| Richard Brodhead | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1947 (age 64–65) Dayton, Ohio |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Yale University |
| Occupation | Administrator |
| Title | President of Duke University |
| Term | 2004- |
| Predecessor | Nan Keohane |
| Successor | Incumbent |
Richard Halleck Brodhead (born 1947)[1] currently serves as the ninth president of Duke University and is a scholar of 19th-century American literature.
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Brodhead was born in 1947 in Dayton, Ohio. His family moved to Fairfield, Connecticut when he was six years old, where he attended public schools. He went on to attend Phillips Academy, where his high school classmates included Dick Wolf and George W. Bush. Brodhead graduated from Yale College in 1968 (summa cum laude with Highest Distinction in the English major). During his senior year at Yale was tapped for membership in the secret society Manuscript. He continued in at Yale for graduate school and earned a Ph.D. in English in 1972. He met his wife, Cynthia Degnan, while both were graduate students at Yale.
After receiving his Ph.D. in 1972, Brodhead was appointed an assistant professor of English at Yale. In 1980, he received tenure and was named Director of Undergraduate Studies in English. By 1985, he had been made a full professor and was named chair of the English department. He was appointed Dean of Yale College in 1993 and served until 2004. Together with current Yale President Richard C. Levin, Brodhead oversaw a major curricular review at Yale.
An expert in 19-century American literature, Brodhead has written or edited more than a dozen books on Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charles W. Chesnutt, William Faulkner, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, Richard Wright and Eudora Welty, among others. His scholarly work has been honored by election to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Brodhead won the DeVane Medal for outstanding teaching at Yale and spent eight summers teaching high school teachers at the Bread Loaf School at Middlebury, Vermont. He has lectured widely in universities in the USA, Europe, and Asia.
As dean and as a professor supervising graduate students, Brodhead was involved in the controversy surrounding efforts by graduate student-employees (GESO) to unionize; he was accused of attempting to blacklist unionist students.[2] In 2003, Brodhead was named a defendant along with, Richard Levin, Linda Lorimer in a lawsuit by Yale professor James Van de Velde claiming damage of reputation after Van de Velde was accused of murdering Suzanne Jovin, a female student, and Brodhead subsequently canceled his class citing his presence as a "major distraction." In 2007, A Connecticut Judge reopened Velde's lawsuit against Brodhead et al.[3]
He left New Haven in 2004 to become President of Duke University, succeeding Nan Keohane. Much of his leadership at Duke has focused on enriching the undergraduate experience of Duke students and expanding the university’s financial aid endowment to ensure that a Duke education is accessible to qualified students regardless of their family’s financial circumstances. He has called for Duke to become an international center in addressing health care inequities through a major global health initiative involving faculty and schools across the university, and has championed Duke’s efforts to bring the fruits of faculty and student research through a translational process to serve society. Brodhead has also been active in Durham promoting K-12 public education, several new community health clinics, neighborhood revitalization through the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership, and the future strategic direction of the Research Triangle Park.
Brodhead led the successful Financial Aid Initiative,[4] which raised $308.5 million for need-based scholarships at Duke at its conclusion in 2008.
His signature program has been DukeEngage, which "empowers students to address critical human needs through immersive service, in the process transforming students, advancing the University’s educational mission, and providing meaningful assistance to communities in the U.S. and abroad." More than 300 students participate in DukeEngage each summer.
Brodhead serves on the board of trustees of the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Security Higher Education Advisory Board.
One month into Brodhead's tenure as president, the Palestine Solidarity Movement (PSM) was scheduled to hold their annual conference on Duke's campus. While this led to opposition, Brodhead approved the conference, citing free speech and the desire for improved dialogue regarding this contentious issue.[5]
Brodhead's actions during the Duke lacrosse case proved very controversial and garnered much criticism after three members of the nationally-ranked men's lacrosse team were falsely accused of raping a stripper hired to perform at a team party off campus on March 13, 2006. Brodhead stated that "whatever they did is bad enough."[6] while saying "our students must be presumed innocent until proven otherwise," while also talking about the horrors of sexual assault and racism in society.[7] On April 5, 2006, Duke's lacrosse coach Mike Pressler was fired and Brodhead canceled the remainder of the 2006 season.[8][9] Student body president Elliott Wolf said that Brodhead faced a public perception "that [Duke] simply washes its hands of students." [10]
On December 20, 2006, Brodhead stated that "the DA's case will be on trial just as much as our students will be."[11] On April 11, 2007, the N.C. Attorney General's Office dropped all charges against the players, declared them innocent, and called them victims of a rogue prosecutor's "tragic rush to accuse."[12] Later, Brodhead apologized to the lacrosse players and their families for the university's "failure to reach out" in a "time of extraordinary peril."[13] Brodhead and more than 30 other individuals were named as a defendant in the lawsuit filed in 2008 by the unindicted members of the lacrosse team.[14]
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