Gray Appointed to Harvard Corporation

Hanna Holborn Gray, president emerita of the University of Chicago, has been appointed to the Harvard Corporation effective July 1, 1997.

Gray will succeed to one of two vacancies occurring on June 30, 1997, upon the retirements of Richard A. Smith, chairman of the Board of Harcourt General Inc., and Henry Rosovsky, the Lewis P. and Linda L. Geyser University Professor Emeritus. Gray will become one of the five Fellows who together with the President and the Treasurer make up the Harvard Corporation, one of the University's two governing boards.

"Hanna Gray is an outstanding academic leader and a person of exceptional judgment and experience," said President Neil L. Rudenstine. "Harvard is very fortunate that she has agreed to take on this important responsibility at a time of unusual challenge for higher education. In 15 years of distinguished leadership at one of America's great universities, she earned the respect of the entire academic community for her willingness to make difficult decisions while standing firm on fundamental principles. I greatly valued Hanna's counsel during her service on the Board of Overseers, and I look forward to working even more closely with her in the years ahead."

"I am greatly honored to have been chosen to serve on the Harvard Corporation," said Gray. "My ties to Harvard go back some forty-five years, and I have always cared deeply for the intellectual richness Harvard has created and sustained and for its unyielding commitment to the highest standards of excellence in education and research. It will be a pleasure to work with Neil Rudenstine, and with the rest of the Corporation, to help strengthen Harvard's role as a flourishing community of learning."

Born in Germany, Gray received her A.B. from Bryn Mawr College in 1950 and went on to study at Oxford as a Fulbright scholar. She then enrolled at Harvard, where she studied the intellectual history of the Renaissance, receiving the Ph.D. in history in 1957. Since that time Gray has taught at Harvard, Chicago, Berkeley, Northwestern, and Yale. After two years as Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences of Northwestern, she was appointed Provost of Yale in 1974, where she also served as acting president during the academic year 1977-78. She was appointed president of the University of Chicago in 1978, a position she held until 1993. She is currently the Harry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor of History in that university.

In 1988 Gray was elected to a six-year term on Harvard's Board of Overseers. In that capacity she served for several years as a member and vice chair of the Board's Executive Committee, and she chaired the Committee on Visitation. In addition, she served as a member of the standing committees on Humanities and Arts and on Institutional Policy. During the years 1992-94 she chaired a key committee which reviewed the visitation process at Harvard and made a series of recommendations which are now leading to greater coordination between the visitation of various units in the University and the academic planning process.

Awarded the Medal of Liberty in 1986, Gray is a 1991 recipient of the Medal of Freedom. She has also received over 60 honorary degrees from universities in the United States and abroad, including the LL.D. from Harvard in 1995. In 1996 she received the University of Chicago's Quantrell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching. She is a trustee of Bryn Mawr College, and she serves on the boards of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Marlboro School of Music, the Council on Foreign Relations (New York), and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. A member of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution, Gray is also an Honorary Fellow of St. Anne's College, Oxford. She serves on several corporate boards, including the Cummins Engine Co., J.P. Morgan & Co., Morgan Guaranty Trust Co., Ameritech and the Atlantic Richfield Co.

Gray resides in Chicago with her husband of nearly 42 years, Charles M. Gray, also a professor of history at the University of Chicago; he is a 1949 Harvard graduate who received the Ph.D in 1956. She is the daughter of the late Professor Hajo Holborn of Yale.

The Harvard Corporation meets frequently to address a broad range of management issues and policy matters and is responsible for making the day-to-day decisions on matters of educational, fiscal and institutional policy. Along with Rudenstine, Rosovsky, and Smith, the other members are D. Ronald Daniel, Judith Richards Hope, James R. Houghton, and Robert G. Stone Jr.