Shots In The Dark: Brodhead and Summers

Saturday, May 05, 2007

Brodhead and Summers

Duke's president, Richard Brodhead, entered uncharted waters when he walked onto Duke's campus four years earlier. He was a shy, scholarly man from Yale, and big-time sports at the Division I level were foreign to him. Brodhead was unsure how to balance athletics and academics, a combination that Duke views with beaming pride. In fact, 10 percent of Duke's undergraduate students are athletes. Brodhead speaks in long, elegant passages and often quotes Shakespeare. His timid, calm demeanor is surprising for a man of such power. In the midst of this struggle to establish himself, he was forced to manage a faculty becoming more vocally radical in its political views. Brodhead had watched just a month earlier as his contemporary Harvard President Lawrence Summers fell victim to that university's more extreme professors and wanted to ensure he didn't suffer a similar fate....

From It's Not About the Truth: The Untold Story of the Duke Lacrosse Case, by Don Yaeger with Mike Pressler

¶ 1:06 PM

Comments:

I can't imagine that Broadhead actually worried that he might repeat Summers's experiences!

My sense of Brodhead (from his time at Yale) doesn't match the portrait drawn here (shy, timid, and scholarly?): he was personable, friendly, and gifted at speaking to a wider, non-scholarly audience.

Both Summers and Brodhead pride themselves on speaking publically without notes. But with Brodhead this comes from preparation, practice, memory, and concentration, whereas my sense with Summers is that it comes from his sense of ease and confidence.

--Former Bulldog
(Also, btw, quoting Shakespeare hardly makes someone scholarly!)

# posted by Anonymous : May 5, 2007 3:36 PM

Farish Jenkins is extreme? Fred Abernathy is extreme? Caroline Hoxby is extreme? The myth goes on. Summers fell victim to himself.

# posted by Anonymous : May 5, 2007 6:41 PM

Great fact checking in the book. The excerpt has Stanford in the Ivy League, but not Princeton.

# posted by Anonymous : May 6, 2007 2:21 AM

This is a silly characterization of Broadhead. He was a fine scholar when he was active, but he was never shy or timid. He speaks with a certain nervous energy, but his ability to charm and interest both small gatherings and large assemblies at Yale was widely recognized.

# posted by Anonymous : May 6, 2007 5:13 AM

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