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A Taste for the Mentally Zesty
Widely respected as a scholar and an academic diplomat, a new dean takes charge of Yale’s “jewel in the crown.”
May 1993
by Bruce Fellman
Sidney Altman, a Nobel Prize–winning biologist who served as dean of Yale College from 1985 to
1989, is not a man to indulge in hyperbole. And when he was asked recently to
describe the qualities required for success in the position, he grew pensive.
“The dean,&rdquo``; he finally said, smiling but serious, “has to be just below
superhuman.”
Richard Hallek
Brodhead, ’68, ’72PhD, the Bird White Housum Professor of English and chairman
of the English department, may not wear a cape—a tweed jacket’s more his
style—but to hear his supporters talk, the 46-year-old scholar and teacher, who
becomes the 11th dean of the College on July 1, is a rare mortal. Typical are
the comments of Paul H. Fry, a professor of English who has observed Brodhead’s
speedy progress up through the Yale ranks: “Dick was born wearing a Yale
T-shirt, and I’ve thought for years that he’d make the ideal dean. He’s a
diplomatic genius whose rhetorical gifts are backed by a subtle, Jamesian
intelligence.”
Such traits
should prove invaluable for Brodhead in taking over from acting dean Donald
Engelman, who is returning to research and teaching as a professor of molecular
biophysics and biochemistry. Engelman stepped in when Donald Kagan, the Bass
Professor of History, resigned as dean three years into his tenure during
the uproar that followed the release in the spring of 1992 of the
administration’s controversial restructuring plan.
Ironically,
Brodhead served on the 15-member Committee to Restructure the Faculty of Arts
and Sciences that produced the now-abandoned strategy which called in part for
cutting a number of departments to help put Yale’s financial house in order.
The resulting furor did not, however, taint Brodhead, an energetic lecturer and
researcher on 19th-century American literature and a highly regarded moderate
who came through the fray with his popularity intact.
“Richard is a
man of great warmth, wit, and wisdom,” notes Alison Richard, director of the
Peabody Museum, who was also a member of the restructuring committee. “Not only
did he emerge untarnished, but the experience should stand him in good stead
because of the wider perspective we all developed.”
As an alumnus
of the College (summa cum laude with exceptional distinction in
English) and the Graduate School who started teaching at Yale in 1972 and
never left, the new dean is intimately familiar with the University, and the
“jewel in the crown,” as the College is known to its partisans.
“Yale of course
has to find a way to live within its budget—the educational mission of the
University requires it,” Brodhead says, looking out over the campus from his
office in Linsly-Chittenden Hall. “But instead of hacking and exterminating all
over the place, we’re now talking about solving our problems with reductions
and economies at the margins. That will preserve our strengths: the residential
college system, the teaching program, and our existence as a real university in
which the whole spectrum of human knowledge is represented.”
In evaluating
candidates for the deanship, John Hartigan, the Eugene Higgins Professor of
Statistics and chairman of the selection committee, explains that his group had
one major qualification in mind. “In these hard times,” says Hartigan, “we felt
it was important that the person had gravitas, weight in the
Yale community, for it’s the dean who will have to persuade the President and
the provost to keep the primacy of Yale College in view and to maintain the
quality of undergraduate life and education.”
Hartigan says
that as his committee culled through the 40-plus letters of recommendation it
had received from faculty, students, administrators, campus organizations, and
alumni, Brodhead’s name came up repeatedly. “Richard has approval, respect, and
admiration from every part of the campus—the sciences and the humanities
alike,” Hartigan notes. “He’s seen as a wise and sensible person can bring
consensus to the faculty. But he’s also known as a leader—a person the faculty
will listen to and trust to solve the tough problems and make the hard
choices.”
Chief among the
new dean’s supporters is Acting President Howard Lamar, who followed the
“unanimous advice” of Hartigan’s committee in appointing Brodhead. Lamar, who
himself served as dean of the College from 1979 to 1985, explains that his
choice was guided by tradition. “When I was first teaching at Yale in the
1940s, William Clyde DeVane was dean,” Lamar recalls. “DeVane was superb in
that role because he was very aware of the faculty at all levels and enlisted
everyone of every rank to participate in the governance of the College. I took
that as a model when I became dean, and that was a major reason I appointed
Dick. He has a way of including everyone in the operation of whatever he does.”
Brodhead’s
concern for the faculty, particularly its junior members, is well known, but
his biggest claim to fame, says Paul Fry, is his teaching. “He may simply be
the best teacher at Yale, and that includes living legends like [Jonathan]
Spence and [Vincent] Scully.”
Indeed, to
watch Brodhead in the lecture hall is to witness someone in love with his work.
His teaching style is warm and intimate, and he always seems to be smiling
about something, even when scolding a class for missing an exam question.
“Honestly,” he says, rolling his eyes heavenward, “who else could it be but
Whitman? We dwelt on that poem in lugubrious detail!”
Even as
Brodhead’s voice trails off in mock despair, the sparkle in his eyes gives the
viewer—and the student—the feeling that there’s nothing he’d rather be doing
than passing on what he’s learned and challenging listeners to come up with
their own interpretations.
“It’s
terrifically exciting to be a teacher here,” says Brodhead, who was awarded the
prestigious William Clyde DeVane Medal for Scholarship and Teaching in 1979 by
the Yale chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. But there is more to his life than the
classroom. When asked about his outside interests, Brodhead lists squash,
tennis, “agonizing” over the fate of the New York Mets, “spending lots of time
with students,” and “hanging out with friends and family.” Brodhead’s wife,
Cynthia, is an attorney whom he met when they were both in graduate school at
Yale. They have a 13-year-old son, Daniel. Brodhead also serves on the advisory
board of the Yale–New Haven Teachers’ Institute and has spent many summers
working with high school teachers at the Bread Loaf School of English in
Middlebury, Vermont.
If Brodhead
faces a major obstacle in becoming dean, it may be that he will have to give up
some of his teaching, which he sees as central to Yale’s mission. “At the
majority of colleges comparable to Yale,” he says, “the most distinguished
members of the faculty tend to distance themselves from education, but here,
there’s an obligation—and one that, by and large, we take great pleasure in—to
engage with students and share what we’re doing in a holistic and interesting
way.”
His earliest
days as a student contributed to that commitment. “I had wonderful teachers,”
he explains of his upbringing in Ohio and Indiana. “It was teachers more than
books—at first.” At Yale, history tempted him, but he soon came under the spell
of American literature, particularly the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt
Whitman. Though Brodhead has studied numerous authors of various eras since
then, the 19th century still evokes his greatest enthusiasm. His literary
investigations of the period have so far resulted in three books, the latest of
which, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in
Nineteenth-Century America, was published by the University of Chicago Press
this spring. Another book, due out in the fall, will join a list of
publications that also includes three books for which he served as editor and
15 essays published in scholarly journals. In addition, Brodhead has presented
his work in numerous lectures at universities and professional organizations
around the world. (He’s also been a popular speaker at gatherings of the Association
of Yale Alumni.)
Fielding a
question about the current climate of “political correctness,” in which attacks
on the “canon” of traditional studies are routine, Brodhead laughs off the
notion that all he teaches is “dead white guys. Sure, one week I taught Henry
James, but the week before I lectured on Louisa May Alcott,” he says, adding
that he rejects the “either-or” dogma that has come to characterize the often
bitter debate over the “proper” subject matter of literary studies. “If you
want to do this right, you don’t say, ‘Let’s teach just the DWGs,’ or tell students that the fact
this author was formerly considered interesting is proof positive that he
belongs to a nefarious stream of cultural oppression. You want to be a little
catholic in your interests.”
Following his
own dictum, Brodhead is currently tackling the writings of a 19th-century
African-American named Charles W. Chestnutt, whose work has been attracting
considerable attention in recent years. “I basically backed into the Chestnutt
project,” says Brodhead, explaining that this “very subtle, gifted, and
intelligent” writer, like many blacks of the period, had trouble getting his
books published. “I knew that one manuscript had been through five revisions
and was rejected four times, and I was led to believe that the early drafts of
the manuscript still existed. I went to Fisk University in Nashville to hunt
for them, but they weren’t there. To justify the plane trip, I combed their
Chestnutt archives for something else, and that’s where I discovered the
fascinating journal he’d kept in his teens and twenties.”
This record of
a young black man’s struggle to become an intellectual is the subject of two
books-in-progress, a happy outcome of serendipity and a mind not hidebound by
academic conformity. “I see myself as someone who doesn’t want to be forced to
choose between the traditional subjects in my field and the more newly
discovered ones,” Brodhead says.
Others share
his assessment of himself. “Richard is one of the very few people who have
tried, with a great deal of scrupulousness, to hold together the various
interests of scholars writing about American literature,” notes David Bromwich,
director of the Whitney Humanities Center and author of Politics
by Other Means, a critically acclaimed look at the divisive effects on
academia that have resulted from the efforts of left- and right-leaning
scholars.
Brodhead is
quick to point out that—press reports to the contrary—the department he has
chaired for the past five years is imbued with the same catholic attitude
towards English that he prescribes. Indeed, he bristled at a colleague’s
comment that presiding over such an allegedly “fractious and contentious"
department would be “great training” for dealing with the College. That
characterization is “an exaggeration on the verge of a serious
misrepresentation,” says Brodhead, warning against any comparison of Yale with
universities where there has been bitter fighting between those who would teach
nothing but the classics and those bent on jettisoning the past. “One of the
real successes of this place is that it hasn’t wanted to choose between the
two. This is a successfully pluralistic English department.”
The consummate
diplomat (some would say politician), he refuses to take credit for achieving
pluralism without pugilistics. “We succeeded because our faculty members
realize that there are values more important than ‘being like me’,” says
Brodhead.
Paul Fry,
however, is more willing to boost his colleague’s achievements. “In modern
times, there’s been no more successful chairman,” he says.
Acting
President Lamar is certain that Brodhead will prosper as dean. “Dick expressed
to me a vision of higher education that I think we all share—that Yale should
not only be the best at what we do, but that we should also serve as a national
model,” he says, adding that Brodhead, “a very practical person,” was willing
to face up to “a major and disheartening challenge: the high cost of doing anything
new, and of doing something right, within a constricted budget.”
Lamar also had
some advice for the new dean: “Be accessible to all parties, open in terms of
honest discussion, and aware that everything you do is being watched by
hundreds of thousands of people. The dean really does live in a goldfish bowl,
but most of the time, the cats are fairly benign.”
Although some
of the “cats” have expressed disappointment about the paucity of scientists
among Yale’s ranking administrators, the College family seems as pleased with
the new dean as he is with his new-found constituency. “Look at how lucky I
am,” he says with unapologetic enthusiasm. “What’s best and most worth
preserving at Yale—the gathering, year after year, of terrifically talented,
mentally zesty students and teachers worthy of teaching them—is still strong
here, and it will continue.”  |
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