When English professor Maureen Quilligan walked into the room where she would begin her post-Ph.D. teaching career, her mind was filled with doubts. “Can I do this? Do I want to do this? Is it going to work out? What’s this really like?” she asked herself.
The year was 1973 and the class was English 125 at Yale University. When she walked into the classroom, she saw fellow junior faculty member Richard Brodhead, who led “the conversation”—the discussion portion of the multiple-section course. Although Brodhead was only one year ahead of Quilligan, he instantly convinced her of the merits of university life.
“I said, ‘This is absolutely ideal,’” Quilligan said. “And it took me another 20 years to find out it was Dick that made it that way. I thought it was the business, but it was Dick. I walked out of that first term and said, ‘He should be president of a university some day.’”
Quilligan is now chair of Duke’s English department, and she includes herself among the numerous other members of the department with past connections to Brodhead who enthusiastically welcome him as the University’s ninth president.
“He was a beloved dean,” said Associate Professor Ian Baucom, who received his Ph.D. and began his teaching career at Yale while Brodhead was chair of the English department and, later, dean of Yale College. “He was a very successful dean. He was a dean with whom the faculty were extremely comfortable. I think that people probably had a sense that [a presidency] was a strong possibility ahead of him... that he was a natural person to head a major university.”
In addition to Baucom and Quilligan, Brodhead was Associate Professor Thomas Ferraro’s dissertation advisor, a colleague of Cathy Davidson, vice provost for interdisciplinary affairs, and he was dean at Yale while Associate Professor Maurice Wallace was an assistant professor there.
“While some of my new colleagues in English are new to me, I’ve known a number of others over the years, and in a variety of ways,” Brodhead wrote in an e-mail. “Some, like Cathy Davidson, are major figures in my own field. Tom Ferraro is an old student of mine who has gone on to teach me (and many others) a lot about my field.
“Ian Baucom and Maurice Wallace were both assistant professors at Yale and I tried to talk them both out of leaving Yale for Duke—though I now rejoice that they were right and I was wrong.”
Although Brodhead did not emphasize his background in the humanities in his inaugural speech, many members of the English department take comfort in his past writings.
“It was noted that he didn’t mention the word humanities in his address,” Quilligan said. “But then Peter Burian, the chair of classical studies, said to me, ‘Well Maureen, think of it this way. There’s a story of the man that came out of the British library during the Blitz. And a woman said to him, ‘Sir, how you can be in the library and not defending Western civilization?’ And he said, ‘Ma’am, I am Western Civilization.’ Peter Burian meaning, I suppose that [Brodhead] could say, ‘I am a humanist.’”
Quilligan said Brodhead’s enthusiasm for the arts opens up the possibility for students to become equally enthusiastic about theater, artwork and music as they are about Duke athletics. She noted that not everyone can play Division I basketball, but every student can participate in a theater production.
The department does not see Brodhead’s presence as merely offering potential to produce more artwork at Duke, but as an opportunity for more interdisciplinary discussions with more empirical fields.
“He’s thought a lot about communication and the marketplace for ideas. In that respect, he will be not just an inspiring model, but a great interlocutor, a great co-producer of the intellectual landscapes here at Duke,” Assistant Professor of English Matt Cohen said. “One of the greatest things Duke is doing now is to bring together system analyses from very different fields—genomics, genetics, medicine, medical research—together with approaches from cultural anthropology, literary studies [and] those that study stories more generally. Because it is really there that we have an advantage over our peers.”
Despite the fact that his primary obligation to the University is to be its leader, the department still feels that Brodhead is a pure academic. Quilligan said it is his skills as an academic coupled with his enthusiasm for life and students that will make him a great university president.
“You have to be a good academic to be a good president,” she said. “And he’s never lost it. He was so clear about the enterprise in which we were engaged. [He’s great] because he has the expense of energy and personality and character that he could include everyone else in what he’s doing. I’m sure he already knows more undergraduates by name going across the quad than I do.”
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