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President Brodhead: Eulogy for Keith Brodie

Friends and family members filled Duke Chapel for a memorial service honoring former President H. Keith H. Brodie. Photo by Duke Photography
Friends and family members filled Duke Chapel for a memorial service honoring former President H. Keith H. Brodie. Photo by Duke Photography
Dr. H. Keith H. Brodie

When you were in high school, you may remember learning that on July 4, 1826, when this country was getting ready to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the nation learned that the two people who had done the most to create the meaning of July Fourth—Thomas Jefferson and John Adams—had both died that very day.  Such things don’t happen often, but we had a Duke version of such an event last Friday, when within a small number of hours, we learned that I, the ninth president of Duke, would have an excellent successor in Vincent Price, who was announced as the tenth president—and at almost the same time, we learned that the seventh president of this university, Keith Brodie, had died. 

You know the official account of Keith’s life. He went to college at Princeton; he went to medical school at Columbia; he was an early and brilliant entrant in the turn in the field of psychiatry, turning away from the talking-cure model and turning toward an understanding of the scientific basis of mental phenomena.  His work made brilliant contributions to understanding the biochemical basis of mood disorders.  So brilliant was this rising person that he quickly got a job at Stanford, and by the time he was 35 years old, he was brought to this university to chair the department of psychiatry.  It didn’t end there: He was so good at that, that soon thereafter he was brought over to be the chancellor under Terry Sanford.  Terry Sanford did the public part, but someone had to manage the university—that would be the chancellor—and when Terry Sanford stepped down, Keith, still only in his mid-forties, was elevated to the office of president. 

And if you know this much of the story, then you know what came next. People have described Keith’s presidency to me this way:  Terry Sanford helped tear down the walls that held this university back, but it was Keith Brodie who helped propel Duke into newly opened spaces and helped Duke become the great university it subsequently became. 

To cite four quick examples: Duke Medicine and Duke University used to consider each other quite separate entities, although located side by side.  An advantage of having a president from the medical school was that he could help both sides see how much better they could be if they thought of themselves as part of a larger whole. 

If you were Keith, that’s what you saw, looking north from the Allen Building.  Looking south, you could think of Athletics—which at most universities were a very separate world from the rest of the university—and you could try to think athletics into the university, identify it with core strengths, and make its successes become symbols for the culture of excellence of the university as a whole.  Everyone thinks Duke was athletic from the moment of conception, but it is not true:  Duke only won its first team national championship, in soccer, under Keith, and then its first two national championships in basketball under Keith. 

Third, Duke became integrated in the early 1960s, and we recently celebrated the 50th anniversary of that event; I see Wilhelmina Reuben-Cooke, one of the first black students at Duke, sitting in the fourth row here.  But if Duke became integrated in some technical sense in 1963, Duke became integrated in some palpable, real sense in the Brodie presidency.  If there were five black undergraduate students at Duke in 1963, black students still made up only four percent of the student body when Keith became president in 1985, but that number had climbed to nine percent by the end of his presidency.  To accomplish this, this university had to tell a population that had not looked to Duke as a place they would aspire to that this was a good school, and a good school for them, and that Duke was interested in having them here, and interested in them having a great experience here. 

And this to me is even more astonishing: Do you know that the number of undergraduates on financial aid when Keith became president was 20 percent of the student body?  This was a rich person’s school in some very visible sense of the word.  But by the end of Keith’s presidency, that number had changed from 20 percent to 40 percent.  Think of the meaning of that for the sense of inclusiveness, for the quality of the students who were drawn here, and for the enriching of the experience of everyone here. 

The Duke we now take for granted was the work of actual people. Keith and his presidency helped create the Duke we celebrate today. 

But David Brooks has taught us the distinction between what he called “resumé virtues” and “obituary virtues”—the things you brag about as your official accomplishments and the human qualities people talk about after you’re gone.  And to talk about Keith as if he had principally been the president—important though his work was—doesn’t get him exactly right.  For one thing, he remained a vibrant member of the Duke community for almost a quarter-century after he stepped down as president.  For another, anyone who chose psychiatry as his profession is a person most interested in inwardness, in intimacy, in confidential conversations.  Keith occupied a public role, but Keith was a private person, and he did much of his crucial work in private settings.  Here again I have four examples. 

When Keith became president, he did not cease to be Keith Brodie.  If you listened to Mike Krzyzewski’s radio interview after the Maine game the other night, he began by telling the story of the first time he met President Brodie, went to the intimidating Office of the President, and met a person in a rumpled, baggy, outstretched sweater with holes in the elbows, and pants six inches too short for him. After a few minutes, Mike said, he thought, this is the most brilliant person I’ve ever met.  But his first thought was, who the hell is that?  You get the point:  when he became the president, Keith didn’t cease to be Keith.  Go look at his portrait in the library.  All the other presidents are depicted in the solemn, depressing grandeur of robes, and there’s Keith—he’s not in a sweater, but he’s casual, he is himself; that’s who’s there.  

Second, even as Keith occupied a public office, he made clear that his private life was his most profound life.  There was a president’s house, but when Keith was president, he lived in his own house.  His family was more important to him than any university office; the space of family was the space where he belonged.  Many people have told me that one of Keith’s mottoes as president was “I’ll do anything you make me do during the day—as long as I get to sleep in my own bed at night.”  Lisa Jordan, who came with Keith from the medical school to the Allen Building and has now served every president for the last 25 years, told me that her one instruction from him was, “If any of the children ever call, you go into the meeting and bring me right out of it.”  Family came first. 

Third, many people have been writing and calling me since Friday, and the Keith they want to talk about is not the president but Keith the teacher.  He continued to teach during his presidency and continued to make an important impact on people through his teaching.  Holly Lisanby is known to many of you because she later became a successor to Keith as chair of psychiatry.  When Holly was an undergraduate, never having taken a course in psychology, she got into the class taught in the Allen Building by the president of Duke University, i.e. Keith Brodie.  She couldn’t find her way to the room, came in late—how embarrassing, how nerve-wracking—she came in and he shouted out, “Oh you must be Holly!  Come up—I want to take your picture.”  He took photographs of each student in the class and told them that by means of these photographs, he’d be able to keep a file on them and remember them for the rest of their lives—which of course he did.  Holly had never met a psychiatrist before this day and had never thought of being one, but after taking this class, that’s what she had to be.  This is a special kind of teacher. 

And there is something else:  Could I see a show of hands of anyone who ever turned to Keith as an adviser?  So many members of this community experienced his generosity of spirit and his gift for one-on-one interaction in which Keith could pass on his wisdom, help share a burden, and engage in the work of mentor.  Keith would come to see me once or twice a term—he’d always come in his sweater with a hole in it.  He gave me many pieces of advice, but I will share just two with you, because they seem to me to be so quintessentially Keith.  Every time he came to my office, starting at about the second year of my presidency, and I’ve now been president 13 years, he’d say:  “Dick.  Don’t underestimate the importance of having your portrait painted early, while you still look relatively good.”  Another time, the first time I ever really met him, he and Brenda had me over to their house and Keith said, “As president, every day, try to do some good thing for somebody that nobody will know about, that will be a surprise to them; that’s just a good thing to do.”  That’s as good a piece of advice as anyone has given me. 

We use the word “counselor” to mean advisor or mentor, but in Keith’s case it is shaded into another meaning:  counselor is also the name for those who help others deal with the difficulties of what it is to lead a human life.  If I now asked how many here had come to Keith for counseling, in stress, in distress, in difficulty—that was Keith’s real métier, to be the confidante, to help people feel someone could listen to them, help them find their way forward to a better state of things.  So much was this his role that Henry Friedman told me he believes the death of Keith Brodie will be followed by a decline in mental health in the Duke community! 

Several people who contacted me over this weekend referred me to the commencement address that Keith gave at Durham Academy in 1990.  I will close by reading a little of it, because you’ll see that this is the work of a psychiatrist: it’s a university president speaking, but from the base of knowledge of the predicaments and difficulties of the human soul.  This is 1990. 

"I am sure you are aware that on campuses all over America there has lately been a shocking resurgence of intolerance of many kinds directed against those who are perceived to be in some way different from the majority.  For whatever reason, an individual or group becomes a convenient repository for the doubts and fears of others—an enemy image. 

"Now, it is relatively easy to point out the illogic of a world situation in which human beings are arbitrarily assigned places on either side of a wall or inferior status within a system of government; it is much harder to apply those insights to our personal situations."

So the problem of prejudice is a social problem, but it is rooted in a psychological operation:  the operation of casting others as enemies.  And even if you were so fortunate as to be able to change social practice through legislation, there still remains the harder, psychological transformation that needs to be made to stop this habit of mind.  So he concludes:

"Wherever you find yourselves next year [and the audience was 17 years old!], you will also find opportunities to be heroes of democracy: to refuse to participate in unfair systems, to help tear down walls between yourselves and others, to stand in the way of the terrible weapons of prejudice and cruelty."

People have said to me: Your job is to leave this place better than you found it.  When we think of Keith, when we think of his students, his department, the medical school, his university, this congregation, the Durham community—we can say of all of them:  he left it better than he found it.  We give thanks for the gift of Keith Brodie.