Lost in transition

Keith Brodie, all 64 years of him, laughs like a 10-year-old. Always has. He sits here, on the same couch where a frustrated Duke faculty member might have asked him—told him, really—how to run the University any day sometime in the 1980s from the Allen Building. He contemplates and often whispers here, resting on the same piece of furniture where a depressed member of the Board of Trustees just begs for a Zoloft prescription when in town for a session. And then, with the same burst of uncontrollable and unadulterated surprise that almost derailed the presidency after he was forced into it in 1985, comes this giddy, almost awkward howl. Hee hoo!

But no matter how many times they seem ill-fitting, neither the giggles nor the guy want to go away. Thirty years ago, Duke reeled in Dr. Hammond Keith Harlow Brodie from Stanford—and before that New York, New Orleans, Columbia, Princeton and a big house in Connecticut—as the psych department chair, ushering him in with all the pomp and circumstance a rising university could give to a star professor. Having been trained in the mental health of a one-on-one conversation, Brodie was rushed all the way up the corporate ladder of Duke University, where counseling isn’t the prescription for a presidency.

“My commitment to psychiatry early on focused on what I enjoyed most, which was talking to individuals and basically teaching, if you will, them to understand the unconscious factors in their lives of work driving a depression or hallucination or whatever it was,” he says. “So, fortunately, as a psychiatrist, when I was president, I mean I was practicing psychiatry—” Brodie laughs so hard at himself now that he could honestly use a straightjacket. “—pretty much every day. Heh heh!”

He swallows back in all the laughter he can, but Brodie’s high-pitched hyena hoot is too heartfelt to take back. It’s as if this whole package—public image, power, credentials—could be some huge joke. Because when a beautiful mind meets an overwhelming office, sometimes even the most cerebral are prone to a little mania.

In 1993, Brodie moved out of the office of the president and right over to East Campus. But the school kicked him out, and he set up shop this year at his final stop, a serene space 15 miles off-campus. Here, he can look out on the trees as he takes a break from writing his book, and that gargantuan telescope looking back at him can now see a man in a cable-knit sweater, baggy chinos and a pair of New Balances who no longer has to shrink when he wonders if he’s his own worst patient.

“I turn 65 in August, and my arrangement with the Board of Trustees when I was hired was that at 65 I would retire,” he says. “And, um, I think that that’s probably a good idea. A sitting president does not need a whole number of past presidents sitting around on the campus.”

Ex-president Brodie thinks of himself as the third participant in a two-person dialogue between his predecessor, Terry Sanford, and his successor, Nan Keohane, about this young school’s history—he’s obsessed with Keohane, like she were Freud or something. When his legacy or his own self-diagnosis come up for discussion—with one person or more—Brodie goes right on chatting about Keohane, without laughing, without stopping, Nan this, Nan that. It is not so much a competition as a justification, a resolution that his legacy lies in the institutional foundation he nurtured.

“I think she was a very fine president and brought in hundreds of millions of dollars and sort of materially changed the place, but I don’t think the University advanced as intellectually as rapidly,” says political science professor Allan Kornberg, former Academic Council chair and an ear to Brodie during his presidency. “In my estimation at least, I think she certainly built on what Dr. Brodie had done, but I think he really changed the intellectual character and the ambiance of the University.

For the 16 years leading up to that shaky but “fun” speech by Brodie, Terry Sanford led Duke in its race to the stratosphere of higher education. A politician by nature who came in as North Carolina governor, ran for the Oval Office twice from the Allen Building and left it to become a U.S. Senator, Sanford reveled in fundraising—lots of it—and in public speaking. Brodie has always hated both, but even a residency with “Uncle Terry” couldn’t condition the chancellor for the towering expectations.

“I took this presidency only because I was asked to,” says Brodie, who was shocked when Sanford interrupted his dinner one Saturday night to essentially demand he be the replacement. “I did not run for the office, I didn’t apply for the job, I was sought out. And you know how these things work: The Board of Trustees, if they like the way the institution is going, will seek the No. 2 to continue it. So it makes sense. They saw me as in Terry’s shadow.”

Brodie felt it, but preferred to cast a much smaller one, a much softer one. He wanted a six-month sabbatical to clear his head and gear up a non-existent CEO skill set to complete the unnerving track from tenure to provost to chancellor to this: the insisting University presidency. Sanford wouldn’t let him take any sort of vacation, for the ’80s would bring budget deficits slashing away at higher education and university chiefs who would soon fall because of them. But Duke was sprouting out of a rosebud so fast that someone had to grasp the reins.

Lost in transition, Brodie could only trust his own faculties, those of a bushy-eyebrowed psychiatrist, a comforting chatterbox, a mindful misfit. He told the senior class this much in a 1988 graduation address: “In my experience—especially since becoming a university president—there just isn’t that much good advice going around. And when your job requires that you traffic eternal verities on a regular basis, the problem is obviously considerably compounded.”

He made it perfectly clear, then, that the faculty—his people—would be the focus. Brodie attended the regular Academic Council meetings, couched with the academy and nudged them—many say too hard. English wizard-warrior-wacko Stanley Fish splashed onto Duke the same year Brodie squirmed into office, and the two both proved to be champions of critical theory and faculty governance, but ill-fitting impresarios nonetheless.

The more challenging push buoyed by Brodie came with the Black Faculty Initiative three years later, a resolution with more resolve than results—one of several such projects that Keohane’s administration had to transform to see through. Henry “Skip” Gates was the hire, a top scholar in African-American studies and in critical theory, but he became fed up within his first year and bolted for Harvard.

In a telling story for The New Yorker last year about a female slave fighting for professional freedom in the literary field, Gates wrote, “English reviewers had condemned the hypocrisy of a colony that insisted on liberty and equality when it came to its relationship to England but did not extend those principles to its own population.”

A scholar, a laugher, a father and a minder of minds, Brodie loves reading into things in such a manner. But his presidential verdict—imbedded personality traits notwithstanding—was that he couldn’t write his own decisions. The man who would be king was a flip-flopper, and Duke was left to execute its own enigmatic visions. The one-on-one, listening, psychiatrist’s approach became the presidential seal, and this couch became a soapbox to influence the theater of the University. Brodie handed off his power to those he trusted most; Provost Phillip Griffiths’ desk became, in many ways, the University’s real stage.

“During the period of his presidency, there was some very strong leadership at the senior officer level and at the mid-manager level at Duke,” says Sue Wasiolek, the longtime dean of students. “They found themselves able to operate rather autonomously.... Many people sort of took their own initiative and defined their own path.”

Continued in "Brodie (cont.)"