On his curriculum vitae, President Richard Brodhead is listed as holding two titles at Duke University: President, and Professor of English. But five years after he accepted the former of these two jobs, he has not yet officially performed the latter.
Why hasn't Brodhead-one of Yale's most beloved scholars during his tenure as the A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of English, and a 19th century literature expert of wide acclaim-ever stepped into a Duke classroom for a semester?
It's something English majors like myself have pondered from time to time, so I stopped by his office June 18 to ask him.
"I don't think, in the near future, I see a way for me to teach a whole course," said Brodhead. "But I know in my life I will teach again. I'll teach all kinds of things again."
Though mum on the subject of when he'll take on a class, Brodhead emphasized his life-long passion for the classroom, and explained that he can still fulfill the role of educator from his office in the Allen Building.
"When I was in college, I wanted to be a teacher, and that's what I became-but then I also became a scholar, and then I got responsibilities for other things at universities," he said. "But if I'm ever stopped at an airport and asked for my profession or something like that, I'll usually say teacher. What am I going to say-administrator?"
As president, Brodhead has read poetry in the Nasher, given countless talks on campus and off and stopped by the odd English class to deliver a guest lecture, but he has not yet stepped behind the podium of his own class. It goes without saying that it's a position for which he would be eminently qualified. At Yale, he climbed the ranks of the Department of English-from a Ph.D. student, to a junior professor and eventually to its chair. But he wasn't just an English professor-he was a rock star at the lectern with classes that were "packed to the rafters," Yale Associate Dean Penelope Laurans recalled to The Yale Herald, a Yale student newspaper, upon Brodhead's departure to Duke in 2004.
In 1980, the Yale Daily News, another student-run newspaper at Yale, printed an editorial entitled "Make me late for Brodhead" that criticized the slow tenure process by mentioning his burgeoning reputation: "Assistant professor of English Richard Brodhead, whose teaching skill has drawn an award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society, raves in the Course Critique and high course enrollment, is up for tenure this year. If the University continues effectively to ignore teaching ability as a criterion for tenure, Brodhead probably won't be around to be late for."
But Yale did not ignore Brodhead's ability-it embraced it for the next 24 years. When Brodhead decided to abscond to Durham, Yale brass came out in full force to let everyone know what the New Haven institution was losing. "Dick Brodhead is one of the finest educators of his generation and one of the greatest deans in Yale's 300-year history," Yale President Richard Levin wrote in an e-mail to his university's community upon news of Brodhead's departure.
"The trouble is that my way of teaching doesn't marry easily with the job I now have," he said. "I don't like to pull notes out and walk into a room and teach from old notes. I like to reread everything I teach, I like to think it through again. and the trouble now is, when would I do it?"
What if you had, I asked him, a "battalion of TAs" to help you with the material?
"See, a 'battalion of TAs?'" Brodhead repeated, skeptically. "I don't want to be making cameo appearance, or doing star turns. That's not my idea of teaching."
Yes, Brodhead's job may leave little free time to teach a class, but the practice is not unheard of: A 2006 survey by the American Council on Education reported that 20 percent of college and university presidents teach a course as well.
And Duke's president should increase that percentage. Though he may be booked for the time being, Brodhead should start taking the necessary steps to allow for a future semester when he can helm an English course. Five years after Yale students lost their chance to show up late to Brodhead's class, Duke students still can't show up at all.
But if they could show up, they'd find that his itch to rip back into his cherished areas of study has not abated at all.
"What would I teach?" he wondered aloud, smiling, his voice rising with excitement. "Oh!-Let's not even go there, let's not even go there, let's not even go there..."
Nathan Freeman is a Trinity senior.
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