- Date Of Birth: December 4, 1937
- Date Of Death: October 19, 2020
- State: Connecticut
Eilene Keller Bertsch, educator, advocate, and beloved nana, passed away at age 82 on October 19, 2020 at her home in Fairfield CT. She was born in the Bronx, NY in 1937 to Violet and Joseph Keller, a banknote engraver, and is predeceased by her sister Susan Hecht.
Eilene, the first in her family to attend college, was a proud member of Marymount Manhattan College Class of 1959. At Marymount, she studied sociology under émigré professor Prince Nicholas Timasheff, who encouraged her to pursue her graduate work and one day return to teach his class. As she tells the story “so I did.” Following a fellowship at Exeter College, Oxford, she attended Fordham University where she received her MA in Sociology. Her first teaching position was at St Peter’s University in New Jersey, then an all-male institution, she, their first female professor, and as she recalled, quite the attraction. Eilene’s passion for the education of women returned her to her beloved Marymount Manhattan College where she would devote 25 years to educating, collaborating, and advocating for inclusion and equal opportunity in higher education. Professor, Director of Government Grants and Institutional Planning, and then Vice-President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty, she was the longest serving Chief Academic Officer of Marymount Manhattan College. It was with particular pride that in 2018 she returned to MMC to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the HEOP program, a program she helped establish supporting underrepresented and underserved students, to present the first annual Eilene Bertsch award to a graduating HEOP student.
Eilene’s second chapter as an educator and advocate brought her to Sacred Heart University in Fairfield CT in 1991. A lifelong New Yorker and subway rider, she needed to learn to drive at age 50, a daunting task as she would brake for airplanes overhead.
