Hanna Holborn Gray, former president of the University of Chicago, will join the Harvard Corporation effective July 1, 1997, the University announced yesterday.

Gray will fill one of the two openings on the University's highest governing body created when Corporation members Richard A. Smith and Geyser University Professor Emeritus Henry Rosovsky retire on June 30, 1997.

University officials pointed to Gray's extensive academic credentials as evidence of her qualifications for the position.

"Hanna Gray is an outstanding academic leader and a person of exceptional judgment and experience," President Neil L. Rudenstine said yesterday in a statement.

The appointment of Gray, who has a Ph.D. in Renaissance intellectual history from Harvard and is currently a professor of history at Chicago, is in keeping with the University's goal of maintaining an academic presence on the Corporation, which is currently dominated by business executives.

"It's very important to have the point of view of an academic when you're running an academic institution," Charlotte R. Armstrong, a Overseer who served on the search committee, said in an interview with The Crimson last February.

Rosovsky's resignation from the 10-member Corporation next year would have left the body without any academics.

Gray received an honorary LL.D. at Harvard's 1995 Commencement and has received some 60 other honorary degrees, including the Medal of Liberty and the Medal of Freedom.

She has served as a dean at Northwestern University and as provost at Yale University. She is also a former member of Harvard's Board of Overseers.

Gray said yesterday that she was honored to have been chosen to serve on the board.

"I have always cared deeply for the intellectual richness Harvard has created and sustained," she said in a statement.