Richard Brodhead as Arthur Dimmesdale

Hershel Parker

Most commentators applauded Richard Brodhead's belated attempt at an apology for his behavior during the Duke-Durham scandal of 2006, in which members of the Duke Lacrosse team were falsely accused of rape and three members indicted. Among the dissenters were William L. Anderson and Michael Gaynor. On 3 October 2007 Anderson quoted from the statement: "When a case like this is over, it's tempting to think that the facts so clearly established at the end of the day must have been equally clear throughout the process. This was not the case." Anderson countered: "Brodhead cannot plead ignorance of the facts here. During the summer of 2006, Kevin Finnerty and his wife, Mary Ellen, the parents of accused player Collin Finnerty, offered to give Brodhead a copy of the entire case file. They wanted to show him that they had nothing to hide, nothing. Brodhead refused, stating that he could not be a judge."

Brodhead's claim, Anderson continued, was "ridiculous, given that much of the Duke faculty, administration, and student body had already acted as judge and jury when the Duke campus exploded with protests and accusations. The lacrosse players had their pictures on 'wanted' posters spread all over campus, the administration refusing even to protest the posters, which were spread by Duke students and employees. The Duke administration said nothing when 'Castrate!' signs appeared on campus, and when professors denounced the lacrosse players in class, openly calling those students rapists in front of their peers." At first, Anderson continued, the Duke administration "was going to permit the Black Panthers to go onto campus in order that the members of the group could 'interview' the lacrosse players." Anderson went on: "Indeed, after canceling the game with Georgetown, after protesters carried signs declaring, 'Don't be a fan of rapists,' Brodhead refused to meet with the parents, sending the sign that he believed the players were guilty. Time and again, he minimized the need for due process and presumption of innocence, telling the Durham Chamber of Commerce, 'Whatever they did was bad enough.'"

On 30 September 2007 Michael Gaynor was even more scathing than Anderson about "Mr. Brodhead's pathetic public statement." He quoted Brodhead's blaming "the public," which "consumes every 'fact'" with "an endless appetite for more." The culture, Brodhead insisted, was to blame: "having become one of America's principal forms of shared public life, these cases highlight crucial problems of our culture." Gaynor commented: "Don't blame the public for the Duke case! Blame the ex-convict stripper, blame the rogue prosecutor, blame his enablers in both his office and the Durham Police Department, blame the political correctness extremists, the feminists and the black racists who didn't care about the actual facts . . . and blame Duke University President Richard Brodhead for being a coward instead of an honorable man."

Quoting more of Brodhead's statement, Gaynor accused Brodhead of hiding from the facts, of choosing not to look at exonerating documents. While issuing statements that blamed the lacrosse students, Brodhead "was a passionate prejudger who refused to criticize the false accuser, the rogue prosecutor or the out-of-control part of the Duke faculty. Discovery in a civil suit against Duke will show that Duke 'entrusted . . . the criminal justice system' with material to which it was not entitled and remained mute about it." Gaynor continued with a relentless paragraph-by-paragraph scrutiny of Brodhead's self-serving statement.

The so-called "apology" has, after all, little to do with the "facts" of the events and the facts of Brodhead's behavior in 2006 and earlier in 2007. (Facts kept changing Brodhead lamented, not distinguishing fact from false report!) The apology does, however, bear close relation to a form of discourse Brodhead is particularly adept at, the New Critical literary essay. Like his "apology," New Critical essays dispense with unpleasant biographical "facts. The next paragraph reviews Brodhead's apology in the lacrosse case by recycling clichés from a compendium of critical clichés, Brodhead's own 1976 HAWTHORNE, MELVILLE, AND THE NOVEL. (I forbear giving page citations.)

The truth is that few apologies realize their own potential so incompletely as does Brodhead's. Rather than seeming inevitable, that nothing could be added to it, or anything taken away, it stands as radically deceptive, a feint toward confession. Rather than facing the starkness of the tragedy that he had contributed to, Brodhead shelters himself behind the dubious ontological status of the other Duke-Durham participants. Ontology stands out as a problem because these academic and law enforcement characters are endowed with radically different sorts of reality, to which Brodhead defers. The way in which Brodhead asks us to believe in them is a function of the way in which they believe in themselves rather than of the way in which the facts of the case pointed all along. Brodhead's sympathetic method exhibits his favored characters in their private community of affection rather than allowing the lacrosse team, its coach, and the players' parents, into his closed circle of those worthy of being protected and cherished. Furthermore, the characters, including the Gang of 88 (not identified as such in the "apology"), the District Attorney, the loose-lipped Vice President John Burness (also not named in the apology), all reinforce a sense of multiplicity of surface. Each unnamed character (unnamed in the "apology" because Brodhead points a finger only and always at the "rogue prosecutor," not at a "rogue stripper" or a "rogue Gang of 88" or a "rogue President") is presented in a mode of fiction appropriate to the mental world he or she inhabits--a mental world in which culpability is deflected or denied outright. Brodhead deflects attention from the image of an inverted urban community, once an intellectual and spiritual center, a university pledged to the ideals of Methodism, now abandoned of morality, now become the haunt of hunkered-down radicals, downtown lawyers suddenly waxing rich, discredited intellectuals, displaced agitators, and would-be Sharptons.

Brodhead's apology is indeed a rhetorical exercise, a performance, a public show of penance in which he seems sorry for almost nothing as he scurries past the mention of what he might have done differently. At the end he has a grand distraction, not a promise of soul-searching and true penitence, oh no! He has the ultimate bureaucrat's solution. He will convene a conference instead of performing acts of penitence: "To work through these difficulties and to see that their lessons are learned not just here but throughout the country, we will be hosting a national conference of educators, lawyers, and student affairs leaders to discuss best practices in this important and difficult field."

Three decades earlier, Brodhead had talked about the difference between penance and penitence in commenting on "The Minister's Vigil" in The Scarlet Letter: "In this chapter Dimmesdale goes to the scaffold at midnight to do public penance for his sin. But even as he does so he is half-aware that his act, like the rest of his rituals of self-scrutiny and self-torture, is a 'vain show of expiation.' By going through the forms of penitence without actually revealing his guilt Dimmesdale only succeeds in renewing his sin of concealment." Brodhead responded emotionally to Dimmesdale's "masochistic fantasies of exposure" and "his recoils of dread from the prospect of discovery." That last word rings ironically now, for the legal process of "discovery" is indeed the one from which the older Brodhead recoils in frantic dread. What may be brought forth in the process of discovery in one trial or another which names him as a defendant is apt to be shattering for Brodhead and others at Duke and Durham. Through the discovery process the Duke Lacrosse Case may yet be seen as exemplifying that great New Critical clichéd ideal--the "seamless unity" that Brodhead praised in The Scarlet Letter. If the story ever achieves that seamless unity it will be because, after all, it is about the truth. And real people in that true story will be seen to have suffered from Richard Brodhead's blindness to his obligation to protect the lacrosse coach and the lacrosse players.