“The assumption generally was that nepotism could result, that you didn’t have husband and wife at the same institution, particularly not in the same department,” she says.

But much to Gray’s surprise, the university offered her a job as an assistant professor of history the very next year.

Chicago had been coeducational from its founding and had already had other women professors.

“It was not being a woman on the faculty that was extraordinary,” she says, “but it was being part of a faculty couple.”

Gray established herself at Chicago. And as she climbed through the ranks, earning tenure in 1964, times changed: students in her classroom donned bell-bottoms, and chatter of building takeovers filled the university’s halls.

Campus tensions boiled over in 1969, when university officials decided not to reappoint a leftist sociology professor named Marlene Dixon.

A group of students took over Chicago’s administration building in protest. Many of them—male and female—alleged gender discrimination in the tenure decision.

University officials asked Gray to chair the faculty committee investigating the case, and it was during this “time of troubles” that she discovered her knack for administration.

Her investigation upheld the university’s decision not to reappoint Dixon but suggested a one-year extension of her contract. The protesters felt let down by the decision the committee had reached, but within the ranks of university administrators its chair had made her mark.

“I really liked the enterprise of dealing with very complicated issues and all kinds of different people and points of view,” she says. “That kind of turned me a little bit to the sense that maybe there would be muscles that would be interesting to use or to try to use.”

THROUGH THE RANKS

Her scholarly work focused on the politics of the Renaissance and the Reformation, but Gray found herself quickly becoming an expert on the incestuous inner workings of the world of higher education.

A master of the subtle, firm diplomacy required of a university administrator, Gray faced tough issues head-on and often used her wry, sharp sense of humor to break the bureaucratic ice.

Picked away from Chicago by neighboring Northwestern University, Gray rose a rung in becoming the dean of its college of arts and sciences. And during her two-year stint in Evanston, she joined the Yale Corporation as its first and only female member.

That appointment came shortly after Yale President Kingman Brewster consulted with Gray about a plan to bring Vassar College to New Haven to make the university coeducational.