Exit Gray, Enter Keohane

Hanna Holborn Gray	Nannerl O. Keohane
Courtesy of Hanna Holborn Gray	Courtesy of Duke University

Corporation member Hanna Holborn Gray, Ph.D. ’57, will step down from the President and Fellows of Harvard College (as the University’s executive governing board is formally known) at the end of the academic year. Of that work, begun in 1997, and her six previous years on the Board of Overseers, Gray said, "I very much appreciate the range and quality of postdoctoral education afforded by service on Harvard’s governing boards." An historian who was provost and then acting president of Yale, Gray was president of the University of Chicago from 1978 to 1993. She also chairs the board of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, is a regent of the Smithsonian Institution, and chaired the board of trustees of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. During her recent Harvard service, she played a leading role in the search that resulted in the selection of Lawrence H. Summers to succeed Neil L. Rudenstine as president. In the announcement of her pending retirement from her Harvard post, Summers cited Gray as "a strong and consistent voice for core academic values and high academic standards, while affirming the central importance of excellent liberal arts education within our leading universities." Gray’s successor, announced on December 5, will be Nannerl O. Keohane, LL.D. ’93, past president of Duke and Wellesley. Keohane is a political scientist, as is her husband, Robert O. Keohane, Ph.D. ’66, former Stansfield professor of international peace.