Dr. 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.

NEW YORK — 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.


As a Democratic representative from Indiana from 1959 to 1981, he 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 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 reelected 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. Dr. Brademas lobbied hard for the NYU 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, Dr. 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, NYU'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, Dr. Brademas plunged into meetings with deans, trustees, students, and faculty members to learn NYU'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 Corp. He courted investment bankers, foundation executives, real estate moguls, and philanthropists, and he reached out to NYU alumni around the world.

He also cultivated relationships with Mayor Edward I. Koch, Governor Mario M. Cuomo, leaders of the state Legislature and the City Council, newspaper publishers and other media VIPs, 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.


By the end of his tenure — he stepped down in late 1991 but retired as president emeritus in 1992 after a sabbatical — he had raised $800 million for NYU and nearly doubled its endowment, to $540 million. He had recruited top scholars from around the country to join the faculty; added new fields of study, including the Onassis Center for Hellenic Studies and the Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies; enlarged the campus; and added 11 residence halls, providing housing for half of the undergraduates.

"I find in Washington Square a tremendous sense of diversity, vitality, and excitement, products of the enlivening mixture of New York University and New York City," Dr. Brademas said in his farewell address to 6,500 graduates. "With all its troubles, New York City is still the place to be. And NYU is still the place to get an education."

John Brademas was in Mishawaka, Ind. His father, a Greek immigrant, ran a restaurant and quoted Socrates to him: "Things of value come only after hard work." He enrolled at the University of Mississippi. After his freshman year, he won a scholarship and transferred to Harvard, a change he called head-spinning. He became a top student and president of the Wesley Foundation, the campus Methodist student group. In successive summers, he worked at an auto plant in South Bend, lived among tribes in Mexico, and served as an intern at the United Nations temporary headquarters in Lake Success, N.Y.


After graduating from Harvard in 1949, he attended Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar and in 1954 earned a social studies doctorate.

Back home in northern Indiana, he resolved to run for Congress in a largely Republican district with diverse demographics: farmers, small-town retailers, auto-industry workers, members of East European ethnic groups, and college communities that included the University of Notre Dame.

It took three tries. After losing races in 1954 and 1956, he gained experience as an aide to two members of Congress and in Adlai E. Stevenson's 1956 presidential campaign. In 1958 finally won the seat for Indiana's 3rd Congressional District.

Dr. Brademas was single for most of his political career, but in 1977 he married Mary Ellen Briggs, a third-year medical student at Georgetown University. He leaves her and three stepchildren; a sister, Eleanor Brazeau; and six step-grandchildren.