Since she was wearing a silk dress, she refused. But the staffer insisted: “No one will know who you are.”
Gray replied: “Look around this room. Do you see another one?”
FROM A DISTANCE
She’s intimidating and no-nonsense, a grand dame of academia, well respected and well connected, a trusted and fair-minded consultant to CEOs and university presidents alike. No one else has served on both the Harvard Corporation and the Yale Corporation.
Gray once sat on corporate boards ranging from Ameritech to J.P. Morgan. She was one of 12 foreign-born Americans to receive a Medal of Liberty from President Ronald Reagan at a ceremony marking the rekindling of the Statue of Liberty’s lamp in 1986. Five years later she won the nation’s highest civilian award, the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
Now, she spends about half her time juggling meetings for the boards of numerous nonprofit institutions, including the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Smithsonian Institution and the Marlboro School of Music—and her meetings run like clockwork.
Former Dean of the Faculty Jeremy R. Knowles praises Gray’s “intimate knowledge of the idiosyncrasies and the goals and the raison d’être” of academic institutions.
Even in retirement, Gray has not left academic institutions behind. Many professors give up their offices when they retire, but not Hanna Gray.
When she’s not criss-crossing the country for board meetings or relaxing in her Vermont farmhouse, Gray can be found in the West Wing of the University of Chicago’s Harper Memorial Library, meeting with students and continuing her own scholarship.
Though she is an emerita professor, the master of academic politics taught two courses this academic year, a survey of the Italian Renaissance and a lecture course about Machiavelli. Her lectures—always delivered in trademark business suits—are legendary on the Chicago campus, and on registration day, her courses are often filled to capacity.
Colleagues say that, in addition to her contagious love of teaching, Gray’s ability to manage large institutions has come in handy at history department meetings.
“She has the force of personality, but also the fairness, to encourage people to work together and get things done,” says Kathleen M. Conzen, who chairs the department at Chicago.
Now, as she watches women run some of the top schools in the country—led by Judith Rodin at the University of Pennsylvania, Shirley M. Tilghman at Princeton and Ruth J. Simmons at Brown—Gray says she’s optimistic about the future of women in higher education, although much remains to be done.
She sees an added burden of leadership for female presidents. “You have a responsibility to the whole institution, for everyone at the institution,” she says. “But you also have a special experience and knowledge, presumably, and therefore must be particularly sensitive to the kinds of lives that women are leading.”
“It is inevitable that people see the distance there is to go,” she says. “I’ve seen the distance that has been traveled.”
Gray will always be the first. But now her successors don’t have to be the only.