“An Academic Life” by Hanna Holborn Gray reviewed | Harvard Magazine

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ANY Massachusetts Hall presidential transition—like the current one from Drew Gilpin Faust to Lawrence S. Bacow—naturally brings to mind questions about University leadership: who is best equipped to chart Harvard’s course, in the prevailing circumstances, to the age that is waiting before? So the arrival of An Academic Life is fortuitous and timely. The memoir of Hanna Holborn Gray extends from her youth and development as a scholar of Renaissance intellectual history trained at Harvard (Ph.D. ’57), through her seriatim roles as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern, Yale Corporation fellow/provost/interim president, and University of Chicago president. Those who have observed segments, or all, of Gray’s leaderly career from afar will recognize her simultaneously plain-spoken and formidable manner in her title. (Further insight comes from the austere citation accompanying her 1995 Harvard honorary degree: “Powerful in judgment, humane in values, profound in learning

Books & Literary Life | April 6, 2018 “An Academic Life” by Hanna Holborn Gray reviewed The former University of Chicago president and Harvard Corporation fellow crafts a timely memoir. by John S. Rosenberg From The May-June 2018 Issue Hanna Holborn Gray | Photograph courtesy of the Special Collections Research Center, University of Chicago Library An Academic Life: A Memoir, by Hanna Holborn Gray, Ph.D. ’57, LL.D. ’95 (Princeton, $29.95) Any Massachusetts Hall presidential transition—like the current one from Drew Gilpin Faust to Lawrence S. Bacow —naturally brings to mind questions about Uni

“An Academic Life” by Hanna Holborn Gray reviewed | Harvard Magazine

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