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| Perfect fit: receiving chain of office from
University Marshal Richard White, left, and trustee chair Peter
NicholasPhoto:Jim Wallace |
When you enter Yale's Sterling Memorial Library,
you come across constant reminders of ancient wisdom and treasured
tradition: a painting of Alma Mater surrounded by allegorical figures
that represent the areas of learning, stone carvings with images
of students and scholars, decorative window panes inspired by great
literary works, and rows and rows of card catalogues that long
ago should have been supplanted by searches in cyberspace.
Shift to Duke's Perkins Library. There, things are being broken
apart and made anew. Late this summer, a faculty member was heard
to complain that he found it impossible to work on the lower levels.
He was confronting the atmospheric upheaval of jack hammering--a
particularly noisy part of the process of constructing a Perkins
addition.
This is, in a sense, the journey of Richard H. Brodhead, who became
Duke's president in July after forty years at Yale as a student,
faculty member, and administrator. Brodhead seems intrigued by
a certain youthful exuberance that's basic to Duke's makeup. It's
not an idea that he invented, he's quick to say. It's how he has
perceived Duke talking about itself. "It took me a little
while to understand what that meant. The whole point is, it doesn't
have anything to do with the chronological age of the university.
It has to do, instead, with the way Duke does business and the
way Duke faces challenges. You could use many, many positive adjectives
to describe Yale. But the word 'young' would not appear on the
list."
From his first exposure to Duke, he found the campus "so beautiful
in a traditional way," he told a press conference last December,
when he was named to the presidency. "But what I really loved
was the coexistence of tradition and heady forward progress: all
those cranes towering over the Gothic buildings, saying that the
building phase at Duke is something of the present and future,
not just the past."
So when Brodhead, a restless intellect, meets Duke, he finds a
campus possessed of a restless energy--an energy that fuels a constant
process of rethinking, retooling, reinventing. Brodhead, the product
of a university that has already marked its tercentennial, may
have found a perfect match in Duke.
In the months immediately following the December announcement,
he visited Duke almost weekly to sharpen his sense of the place
and its people. Since taking office, he has been a relentless campus
force. In his first days on the job, he joined a gathering of student
boosters of Mike Krzyzewski as the men's basketball coach was being
wooed by the Los Angeles Lakers. Weeks later, he stood up for the
university's tradition of open debate as plans were announced for
a controversial Palestinian-rights conference on campus. At a welcoming
reception for the new Nasher Museum director, Kimerly Rorschach,
he talked about how the museum will be re-imagined and not just
relocated. As the semester was starting, he told freshmen, in a
convocation address, that a community of mutual respect shouldn't
imply "a world of self-neutralized convictions and watered-down
consensus." He welcomed graduate students with a message to
balance the quest for specialized expertise with an interest in
the larger field of "humanly interesting things."
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| Awaiting procession:
Brodhead greets faculty membersPhoto:Les
Todd |
The chair of the faculty's Academic Council, Nancy Allen, a professor
of medicine and rheumatology and immunology, refers to Brodhead's
eloquence, warmth, and "infectious enthusiasm." Allen,
who was a member of the presidential search committee, adds, "He
displays excitement, genuine intellectual curiosity, a wry sense
of humor, and a friendly and open style. He is well on his way
to endearing himself to students, alumni, staff, faculty, and parents."
At Yale, Brodhead received his bachelor's degree summa cum laude
and with exceptional distinction in English in 1968. Two years
later, he earned a master's and, then, in 1972, a Ph.D. in English.
As a graduate student, he decided to become an Americanist, with
a particular interest in Hawthorne and Whitman. At the time, he
recalls, "English literature, and especially poetry, was in
the ascendant, so the choice of American and fiction was, as one
might say, a minor personal rebellion."
That choice reflected a longstanding literary passion. "There
was just a sense that there was something endlessly fascinating
and profound in those works," he says. And while he's worked
vigorously in textual analysis, he continues to regard literature
as "a repository of experiential wisdom, as well as invention
and creativity."
Right after earning his Ph.D., Brodhead joined Yale's faculty as
an assistant professor of English. He was appointed professor in
1985 and chaired the English department for five years before his
selection, in 1993, as dean of Yale College. As dean, he had oversight
of undergraduate education and the faculty appointments process,
with policy responsibilities in admissions, financial aid, student
services, and student life. He was also, beginning in 1995, the
A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of English; the endowed chair honors
the former Yale president and commissioner of Major League Baseball.
"I like this place," Brodhead says of Yale, "because
it's a place where teaching is taken very seriously. I am first
and foremost a teacher. I've become other things later on, too,
but that's the bedrock of me." Even as an administrator, he
has been a teacher. Administration, he once wrote, is "a temporary
crossing over from the realm of education proper into the enabling
realm of arrangement." He arranged to teach and advise students
through most of his years in the Yale deanship; in all of those
roles, he was widely seen as an energetic advocate for students.
As dean, Brodhead oversaw areas that on most campuses, Duke included,
are distributed among several administrators. And he seems to have
been everywhere, from author readings to sports events.
Sports, of course, operate in a different context in Yale. The
current shaper of that tradition occupies an office decorated with
trophies, aerial views of Yale's playing fields, and a Frederic
Remington painting of a Yale-Princeton football match (Remington
was Yale Class of 1898 and a football player). In that setting
athletics director Tom Beckett talks about Yale stars drafted into
the professional ranks, a recent set of Yale Olympians, and four
consecutive years of sold-out hockey games. The Brodheads lived
so close to the Yale hockey rink that they could hear the rousing
cheers every time Yale scored a goal, Beckett points out. "He's
an amazing fan. He will be the number-one fan of Duke athletics.
That's because he just loves to be there to support the activities
that students are passionate about."
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