We live amid demonizers, judging from Google: "Some Methodists Are on a Mission to Demonize Israel"--"Far Right Uses Foley Scandal to Demonize Gays"--"Anti-Immigrant Groups Borrow Playbook of Hate Groups To Demonize Hispanics." We talk so casually about demonizing that we have begun to treat it as metaphorical. When Richard Brodhead as Dean of Yale College called me a "demon-researcher" in the New York Times on 23 June 2002, I did not take it literally. Belatedly, I see that Brodhead was revealing more about himself than he realized. Just as earlier at Yale and later as President of Duke University, he was overtly demonizing, in a pattern I see in Melvillean terms.

Saturated in the Bible, Melville recalled Saul's jealousy of young David when he portrayed two villains. In MOBY-DICK, Ishmael, telling "The Town-Ho's Story" to Spanish dons in Peru, elaborately accounts for Radney's jealousy of Steelkilt: "when a person placed in command over his fellow-men finds one of them to be very significantly his superior in general pride of manhood, straightway against that man he conceives an unconquerable dislike and bitterness; and if he have a chance he will pull down and pulverize that subaltern's tower, and make a little heap of dust of it." Radney is "ugly as a mule" while Steelkilt is "a tall and noble animal with a head like a Roman, and a flowing golden beard like the tasseled housings of your last viceroy's snorting charger; and a brain, and a heart, and a soul in him . . . which had made Steelkilt Charlemagne, had he been born son to Charlemagne's father." Decades later, in BILLY BUDD, Melville explains that what first moved the master-at-arms Claggart against "the Handsome Sailor" was Billy's "significant personal beauty." Claggart's envy of Billy "struck deeper" than the "apprehensive jealousy that marred Saul's visage perturbedly brooding on the comely young David." At least twice, Brodhead's demonizing involves jealousy of personal strength and beauty, and especially the "brain" Melville attributes to Steelkilt, although not to Billy.

Brodhead seems particularly jealous of unconventional intelligence based on real-world experience, perhaps because he never looked for a job in a tough competitive market, never had to adapt to the peculiarities of diverse work-places, never mixed it up intellectually and aesthetically with people unlike his own teachers and fellow students. Older colleagues treat such an untested person with a mixture of pride and disdain: one of ours, yes, an exemplary New Critic, almost as good as we were at that age, but one who could not leave the nest. Such a cosseted professor at middle age may well envy those who took a more strenuous and rewarding way, especially those who learned to think independently by performing original work. When such an untested person is put into a position of power, there may break out long repressed envy for those who led a more adventurous life of body and mind. Such a man may demonize those he corrosively envies then revel in a newly acquired power to punish.

In December 1998, after the ghastly murder of Suzanne Jovin, a female student at Yale, Brodhead summoned the young political science instructor James Van de Velde into his office. Van de Velde, a brilliant lecturer, was a Marine with diplomatic experience, a man with a burgeoning reputation as a television commentator. An all-round athlete, he was a marathon man, a body builder, an expert in martial arts. Brodhead had received a list of suspects from the New Haven Police Department (not a highly trained and famously ethical group) that included Van de Velde's name because he had an undeniable connection with the slain woman: he was directing her thesis on the threat posed by Osama ben Laden, an area of his expertise. A dean who knew the world first hand might have asked the handsome young academic Steelkilt to help him hammer out a statement he could issue to keep the teacher from being injured by incompetent police work and outrageous leaks to the press. "I'll come with you to your next class, if you like, and talk straight to the students about the tragedy and the new reckless gossip," Brodhead could have said. Instead, stuttering, fumbling for words, he cancelled Van de Velde's class, and (later) did not renew his appointment. Brodhead treated Van de Velde as a demonic slayer who had to be banished from Yale. At his lowest, afterwards, Van de Velde declared that his life had been ruined.

Brodhead did not put himself on record as accusing Van de Velde of murder, but as President of Duke University he publicly condemned the Duke lacrosse players, particularly those falsely accused of gang raping a female black stripper. In March 2006 Brodhead accused the players of "bad behavior, boorish behavior, immature behavior, and inappropriate behavior." On April 5 he declared that the "acts the police are investigating" (real acts, he said, not "alleged" acts) were "only part of the problem." The "episode" had "brought to glaring visibility underlying issues" such as "concerns of women about sexual coercion and assault," and "concerns about the survival of the legacy of racism, the most hateful feature American history has produced." Moreover, the lacrosse episode had highlighted "the deep structures of inequality in our society--inequalities of wealth, privilege, and opportunity (including educational opportunity), and the attitudes of superiority those inequalities breed." If the young men had not gang-raped, ripped a false nail from her finger, and otherwise brutalized the young woman (to be respected as a single mother working her way through college), whatever they did to her "was bad enough."

What was bad of course was Brodhead's rush to judgment, like his rush to banish Van de Velde from his classroom and the campus.Van de Velde and the lacrosse players had in common high intellectual abilities. Van de Velde was brilliant, as some of the lacrosse players seem to be, and he and the lacrosse players were physically agile and powerful. Van de Velde had practiced martial arts which require headguard and faceguard. In Brodhead's fervid imagination had he worn his helmet when he went ravaging out into the New Haven darkness? And did Brodhead envision the lacrosse players as ancient warriors storming under Montefortino or Thracian helmets as they raped, plundered, and even urinated off precipices? Duke's helmeted warriors were all the more dangerous because they were excellent students, but Brodhead had power over them. He could cast out from the Dukedom the coach, Michael Pressler, the general of the helmeted hoard. He could be Richard II: "Therefore we banish you our territories!" He could toy with the leaderless helmeted lacrosse troop, at first making them forfeit games. Later, he could be Richard II at his haughtiest: "LET THEM LAY BY THEIR HELMETS AND THEIR SPEARS." He could cancel the season, he could MAKE THEM LAY ASIDE THEIR HELMETS. Had the President of Duke University become King Richard, without forethought of the abdication to come?

There had been no evidence at all against Van de Velde, but in any case a demonizer never scours the records for mitigating or outright extenuating circumstances. At Duke, Brodhead "took pains to avoid exposure" to the exonerating evidence. "The parents assured Brodhead that the DA's files would show him that the criminal charges were false. Brodhead refused to look at them or assign a subordinate to look. Ironically, even as he went out of his way to avoid examining the discovery information, Brodhead publicly complained about his difficulties in having to base decisions on incomplete information" (Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, Until Proven Innocent, 132-133).Brodhead's selective blindness continues. In February 2008 Duke welcomed a sex show to campus which featured an ambiguous performer going on all fours with a lighted sparkler stuck in his or her anus while "America the Beautiful" played. When Ken Larrey, the leader of Duke Students for an Ethical Duke, brought information about the show to him, Brodhead refused to look at it. Knowing the way Brodhead had averted his eyes from proof of the lacrosse players' innocence, young Larrey boldly read the document aloud to Brodhead before he could be stopped.

I don't fit the pattern of Brodhead's demonizing handsome scholar-athletes. A Depression Okie, I am far older than Brodhead and never at any time resembled Steelkilt or Billy. In my perfect oldest brother Choctaw-Cherokee was predominant and the next seemed pure German-Scot, while I was the dishwater blond with a broken nose, acne, and tuberculosis. I was, however, the tallest, and in December 1996 when the New York Times Magazine printed a full-page color picture of me in my study the writer certified that I was then "handsome." Was the picture in that magazine enough to incite Brodhead's jealousy? Or simply by conducting biographical research, all but forbidden at Yale since 1953, when Stanley T. Williams retired, had I become a threat to anyone whose career had been built on superficial commentary? Was Brodhead half aware, already, that his own academic writing had been insubstantial? By 2002 had someone told him that he had written THE SCHOOL OF HAWTHORNE knowing only about a few famous white males, not the other pupils?

Could Brodhead's calling me a "demon-researcher" be a witty exaggeration, a backhanded compliment, a charming nod to my hard work? No, for he also compared me to crazy Ahab. I was a demon because, unlike anyone he knew, I had worked in the archives, decade after decade, and Brodhead's jealousy compelled him to claim that my demonic quest had ended in wreck. The way to do it was to allege that I had invented two lost books, THE ISLE OF THE CROSS (1853) and POEMS (1860). After all my demonic work, I could not be trusted. In order to imply that I made up these two books, Brodhead had to shut his eyes to the evidence that earlier scholars had accumulated over the decades. He had to deny the existence of the great Yale scholars from the 1940s who had established facts about the book Melville finished in 1853 (leaving me to find the title in 1987) and to deny the existence of the scholars who, beginning in 1922, had published and discussed the documents about the 1860 book Melville called "POEMS." In the pages of my biography I had quoted new and old documents about THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and the old documents about POEMS.

You see the pattern. Just as he turned away from the overwhelming evidence that Van de Velde was innocent, just as he turned away from documents proving the innocence of the lacrosse players, just as he turned away from the documents about the sex show at Duke, Brodhead shut his eyes to the evidence in order to demonize me. I was a terrifying anomaly, a researcher, a demon-researcher who had to be crushed into a little heap of dust. It almost worked, for two other Melville critics who also had done no archival research, Andrew Delbanco and Elizabeth Schultz, echoed Brodhead's accusations. For more than four years I suffered in silence. Only in the Fall of 2006, when I realized that Brodhead was not only destroying the reputations of three young lacrosse players but was putting them in danger of prison did I start writing about how he had filched from me my good name. Richard Brodhead is a savager of reputations--Van de Velde's, mine, Pressler's, the lacrosse players'. We all have lives back, now, but not "our lives" as they would have been: no one is ever whole again in the same way after being so demonized.