Young minds, old university inspire Brodhead

People ask me what my hobbies are, what I do for recreation," Richard Brodhead, BR '68, GRD '72, said. "Well, I like to teach."

Brodhead, while best known to Yalies as Dean of Yale College, is not teaching a class this term, but he still thinks of himself first and foremost as an educator. An expert in the field of American literature, he has taught at Yale since finishing graduate school.

"It was clear to me by at least the end of high school that I wanted to be a teacher," Brodhead said. "It later occurred to me that there may be other interesting professions that I never gave adequate thought to. But I consider myself thoroughly happy."

Brodhead especially enjoys the exchange of ideas provided by the educational experience. "Teaching is a chance to share your enthusiasms with others and, with luck, to recreate them," he said. "It's the social form of thinking, it's conversational; things come back to you that you couldn't think of yourself."

His students confirm that a Brodhead lecture is a wholly interactive affair. Peter Norman, CC '00, a student in Brodhead's literature Directed Studies section last year, said, "It seemed almost like he was exploring the literature for the first time with us, enjoying the works and putting his mind completely into them."

"He respects the students. His class is an egalitarian experience," John Muse, TC '00, said. Muse remarked that Brodhead's DS section was the best class he has had at Yale. "He's brilliant, but it's as if he teaches out of a moral obligation to let people bounce off his ideas and come up with their own."

Kimberly Sargent, BK '00, also found Brodhead's unique approach in DS section stimulating. "He didn't assign essay topics, so people formed theses that were interesting to them. He encouraged us to go out on a limb in our writing, to use innovative styles instead of writing the generic English essay--he really inspired us."

While Brodhead enjoys travelling and reading and wishes he had more time to play squash, he said, "I consider myself lucky that my vocation and avocation happen to be very close together. My good friends are mostly academics. [Teaching] is what I like to do."

Brodhead loves "the puzzles and questions that books help us to ask and answer," though he calls himself "censorious in taste--when I read a book, I want it to be not only good but not bad. There are so many ways in which works can be uninteresting, bland, conventional--even experimentation has been conventionalized to some extent."

Recent books Brodhead has enjoyed include Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things and Robert Fagles' translation of Homer's Iliad. But while Brodhead's degree is in literature, he said he "gravitate[s] toward reading history." His recent scholarly work has concerned the American South, especially the town of Jacksonville, Mississippi in the time of writers like Eudora Welty and Richard Wright. Next semester, he will teach English 431b, a senior seminar on "The American Prophetic Tradition."

Over his 25-year career, Brodhead has taught everything from Shakespeare to 19th-century European fiction. His favorite, however, is still the first class he taught at Yale, English 125. "It's an exhilarating course," he said. "I love teaching freshmen. They're so ready for things, and typically in high school they've been held back a little bit, so their minds are eager and ready to notice things."

Brodhead's connection with Yale started when he entered as an undergraduate in 1964 (and took Directed Studies as a freshman). After graduating, he pursued graduate study at Yale, and then became a Yale professor. In 1986, he became chair of the English department, and in '92, he was appointed Dean of Yale College.

Does he regret that his administrative responsibilities leave him so little time to teach? Characteristically, Brodhead answers in the abstract. "When you've spent a long time at a university, and when that university has provided you with the growth media for your intellectual life, two things happen," he said. "First, you feel a sense of gratitude; second, you care about the place. You want to support its strengths and fix its weaknesses. The life of a faculty member is very satisfying, but you can teach at a university for years and have only the sketchiest sense of how the university actually works."

Still, "it's too bad he's not teaching more classes," Muse said. "He made [class] a joy. There's nothing godlike about him, but occasionally he says something that just really makes you think."

Photo courtesy OPA.

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