Hanna Holborn Gray
9th President of theUniversity of Chicago
In office 1978–1993
Preceded by	John T. Wilson
Succeeded by	Hugo F. Sonnenschein
18th President of Yale University
Pro tempore
In office 1977–1978
Preceded by	Kingman Brewster, Jr.
Succeeded by	A. Bartlett Giamatti
Personal details
Born	(1930-10-25)October 25, 1930 (age 94) Heidelberg, Germany
Spouse	Charles Montgomery Gray ​ ​ (m. 1954; died 2011)​
Parent(s)	Hajo Holborn Annemarie Bettmann
Education	Bryn Mawr College University of Oxford Harvard University

Hanna Holborn Gray (born October 25, 1930) is an American historian ofRenaissance andReformation political thought and Professor of HistoryEmerita at theUniversity of Chicago. She served as10th president of the University of Chicago from 1978 to 1993, having earlier served aspresident pro tempore of Yale University in 1977–1978. At both schools, she was the first woman to hold their highest executive office. When named to the post in Chicago, she became one of the first women in the United States to hold the full presidency of a major university.

Holborn was born inHeidelberg, Germany, the daughter ofHajo Holborn, a professor of European history at Yale who fled to America fromNazi Germany, and Annemarie Bettmann, a philologist.^[1] Her older brother, Frederick, became a White House aide and professor of foreign policy at Johns Hopkins'School of Advanced International Studies.^[2]

Gray attended The Foote School inNew Haven, Connecticut (graduated 1943),Sidwell Friends School inWashington, D.C.,Hopkins School in New Haven,^[3] thenBryn Mawr College insuburban Philadelphia, from which she graduated in 1950.^{[citation needed]} She traveled toOxford as aFulbright Scholar. She earned aPhD fromHarvard University in 1957, and taught there, becoming an assistant professor in 1959.^{[citation needed]} At Harvard, her experiences were circumscribed by her "outsider status" as a woman.^[4] Although technically coeducational in some graduate programs by the 1950s, women were mostly relegated to the "separate, but not equal"Radcliffe College. When Gray became the first and only woman tutor in history and literature, she was reluctantly allowed into the tutor's dining society but was distinctly unwelcome by the other tutors. Similarly, when Gray advanced to instructor, as a woman, she was forbidden in the main faculty hall and was required to enter through the side door, although she decided to just go in the front door, anyway. (She took her cue from Harvard professor,Helen Maud Cam, who earlier in the decade became the first woman to attend faculty morning services in the over 300 years of the institution just by showing up every day and sitting down).^[4]

Gray moved toChicago when her husband was appointed to a position at the University of Chicago. She spent her first year as a research fellow at theNewberry Library, and then began teaching history at Chicago earningtenure in 1964. From 1966 to 1970, she was co-editor of theJournal of Modern History with her husband.^[5] Gray was named dean of the College of Arts and Sciences atNorthwestern University in 1972 and became professor of history and provost atYale University in 1974.^[6] She served as acting president of Yale for fourteen months after President Kingman Brewster unexpectedly accepted an appointment asUnited States Ambassador to the Court of St. James's.^[7]

Gray then returned to the University of Chicago, serving as president from 1978 to 1993, the first female (full) president of a major university in the United States.^[8] In 1991, she was awarded thePresidential Medal of Freedom.^[9] She retired in June 1993 but remainsHarry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor Emerita.^[10]

Gray has also served as a director, board member or trustee of theHarvard Corporation, theYale Corporation, theSmithsonian Institution,JP Morgan Chase, theAndrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Marlboro School of Music, theCouncil on Foreign Relations, theConcord Coalition, theMayo Clinic, theBrookings Institution, andBryn Mawr College. Gray has received honorary degrees from more than sixty institutions, including the University of Chicago,The College of William and Mary, Harvard, Oxford, Yale,Brown,Columbia,Princeton, andDuke. She served as chairman of the board of the second largest foundation in America, theHoward Hughes Medical Institute, until 2010.^[11] The portrait of Gray that hangs at the University of Chicago has been "stolen" (and returned) on more than one occasion as a student prank.^[12] Gray published a memoir,An Academic Life, in 2018.

• Medal of Liberty
• Presidential Medal of Freedom
• Francis Boyer Award
• Golden Plate Award of the American Academy of Achievement^[13]
• member,American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1973)^[1]
• member,American Philosophical Society (1981)^[2]

• Teaching Fellow, Harvard University, 1955–1957
• Instructor, Harvard University, 1957–1959
• Assistant Professor, Harvard University, 1959–1960
• Assistant Professor of History at the University of Chicago 1961–1964
• Associate Professor of History at the University of Chicago 1964–1972
• Professor and Dean, Northwestern University 1972–1974
• Professor and Provost at Yale University 1974–1978
• Acting President of Yale University 1977–1978
• Professor of History at the University of Chicago 1978–present
• President of the University of Chicago 1978–1993
• Member of the Harvard Corporation, 1997-2005^[14]

• Hanna Holborn Gray, "Some Reflections on the Second Generation."The Second Generation. Émigrés from Nazi Germany as Historians, ed.Andreas Daum, Harmut Lehmann, andJames J. Sheehan. New York: Berghahn Books, 2016,ISBN 978-1-78238-985-9, 102–113.

• Gray, Hanna Holborn (2018).An Academic Life: A Memoir. Princeton University Press.ISBN 978-1-4008-8934-1.OCLC 1026492115.

• Kelley, Brooks Mather. (1999).Yale: A History. New Haven:Yale University Press.ISBN 978-0-300-07843-5;OCLC 810552
• Leavitt, Judith A. (1985).American Women Managers and Administrators: a Selective Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Leaders in Business, Education, and Government. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press.ISBN 978-0-313-23748-5;OCLC 10878509
• Shoichet, Catherine."Gray Matters: Nearly 50 years after she first honed her teaching skills at Harvard, Hanna H. Gray has wisdom to share,"Harvard Crimson. June 5, 2003.

• Dan David Prize (includes photo)

• 1930 births
• Living people
• Writers from Heidelberg
• 21st-century American historians
• Historians of Europe
• Bryn Mawr College alumni
• Andrew W. Mellon Foundation
• Harvard University alumni
• Presidents of Yale University
• University of Chicago faculty
• Presidents of the University of Chicago
• Harvard University Department of History faculty
• Northwestern University faculty
• National Humanities Medal recipients
• American women historians
• Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients
• Sidwell Friends School alumni
• Alumni of the University of Oxford
• 21st-century American women writers
• Women heads of universities and colleges
• Members of the American Philosophical Society

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