Brodie (cont.)

Continued from "Lost in Transition"

In 1989, Brodie made Griffiths the official No. 2 in the middle of a war with the Academic Council. The coalition he had sought out early on as an ally turned against him to publicly question who was running the school and how they were going about it. The faculty wanted more power, and he wanted them to have it, but some degree of cognitive dissonance set in for Brodie—his thoughts could no longer translate into action, those thoughts growing less and less confident by the day.

The late political science professor James David Barber, in a scathing, mutiny-on-the-Brodie column in The Chronicle that spring, called out “the arbitrary decision-making of this administration.” Barber said a hefty section of the Duke community was “depressed by the anticipation of another half decade of his presidency. Time and again, those of us who hoped he would reform his presidential performance have tried to straighten him out, with no success. His is a kinder, gentler person who tolerates bullies. He is a sincere expresser, but you can’t rely on what he says.”

At the time, Brodie was up for re-evaluation by an increasingly skeptical Board, and the continuing backroom discussions between trustees and other administrators “sometimes resulted in the development of a contentious and deleterious factionalism,” Brodie would write later. The internal auditing committee weeded through response after response from an unprecedented survey of everyone—friends, fractious foes, flummoxed faculty. But eventually, even in the midst of all the other questions about who was in charge, Brodie was deemed a good enough guy to hang around for a while. He was the president, after all.

In the book he just finished, to be released next year, Brodie analyzes the “life cycle” of the research university president in four stages: the Prelude, the Honeymoon, the Plateau and the Exit. While he turns the attention outward to his peers, Brodie does quite a bit of indirect self-psychoanalysis to determine “whether one must resolve the conflicts associated with one stage of the presidency before moving on to achieve success in the next.” After his reinstatement, Brodie was clearly in the exit phase, like it or not. He would last another four tormented years.

The problems were beyond resolution, but Duke research, giving and faculty were still hitting new heights, with corporate ties giving serious headway to projects that would carry the University into its next presidency. Brodie has always considered himself on the cutting edge, so he made himself an avid participant in the goings-on, putting himself out there, laughing all the way.

As the men’s basketball team lifted Duke onto the national scene and the television screen, he was there pumping his fists, even with his detractors scowling rows behind. And as the student-faculty ratio dipped and applications skyrocketed, Brodie always taught his classes. They rescued him. He even returned the favor in 1992, when he and his wife, Brenda, ponied up $320,000 to save the budget-choked A.B. Duke scholarships. He wishes he could have dispensed all of the annoyances like that, but the solutions weren’t all as hollow as a check for a couple hundred grand.

Somehow, still, the psychiatrist had taken Duke public.

For the length of Keohane’s presidency, Brodie sat around on East Campus, waiting for Keohane to call and ask for advice. She got the credit for moving all freshmen over to East and sophomores to West, where a quad was named in her honor amidst a bustle of new buildings. All Brodie got was a gym—a renovated rec center, for that matter.

Having watched Keohane come and go, he is now more enamored with the university presidency, more interested in observing the office than he ever was in sitting through one. Thinking about the “stressers” in the brains of his peers at the top from other Duke-like institutions, Dr. Brodie has spent the past couple years turning a festering obsession with his own presidential struggles outward. He has finally helped himself.

Paying his own sanity for a lasting peace, then, Brodie has Otis. Otis is high-maintenance, messy, confusing and intimidating. But for a 64-year-old man who otherwise lies on a psychiatrist’s couch reading the newspaper alone—a basketful of bad decisions right there to haunt him—his new black Labrador puppy is about as soothing as can be.

So as Brodhead settles in as Duke’s ninth chief, unlucky No. 7 officially works as head of The Devinwood Co. But for Brodie, who served as the youngest president of the American Psychiatric Association and pushed, however in vain, to make Duke a business partner, Devinwood is really nothing more than the name of his childhood home—a moniker tacked up on the door so the insurance company couldn’t charge him more for housing a medical practice.

“They didn’t want me billed as the local doctor,” he says. “I didn’t mind that either, because, you know, you put m.d. out there, suddenly people are rushing in so you can have some—hee, hee—medical emergency which I might not be particularly well-equipped—hooofff—to handle.”

And now in his new home, Brodie finally has a secret locale for trustees, faculty and administrators to come and find a familiar couch. In those 50-minute sessions, just like in those forgotten 50-minute classes, Brodie is back in the thick of Duke, laughing and listening.

“A few of them, you know, they hold substantial positions in the university and have perhaps gone through a crisis which has involved some coping strategies and perhaps a little bit of psychopharmacology to get them over a loss or a serious stress,” he says of his current patient roster. “And that, as you might gather, forges a confidence. And the fact that you’re there and around is very reassuring to many of these people because they feel that you know their history.”

Brodie is going to hang around for a while, without pretending to be anything but the happy-go-lucky, ace shrink he’s always been. After Sept. 11, 2001, the New York Police Department asked him to move back north and develop psychological programs to help officers cope with post-traumatic stress disorder. But despite a courtship and cajoling that rivaled the Board’s slinging him into the presidency, Brodie turned down the NYPD and its ticket away from a decade and a half of failure.

They needed him to counsel those already down, not a university on its way up. But after all those years on the couch at Duke, Brodie couldn’t help but stay, not because his wife told him she wanted to take care of her garden, but because he still had to counsel himself. “That was to me sort of a dream job, but in the end she convinced me that—” a smile fading, “—you know, we had work to do here.”