In Memoriam: Josephine Rachel Broude, 1927-2022

Josephine Broude, executive assistant to the provost at Yale University for over 30 years, died on December 22 at her home in New Haven, Connecticut. She was 95 years old. During her tenure, she ran the executive office for 10 different provosts of Yale University.

Charles Long, the senior deputy provost for many years, said that Broude was an unusual combination of public and private. “As the executive assistant to the provost, Josie knew and interacted in a friendly and outgoing manner with hundreds of faculty and staff. Through her work she came to know nearly everything and everyone at Yale,” he said.

Broude was a native of New York City. She graduated from Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1949, where she met her husband, Henry, who later was the Philip G. Bartlett Professor of Economics at Yale. Before coming to Yale, Broude worked in the architecture firm Bulfinch, Richardson & Abbott in Boston, and later as an interior designer with Douglas Orr at the American Institute of Architects in New Haven.

Broude was the author of The Provost of Yale University: A History of the Office 1919-1994 (Yale University Press, 2002). For the university’s tercentennial in 2001, Broude collected the major 20th-century reports by committees of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, which became the core of the university’s governance and historic documents now available online.