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Hanna Holborn Gray, Ph.D. '57, has been named the newest member of the Harvard Corporation, the University's senior governing board. Gray will fill one of the two vacancies created by the retirements next June of Corporation members Henry Rosovsky, Ph.D. '59, and Richard A. Smith '46 (see "Needed: Jolly Good Fellows," May-June 1996, page 79). On June 5, at their customary pre-Commencement meetings, the President and Fellows of Harvard College (as the Corporation is formally known) elected Gray and the Board of Overseers gave its consent.

A professional historian who specializes in political and historical thought in the Renaissance and Reformation, Gray is no stranger either to Harvard or to academia. She was a teaching fellow here from 1955 to 1957, an instructor from 1957 to 1959, and an assistant professor for the 1959-1960 academic year. After stints on the University of Chicago's history faculty and as dean of the college of arts and sciences at Northwestern University, she became provost and professor at Yale University from 1974 to 1978, where she concluded her tenure by serving briefly as acting president. Gray then became president of the University of Chicago, a position she held until mid 1993. There, in the words of one close observer, she was "stalwart in defending what comes first: the autonomy and efflorescence of scholarship," even while confronting budgetary pressures. She was also a Harvard Overseer from 1988 to 1994.

At the 1995 Commencement, when he conferred on Gray an honorary doctorate of laws, President Neil L. Rudenstine declared of her: "Powerful in judgment, humane in values, profound in learning, incisive in wit, she has lifted American education ever higher." In commenting earlier this year on the search for new Corporation members, Rudenstine mentioned the expected qualities-intelligence, common sense, good judgment-but also emphasized the importance of finding at least once candidate with academic experience. Hanna Gray more than satisfies that criterion and, it appears, all the rest.

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