BRODHEAD: "IN A HELL OF HIS OWN MAKING"
Hershel Parker
On 4 February 2008 Erin O'Connor in her blog, "Critical Mass," said this: "Duke president Richard Brodhead has been living in a hell of his own making ever since the lacrosse scandal revealed his total incapacity to uphold--or even really grasp--foundational principles such as fairness, due process, and Doing the Right Thing. Brodhead pandered and cowered and skulked his way through the extended tag-team beating administered [in 2006] to the falsely accused lacrosse team by the Durham D.A.'s office, the national media, and the Duke faculty, and wound up shaming himself and his university in ways that can never be undone." Right!--except that Brodhead took active part in beating the lacrosse players. Now that people whose reputation he set out to destroy are fighting back, Brodhead bobs up and down in several concentric circles of Hell, all of his own making.
Most professors of English don't acknowledge that all literary criticism has a moral component, but the form of the text that you choose to criticize and how you criticize it are moral as well as intellectual and aesthetic choices. In the early 1980s I was so appalled at Brodhead's indifference to Melville's agony at a crisis in his career that I called attention to it in FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS (1984). That same blindness to other people's suffering marks all the worst mistakes of Richard Brodhead that have so far come to light. His present Hell of his own making is a consequence of his character. Character tells.
While Brodhead was Dean of Yale College a young female student was murdered, and the local police leaked word that the lecturer James Van de Velde was a suspect because he was her thesis adviser. A better Dean would have gone to the next scheduled class with the young lecturer. Standing shoulder to shoulder with him, he would have told the students that he understood their distress not only at the murder but also at the news that their teacher might be investigated by the New Haven police. Well, the police might investigate him too, he could have said, since he was the slain woman's dean. Without disparaging the police department, the low reputation of which was well known to the students, he could suavely have made it clear that they had to shrug off an occasional rush to judgment or a rash enumeration of suspects. Everyone at Yale would be upset until the murderer was arrested, he could have acknowledged, but the students would focus on their work in Van de Velde's class. From what he had heard (he could have smiled) this was a teacher who challenged students to perform above what they had thought were their abilities.
Instead, Brodhead canceled Van de Velde's class and refused to renew his contract. Brodhead's overt motive was to protect Yale's public image; in another tcv article on Brodhead as "selective demonizer" I have suggested a deeper motive. Van de Velde later said to an interviewer that Brodhead had ruined his life. Van de Velde's life did not matter to him any more than Melville's agony had mattered. Late in 2007, Van de Velde's lawsuit against Yale (naming Brodhead as the chief defendant) was reinstated. Now, whoever pays the defense lawyers, Brodhead is in a Hell of his own making because of what he did to Van de Velde.
On 23 June 2002 in reviewing the second volume of my Melville biography in the New York TIMES Brodhead set out to destroy my reputation as a careful scholar by misrepresenting previous scholarship and implying that I made up two now lost books, The Isle of the Cross (1853) and Poems (1860). He started with snide innuendo then edged over into outright falsehood. Exhausted, in bad health, I did not try to respond, partly because I was sure other reviewers would correct Brodhead. None did, and to my bafflement Andrew Delbanco and Elizabeth Schultz, who like Brodhead had never done archival research and who, like him, had not consulted such basic tools as The Melville Log (1951) and Correspondence (1993), echoed Brodhead's accusations with new twists of their knives. It was almost as if there had been--what? a conspiracy?
I kept my silence. Late in 2006, when I focused on how Brodhead might send three young lacrosse players to jail for 30 years, I wrote "The Isle of the Cross and Poems: Lost Melville Books and the Indefinite Afterlife of Error" (Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 62, June 2007). Then I exposed Brodhead's distorting the trajectory of Melville's career in Melville: The Making of the Poet (Northwestern, 2008). Replying on the Internet, where his false 2002 account still flourished, did not occur to me.
Early in 2006, when a promiscuous drug-addled black female stripper with a history of making false accusations made new false accusations of gang rape against a large but variable number of Duke's lacrosse team, what Duke needed as President was not the former Dean of Yale College but a strong, honorable man. On 24 March 2006, when many members of the Duke faculty were demanding punitive actions against the lacrosse team (without knowing what, if anything, lay behind the accusations), a strong President would have reminded them that the players vehemently denied the accusations. He would have informed the faculty members that the lacrosse captains had talked with the police without counsel, had given statements, had presented a list of people who were at the party, and all the team had freely given DNA samples and had offered to take polygraphs lie detector tests. He would have informed them that the Duke Police Department had told Dean of Students Sue Wasiolek that the allegations did not seem valid. This strong President of Duke University would have told them that the Durham PD had no jurisdiction. Duke PD had jurisdiction and would be investigating the case since the alleged crime was said to have happened in University-owned property.
Warning that everyone there would act decorously throughout the meeting, a strong President would have informed the faculty members bluntly that especially in this racially sensitive situation they were expected to exercise restraint in any of their comments and actions. If angry faculty members had tried to shout him down, a strong President would have stood his ground, calling on Duke's security forces if necessary, and told the faculty members clearly, firmly, and finally: the lacrosse players are innocent until and unless they are proven guilty. He would have read from Ch. 6 of the Duke Faculty Handbook: "Members of the faculty expect Duke students to meet high standards of performance and behavior. It is only appropriate, therefore, that the faculty adheres to comparably high standards in dealing with students . . . Students are fellow members of the university community, deserving of respect and consideration in their dealings with the faculty." The investigation would be fair and complete, he would have continued. Further, he would plan an early meeting with the parents of the Lacrosse Team and report back to the faculty members when he had something to say. But one thing was clear: he would take no disciplinary action against the team before the DNA results came back and no such action would be taken if the DNA results did not implicate any students. Faculty members, this strong President would have warned them, would not make hasty statements to local or national television, particularly statements which violated the Handbook. No one at Duke was to make the situation any more of a circus than the mainstream media seemed determined to make it.
Ultimately because Brodhead was not a strong leader and did not protect the lacrosse students as he was obligated to do, Duke settled with three falsely accused and corruptly indicted players--settled privately so as to avoid revealing all his actions to the public. Report is that Brodhead cost Duke between $18,000,000 and $30,000,000 in this settlement, but he did not put the case behind him. Too many reputations had been damaged or destroyed, too many lives had been put in danger. Now Brodhead is in a Hell of his own making.
On 21 February 2008 thirty eight members of the lacrosse team and several of their parents filed a lawsuit against Durham and Duke officials, including Brodhead. Ludicrously, his lawyers went to court to make the lawyers remove their webpage from the Internet lest they publish items favorable to the lacrosse players--this while much of Duke's own trashing of the players was still up on the Internet. Furthermore, when Brodhead's lawyers' attempted to make the fired lacrosse coach Michael Pressler submit to arbitration in his suit against Duke, the judge rebuffed them and admitted that he was aghast the spokesman appointed by Brodhead had been "dumb enough" to violate the terms of Pressler's severance from Duke. Brodhead's Hell is entirely of his own making.
Robert and Samantha Ekstrand's Amended Complaint of Ryan McFadyen, Matthew Wilson, and Breck Archer against various Durham and Duke employees, including Richard Brodhead, shows very clearly just how busily Brodhead labored at creating the Hell he is in now. Look at these charges: "BRODHEAD'S ACTS IN FURTHERANCE OF THE CONSPIRACY TO FABRICATE THE 'RACIST' DIMENSIONS TO MANGUM'S FALSE RAPE."----"BRODHEAD AND STEEL CONSCIOUSLY PARTICIPATING IN THE FRAMING OF THEIR OWN STUDENTS"----"FALSE PUBLIC STATEMENTS IN VIOLATION OF 42 U.S.C. §1983"----"INTERFERING WITH RIGHT ENGAGE IN POLITICAL PROCESSES IN VIOLATION OF 42 U.S.C. §1983 AND CONSPIRACY"----RETALIATION IN VIOLATION OF 42 U.S.C. §1983 & CONSPIRACY"--"COMMON LAW OBSTRUCTION OF JUSTICE & CONSPIRACY"----"INTENTIONAL INFLICTION OF EMOTIONAL DISTRESS AND CONSPIRACY"--"BREACH OF CONTRACT." Those are charges only from the lawsuit filed by Ryan McFadyen, Matthew Wilson, and Breck Archer. These are not accusations that Brodhead drifted and waffled and evaded and dithered like the stereotype of a cosseted professor suddenly dropped from his Ivory Tower. They are charges that he actively, knowingly engaged in criminal actions.
When the Blue Committee recommended that Brodhead be continued as President of Duke University many assumed that he would soon leave quietly. There will be no face-saving period. Brodhead is confronting like "Breach of Contract" and "False Statements" and "Framing" of students and still more serious charges of "Conspiracy" to commit one crime, "Conspiracy" to commit another crime, "Conspiracy" to commit yet another crime. Brodhead may face criminal prosecution within the next year or two. He may not be as lucky as another conspirator, the former District Attorney Michael Nifong, who spent only one night behind bars, and that snugly in the local jail. Two years after what KC Johnson and Stuart Taylor in UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT called his "moral meltdown," it is clear that Brodhead's problems are all character-driven. Brodhead may never be imprisoned "in a cell of his own making" but he will live out his life in a Hell of his own making.