 | Judith Brandenburg |
Judith Berman Brandenburg, a former associate dean of Yale College who was a driving force in the creation of the University's Women's Studies Program and its grievance procedure for sexual harassment complaints, died of cancer on Jan. 26 at the age of 61.
Ms. Brandenburg served as associate dean of Yale College and dean of academic life from 1977 until 1984, when she was appointed the first woman vice president and dean of the faculty at Teachers College at Columbia University. At the time of her death, she was a professor of psychology and education at Teachers College, having completed her tenure as dean there in 1994.
At Yale, where she was also a lecturer in psychology, Professor Brandenburg had special responsibility for the education of women. Yale had been coeducational for less than a decade at the time of her appointment. She chaired a committee that developed grievance procedures for complaints of sexual harassment by students, and her Yale work in this became a model for many other institutions. She was also the coordinator of transfer students at Yale and of Title IX, and served as secretary of the Yale College Course of Study Committee. During her tenure, Professor Brandenburg carried out research on coeducation and gender differences in education and the sciences. During a sabbatical from Teachers College in 1994-1995, she was a visiting fellow in the Yale psychology department.
Professor Brandenburg devoted much of her professional and personal life to equity issues and to assuring access and excellence in education. Her research and publications, which largely dealt with gender issues, include the 1997 book "Confronting Sexual Harassment: What Schools and Colleges Can Do." In this work, she described how schools and individual practitioners can become models for educating students to deal with sexual harassment in the larger social setting.
At Columbia Teachers College, Professor Brandenburg initiated grievance procedures for sexual harassment and other complaints of discrimination, created a faculty seminar on the Scholarship on Women and Gender, began grants to support faculty and student research, and developed new programs to recruit minority students and liberal arts graduates. She also helped to increase the number of faculty who are women or members of minority groups.
A graduate of Cornell University, Professor Brandenburg earned a Master of Arts in Teaching degree from Harvard University in 1962 and a doctorate from New York University in 1971. Early in her career, she taught biology at Roslyn High School in Roslyn, New York, and was a psychologist in private practice. Before joining the Yale College administration, she was an assistant professor and psychologist for eight years in the Counseling Center at Queens College of the City University of New York, where she started programs for older women returning to school and for under-prepared open admissions students. She was honored there with a Favorite Teacher Award.
Professor Brandenburg was a former trustee of Cornell University and a founding member and vice chair of the President's Council of Cornell Women. With the council, she initiated and implemented a university-wide grants program to support Cornell faculty, students and staff, and to address women's issues through projects and research.
She was a member of numerous organizations, including Project UNITE (the Urban Network to Improve Teacher Education), the steering committee of the Japan/United States Teacher Education Consortium, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Corporation Visiting Committee on Undergraduate Education and Student Affairs, the advisory committee of the Lincoln Center Institute Evaluation and Curriculum Development Project and the East End Women's Alliance.
The former Yale dean's honors include the 1993 Award for Creative Leadership and Significant Service from the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education. She was named Educator of the Year for 1985-1986 by the Columbia University chapter of Phi Delta Kappa, an international association for professional educators.
Professor Brandenburg lived in New York City and Amagansett, New York. She is survived by her husband, Lane H. Brandenburg, and sons David and Neal Brandenburg. David is the music director of the Yale Jazz Ensemble. She also leaves a brother, Judge Richard M. Berman of the U.S. District Court in Manhattan.
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