By ROBERT D. McFADDEN, The New York Times
John Brademas, a political, financial and academic dynamo who served 22 years in Congress and more than a decade as president of New York University in an all-but-seamless quest to promote education, the arts and a liberal agenda, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 89.
His death was announced by N.Y.U.
Mr. Brademas liked to say that being a university president was not much different from being a congressman: You shake hands, make speeches, remember names and faces, stump for a cause and raise money relentlessly. The difference, he said, is that you do not have to depend on voters to renew your contract every two years.
As a Democratic representative from Indiana from 1959 to 1981, Mr. Brademas became known as Mr. Education and Mr. Arts. He sponsored bills that nearly doubled federal aid for elementary and secondary education in the mid-1960s and that created the National Endowment for the Arts and Humanities. He was also instrumental in annual financing of the arts and humanities and in the passage of Project Head Start, the National Teachers Corps and college tuition aid and loan programs.
He opposed the Vietnam War and many defense measures, rebuked President Richard M. Nixon in the Watergate scandal and voted for civil rights legislation, environmental protections, day care programs and services for the elderly and people with disabilities. He became majority whip, the House’s third-ranking official, and was re-elected 10 times in a mostly conservative district, winning up to 79 percent of the vote.
But he was swept out of office in the 1980 Republican landslide that elected Ronald Reagan president. Mr. Brademas lobbied hard for the N.Y.U. job and, as president from 1981 to 1992, transformed the nation’s largest private university from a commuter school into one of the world’s premier residential research and teaching institutions.
When he took over, Mr. Brademas had no experience running a large organization. The university had seven undergraduate colleges, 10 graduate and professional schools, 13,000 employees and a $500 million annual budget. There were 45,000 students and housing for only a few thousand, in crowded Greenwich Village and scattered sites around New York City.
But he was a gregarious leader with voluminous contacts in government and corporate life. His skills as a politician and fund-raiser had been honed in a whirlwind of congressional and civic responsibilities. And, as his admirers came to believe, he was — if there is such a thing — a natural university president.
“No one hit the ground running as well as Brademas,” said L. Jay Oliva, N.Y.U.’s vice president for academic affairs, who became chancellor and succeeded his boss 11 years later, and who died in April 2014. “All his instincts were university presidential.”
Looking collegiate in tweeds and sweaters, displaying boundless energy, Mr. Brademas plunged into meetings with deans, trustees, students and faculty members to learn N.Y.U.’s strengths and weaknesses. He joined the boards of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York (he later became chairman), the New York Stock Exchange, the Rockefeller Foundation, RCA and the Loews Corporation. He courted investment bankers, foundation executives, real estate moguls and private philanthropists, and reached out to N.Y.U. alumni across the country and around the world.
He also cultivated relationships with Mayor Edward I. Koch, Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, leaders of the State Legislature and the City Council, newspaper publishers and other media V.I.P.s, union officials, leaders in the arts and the heads of museums, cultural institutions and other colleges and universities. He was often in Washington, conferring with education officials and members of Congress. He stoutly opposed the Reagan administration’s education cutbacks and attempts to abolish the National Endowment for the Arts.