Betty Glassman Trachtenberg

Glassman was born in Philadelphia, the daughter of Solomon Glassman and Anna London Glassman. Both of her parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.[1] Her father ran a grocery store. She studied piano with Leo Ornstein,[2] and graduated from Girls High School in 1951.[3]

Trachtenberg worked in administration at Yale College, beginning in 1974 in the summer program,[4] and then in the admissions office, where she was associate director. She was director of the Eli Whitney Students Program for nontraditional-age students, and active in the Yale Women's Center.[2] She was a founding leader of the Sexual Harassment Grievance Board, and the Sexual Harassment and Assault Resource and Education Center, both at Yale.[5]

Trachtenberg was Yale College's Dean of Student Affairs from 1987 until she retired in 2007.[6][7] This position brought her into the center of campus policy enforcement controversies.[8] In the 1990s she was named as a defendant in a lawsuit by the "Yale Five", a group of Orthodox Jewish students who argued that Yale's undergraduate housing policies were discriminatory.[9][10] The suit was dismissed in 1998.[11] In 2005, she was responsible for an unpopular new ban on drinking games and extended tailgating at football games.[12] She was also the college's spokesperson when celebrity students made headlines.[13][14] She gave an oral history interview to the Yale Archives in 2009.[1]

Trachtenberg taught piano as a young woman. in the 1960s she co-founded the Music Academy in State College, Pennsylvania.[3][4] In her retirement, she served on the board of New Haven's Neighborhood Music School (NMS).[3]

Glassman married her childhood friend Alan Trachtenberg in 1952. They had three children, Zev, Elissa, and Julie. Her husband died in 2020,[15] and she died in 2023, at the age of 89, in Hamden, Connecticut.[2]