "led me to understand that I was in a troth, and he led me to see that life might be better sometime, and soon after it was." Brodhead was named a full professor in 1985.
Brodhead had stayed on, despite a humiliatingly slow and “complex” process by which Yale decided to grant him tenure but to leave him for some years "in a troth," living on hints that the lover would take him as a bride in a legitimate public marriage. Meanwhile, the lover, Yale, could make overtures to or entertain overtures from any young, alien, trendy, and disturbingly nubile candidate on the annual marriage market. In the end, patience, passivity, deference, hunkering down and keeping his nose clean, had paid off, and Brodhead soon became chairman of the English Department and then Dean of Yale College. Everything was all right at last?
No, the "excruciatingly complex process" during which, untenured, Brodhead taught alongside his tenured teachers, many of whom were less popular with students than he, had scarred Brodhead. He had kept his mouth shut too often and too long for him to be easy with himself and his colleagues even when tenure was finally granted him without promotion to full professor. Perhaps no one can understand just how he felt. I can understand better than most. At Northwestern I took my MA and PhD in four years, as Brodhead did at Yale (Ferraro marveled at the speed!). After two years at Urbana as an assistant professor I was hired back at Northwestern, still as an assistant professor. Nominally teaching half time while working half time on the new Melville Project at the Newberry Library, I worked full time on the Melville Project, taught passionately, and picked up a few dollars from teaching novels to the Glencoe Literary Ladies. On the Melville Edition I had weighty responsibilities but no authority. That was the mid-1960s, the high triumph of the New Criticism, which stressed final product instead of process. The dominant textual theory, which also stressed final product, was perfect in the cases of simple correction but, I found, could not apply to authorial revision. I began asking questions about the creative process, but had no one to talk to until the Faulkner scholar James B. Meriwether came back to Chicago. In the years since his last visit we had worked our way to similar conclusions, I on Melville, he on Faulkner. We talked for hours about the creative process and sober second thoughts, and the next day I started looking for a job. The chairman had reneged on a promised raise, confident that I was trapped. To be free to rethink the dominant literary and textual theories I could not stay on where I had been a graduate student. When the chairman offered a raise and tenure, he was too late.
What if Brodhead had taken one of his offers and gone away from Yale in the 1970s? What if he had encountered faculty members who were unlike him, perhaps even some men (or women) from a lower social class? What if he had been forced to stand his ground on principles and define intellectual turf worth defending? What if he had encountered students who were not male, white, and wealthy, as his first students at Yale were? What if rather than enduring the "excruciatingly complex" process of becoming tenured at Yale he had taken earlier tenure elsewhere and had knocked about a bit, learning to deal with people quite unlike the adolescent buddies from Andover who proved to be his lifelong friends?
Had he left Yale, Brodhead might not have given rein to the demeaning and ultimately damning psychological quirks that are in the process of destroyed his reputation. For his reputation IS being destroyed. He settled with three formerly indicted Duke lacrosse players for a figure cited variously as between $18,000,000 and $30,000,000. He is being sued for his rush to judgment at Yale (James Van de Velde's lawsuit, naming Brodhead, having been reinstated in December 2007). He was sued by Michael Pressler, the Duke lacrosse coach he fired, for violating terms of their agreement, and Duke settled with Pressler. He is being sued by three unindicted lacrosse players. He is being sued by more than thirty lacrosse players and family members for charges involving criminal conspiracies. Damningly, he had exhibited the "extraordinary moral meltdown" described in the Taylor-Johnson book, UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT (p. 122). Brodhead will never regain a high reputation, not after the long delayed DISCOVERY PROCESSES are pushed through—and this is all aside from his strange search for an “intermediate explanation” of Dr. Anil Potti’s false claim to have been a Rhodes Scholar and the faked science with which he was treating real human beings with cancer until late in 2010.
Meanwhile, Brodhead's reputation as a scholar is being examined by a man he defamed in the New York TIMES on 23 June 2002. There he called me a "demon researcher" who showed "a single-mindedness worthy of a Melvillean hero," presumably Ahab, the captain of a doomed ship. After years of archival work I had merely "surmised" the existence of two lost books of Melville's. In fact scholars had known much about one of the books since 1960 and all about the other book since 1922. Brodhead's own academic "work" disintegrates at a skeptical touch, sometimes grotesquely, as when I pointed out that Thomas Bailey Aldrich, a man he jeered at for losing his reputation, ought to have been featured as a star pupil in THE SCHOOL OF HAWTHORNE (along with such women as Harriet Beecher Stowe, who wrote novels influenced by Hawthorne).
Brodhead had coasted to a high reputation as he had coasted through life. But something bad happened during those years of waiting, of being "in a troth." Brodhead soured. Later, when chances arose, he rushed precipitously to the wrong judgments, as if eager to punish the innocent. Brodhead fired James Van de Velde at Yale when the inept New Haven police let it be known that they had questioned him in the murder of a student. All the evidence pointed away from Van de Velde, but he had been the student's adviser, and police had questioned him. That was enough for Brodhead.
In the 1 April 2001 Hartford COURANT Les Gura described Van de Velde as a top student and athlete who graduated from Yale in 1982, then took his doctorate in international security studies from Tufts University's Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. In Van de Velde's "top secret government security clearance as a lieutenant commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve," he took "government and education positions in the U.S. and abroad for the State Department." After real-life adventures such as Brodhead had never known, Van de Velde went back to Yale in 1993 as dean of Saybrook College. "In the spring of 1997," Gura reported, "he took a leave from Yale on a Navy assignment to help monitor the status of peace in Bosnia from a base in Italy." At the time of his firing, Van de Velde was a lecturer in Yale's political science department. "With his training and combined government and education backgrounds," he was preparing to become "a television commentator on foreign affairs who also could find time to be a college lecturer."
Van de Velde had remained an athlete, a proficient even in martial arts which required the use of face masks or helmets. He was regularly described as a "handsome" man. He was flexible, adaptable, resourceful, variously competent, not a timid, cosseted man trying to believe he was really "in a troth." Was he, to Brodhead, unbearably manly? Wielding his new power, Brodhead recklessly fired him. Van de Velde told Gura,"my life is destroyed yet there is nothing I have ever done that I feel ashamed of."
As for me, I was a "demon researcher" and Brodhead, like most of his New Critical teachers, had no idea what research was. In a 1984 book, FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS, I had challenged both the New Criticism and the dominant textual theory and incidentally had pointed out Brodhead's coldness in closing his eyes to Melville's agony in enlarging PIERRE, cheerful that he was left a New Critical text to toy with. Did he know how unlike him I was, a Depression Okie and Texan, forced to drop out of high school, a railroad telegrapher for seven years until I left Texas on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship? Was I someone who could be easily sacrificed, kept from a Pulitzer in 2003 after being one of two finalists in 1997? For I was sacrificed by Brodhead, Andrew Delbanco, and Elizabeth Schultz, critics who declared that I was not to be trusted, when the evidence of my statements was right there on the pages of the book they were being paid to review. My health suffered for five years. I did not sleep one night without feeling the pain from the false accusations. In 2007 I began speaking out, and never lost sleep over the lies again. During all the nine years from 2002 until today, the Brodhead-Delbanco-Schultz reviews have been blazoned on the Internet., freshly defaming me every day. Not one of these critics has apologized.
At Duke, we know, Brodhead once again rushed to the wrong judgment, firing the admirable lacrosse coach and prejudicing the public against the falsely accused lacrosse players by saying that whatever they did was "bad enough." As at Yale, his victims were young, healthy, and handsome men, some from families more wealthy even than those of Brodhead and his friends at Andover and Yale. Again, they were athletes in a sport which involved bodily contact and the wearing of helmets. All of them were academic achievers, and some were brilliant. Do Homeric or Shakespearean memories haunt Brodhead, so that he sees himself as Thersites in contrast to Hector or Achilles?
Seeking to understand Brodhead's strange antipathy to brilliant handsome young athletes, I can best compare him to Radney in MOBY-DICK, so irrationally determined to pulverize Steelkilt, his superior in brains and physique, or Claggart, so jealous of the handsome and innocent Billy Budd. Did the "incredibly dispiriting" 1970s enrage Brodhead so that when he gained power he used it arbitrarily against those of whom he was fiercely jealous--usually men younger, brighter, more resourceful, and far more athletic than he was? The man who fired Van de Velde, led a trio of character assassins against me (for a non-scholarly would-be biographer and another Melville critic echoed Brodhead false accusations about merely “surmising” two lost Melville books), and turned his back on the Duke lacrosse coach, the players, and their parents--this man should never have been granted the power to inflict harm. Brodhead was already damaged goods. The lawsuits against Brodhead, Duke, and Durham have been unconscionably delayed. Van de Velde’s suit against Brodhead and Yale is reinstated but unconscionably delayed.
Now in 2011 it is clear that Duke, Potti, and others will be slapped with malpractice suits by the cancer patients who underwent actual treatment based on phony science—the cancer patients or surviving members of their families. Dr. Anil Potti faked his resume and mislead his colleagues into signing papers in which he faked science. He and his colleagues published papers in respected journals which purported to show how to select cancer treatment by analyzing an individual patient's genomic information--boutique analysis and treatment available only at Duke! Biostatisticians at the University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center tried to warn the Duke administration that Potti's results could not be duplicated, but the administrators sat on the information. Luckily, sciences are still more honest than literary criticism, so the Texans persisted, and in the last months Potti and his colleagues have renounced their own papers, including one in NATURE MEDICINE and one in the NEW ENGLAND JOURNAL OF MEDICINE. Some weeks ago now, long after evidence was clear that Potti had faked his credentials and was every day treating real cancer patients with faked science, Brodhead wistfully hoped that there could be some “intermediate explanation” for Potti’s difficulties. That phrasing will be remembered by those whose cancers advanced while they were being “treated” by faked science. Where will the culpability end? Where will the human suffering end?
At least, science still (in the end) seems to be held to a high standard. Literary reviewing, literary criticism, is held to no standard at all. Has Brodhead ever thought of renouncing one of his publications, asking, for example, the New York Times to mark one of his reviews as withdrawn because untrue? No, Brodhead learned how to write conventional literary criticism very early but he learned no standards for scholarship at Charles Feidelson's Yale. Does he reflect on the parallels between faked scientific expertise and faked expertise in literary scholarship now that Potti is exposed? Did he see himself at risk when he tried to deflect examination of Potti's bad publicity? There will be some sort of punishment for Potti, and certainly punishment for Duke as a result of the actions of Potti and his associates, but there is no punishment for a reviewer who in the New York Times fakes knowledge of scholarship, who passes himself off as competent to review a book based on archival research and on the whole course of research on Herman Melville.
But will there, after all, as DISCOVERY proceeds in April 2011, be punishment for Richard H. Brodhead's "constructive fraud" in one case and "obstruction of justice" in another? Think about Brodhead's position as President of Duke University, the judge having decided that "conspiracy" charges would be too hard to prove but deciding that there is ample evidence for DISCOVERY to proceed on the charges of "constructive fraud" and "obstruction of justice." Will emails be located after 5 years time? Have a few honest faculty members at Duke saved emails from the start, such as the one which urges everyone to get their stories straight? Can even a figurehead function in such a perfect storm all brought down by his own behavior on his own head?
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