“I advised very strongly against this, in part because of what I’d seen [at Harvard],” Gray says, “in part because I thought to bring a women’s college to New Haven, plunk it down, and make it Yale’s sister would be to recreate conditions of second-class citizenship, rather than to promote the idea of genuine integration.”

Yale made a rare exception when it offered her its provost post even though she wasn’t a faculty member there. With a new and larger administrative role—and a tenured professorship in the history department to go with it—she returned to the East Coast in 1974.

She came to the institution where she grew up and where her father had taught for 35 years.

“It was both the plus side in the sense that you were really helping an institution that you cared about, but it wasn’t easy,” she says. “If things did not go that well, then if you were a woman who happened to be provost, and you had women who were very unhappy about the pace of change at Yale, you came to be seen as not a very good woman.”

Three years into her term as provost, when President Brewster resigned to become U.S. ambassador to Britain, Gray was tapped to be the university’s acting president.

The choice sparked tensions and disagreements among many at an institution that, like every other major research university, had never had a woman at the helm. “You could tell that there were certainly some Yale alumni who were not very happy to see a woman sitting in Woodbridge Hall at that time,” she says.

PORTRAIT OF PRESIDENT GRAY

Yale was still looking for its next leader when, on Dec. 10, The New York Times reported an end to Chicago’s presidential search with a headline announcing that the university had settled on “Mrs. Gray of Yale.”

After serving as the interim president of Yale for more than a year, Gray handed over the keys to her New Haven office and set out on a two-day road trip back to the Midwest—as the 10th president of the University of Chicago.

When she arrived in 1978, the university faced a drastic deficit, and balancing the budget was a top item on Gray’s agenda. Though she led several major building initiatives during her tenure, including the construction of a new science quadrangle, Gray trimmed some aspects of the university. She closed the department of geography in 1986 and the graduate library school in 1988.

In response to declining graduate school enrollment across the nation, Gray’s administration led the way in efforts to attract top students to advanced degree programs. And enrollment in the college grew by more than 25 percent with Gray at the helm.

During her 15-year tenure, she was one of the most visible college presidents in the nation—especially since she was the first woman to head a large research university, a fact that she says often got more attention in the popular press than it deserved.

“It was sometimes difficult to get beyond that to talk about ideas about education, and where the university was going and so on,” she says.

The message came across in different ways.

Once, at a meeting of the Association of American Universities, Gray was handed a name tag and asked by a staffer to pin it on.