Hanna Holborn Gray, An Academic Life: A Memoir, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 352 pp., $29.95.

Hanna Holborn Gray was the first woman president of a major American university—Yale, as acting president for more than a year, and if one does not count that, president of the University of Chicago for fifteen years. Once deemed “the most distinguished woman in the academic world,” she served on the Harvard and Yale corporations, as well as on the board of directors of the Andrew Mellon Foundation, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Mayo Clinic and the Brookings Institution; a few years ago she stepped down as president of the Howard Hughes Medical Foundation, the second largest foundation in America. She probably has received more honorary degrees than anyone other than the Dalai Lama. Those who have seen her know her magisterial bearing. Her memoir contains magisterial reflections but is also sprightly, often playful, and chockful of entertaining anecdotes.

Even though Hanna Gray was a childhood refugee from Hitler’s Germany, she had a head start in life. The family was forced to flee because Hanna’s mother was Jewish, but her Christian father, Hajo Holborn, who had gained a doctorate in history from the University of Berlin, was well-connected. He looked for employment in the United States immediately after the Nazi takeover, sailing alone to America with financial support from the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in February of 1933. In April, he was faced with the difficult choice of whether to accept a faculty position at either Harvard or Yale and opted for the latter. His daughter writes that “the outcome seemed a kind of miracle” yet adds: “it is quite certain that, had he been Jewish, his search would have been unlikely to end in a department of history in the Ivy League.”

Holborn brought his family over in the summer of 1934. Hanna was four. She recalls that “the ship docked at midnight after sailing past a brightly lit Statue of Liberty.” She was very excited because it was the latest she had ever been up. Foreseeing the reader’s wonder about whether memories of a four-year old might be suspect, she writes that the details of the landing “were so often repeated as part of family lore that [they were] reinforced in my personal sense of a significant past moment.” Hanna’s mother, Annemarie Bettmann, came from a Heidelberg professorial family that mingled with the Heidelberg intellectual elite. Annemarie herself gained a doctorate at Berlin in classical philology before marrying Hajo Holborn. Gray writes that both parents were “steeped in the study of Greek and Latin.” Both were left-of-center social democrats. In the Holborn living room, young Hanna listened to her parents’ conversations with intellectuals such as Erich Auerbach, Paul Hindemith and Ernst Cassirer, “with his great mane of white hair like a movie producer’s vision of a philosopher.” There was also the Sanskrit folklorist Heinrich Zimmer and his wife, the daughter of Hugo von Hoffmannsthal, Erwin Panofsky, Paul Tillich and Hannah Arendt. The historian Ernst Kantorowicz was there too.

Hanna attended the private Foote school in New Haven—“with Bryn Mawr standards: both rigorous and mildly progressive.” When her father moved to Washington with his family for war work (OSS, of course), it was the Sidwell Friends School. (Perhaps out of modesty the author neglects to mention that in Washington she appeared on the local radio as a “Quiz Kid.”) When it was time for her to choose a college, she narrowed it down to either Smith or Bryn Mawr: “with great excitement I told my father that I would be attending Smith. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you are going to Bryn Mawr.’ And so I did.”

Gray’s Bryn Mawr chapter is full of lively incident. We may not be entirely surprised to learn that on May Day Bryn Mawr girls danced around a maypole in “gauzy long white dresses with garlands around their heads,” but it surely is surprising to learn that teen-aged Hanna, scorning the garlands, managed to fly a Hammer and Sickle flag from the tower of the main administration building. The prankster was outstripped by the deeply engaged student. First-year Latin was not offered at Bryn Mawr because an entrance requirement was at least three prior years of the language. Hanna still felt shaky in Latin in her first year, but managed to improve: “the apex of [her] undergraduate education was to study Tacitus, Livy, and Lucretius.” Her teacher, the great classicist Lily Ross Taylor, insisted that students recite the works aloud, with the result that Hanna Gray still has “quite a bit of Lucretius etched in [her] memory.” Nevertheless, she majored in history. In her second year she experienced a “kind of epiphany” one winter evening when she entered the library. As she tells it, “the worn wooden steps gave off their usual creak, the distinctive odor of books was in the air” and she “suddenly realized that I could be happy to do this every night for the rest of my life.” A highpoint at Bryn Mawr was hearing T.S. Eliot read from his work “in a hauntingly thin and world-weary voice.” The next morning Hanna had breakfast with him in her capacity as an interviewer for the college paper, and this led him to invite her to see him whenever she might be in London. Which she subsequently did: “he was very kind to the young.”

Two aspects of Bryn Mawr that Gray discusses offer leitmotifs for the rest of the book. One concerns the challenges of career-oriented women. “Miss Thomas,” a formidable early president, did not really say “only our failures marry.” But “she might have said: ‘our failures only marry.’” Be that as it may, Bryn Mawr surely groomed its female students for careers, whether married or not. Most hoped to find satisfying jobs as well as husbands, but “we were a little vague about how we were going to combine careers and families.” Gray went ahead toward a career in scholarship (she had not foreseen administration) as well as managing a harmonious marriage, but her account of all the doors she had to open to pursue her career is continually riveting. Second, Bryn Mawr also helped clarify the goals of higher education for her. Much though the school’s culture enhanced the self-confidence, even toughness, of women, as a women’s college it did not aim to train “leaders,” let alone “leaders in the nation’s service.” Instead, the Bryn Mawr ethos was that liberal arts offered “a good in themselves.” She returns to this toward the end of the book, speaking of “the fundamental importance [. . .] of cultivating intellectual interests precisely because they matter greatly in themselves and are of enduring value in defining the animating spirit and vitality of civilization itself.”

AFTER BRYN Mawr, where else was the gifted daughter of Hajo Holborn to go but Oxford and Harvard? At Oxford for a year she wished to begin advanced study in Renaissance history but was frustrated by the lack of professionalism and a prejudice against women she had not yet met. Hugh Trevor-Roper did know something about her chosen research topic, “but he did not much like teaching girls [. . .] and thought only an undergraduate degree made sense for them.” Gray did continue her education informally as a result of being “taken on” by Eduard Fraenkel, a severe classicist. Fraenkel decided that her ignorance of Greek needed to be remedied and Latin was not to be neglected. Once, when she was with his family on New Year’s Eve, he asked her to read and translate aloud passages from the odes of Horace. (He was making a point at the expense of his children.)

Gray matriculated at Harvard in 1951. Her Latin facility now led to her marriage. In her first year she signed up for a graduate course in the works of Erasmus. Not surprisingly, there were only two other students because Erasmus’s Latin is notoriously more Ciceronian than Cicero. But one of these students was Charles Gray, who had just taken his bachelor’s at Harvard summa cum laude. Hanna Holborn thought she had “never encountered anyone more likeable,” and soon enough the two were married. Another graduate student whom she came to know was Henry Kissinger, who “didn’t seem like a graduate student at all but appeared already to have reached some higher stage of being.” Gray recounts that she “developed a minor reputation as a mimic with a special aptitude for doing Henry Kissinger”; later, the foreign minister of Turkey, who had been well briefed, asked her to demonstrate this talent but she declined out of propriety. After receiving her doctorate, Gray became an assistant professor of history at Harvard. She passes over this astonishing fact while turning to another. She was required to attend department meetings held at lunch time in the Faculty Club, but women were not allowed to enter through the front door. Nevertheless, she ignored the injunction and no one stopped her. Much more door opening was to come.

Charles Gray was called to join the History faculty of the University of Chicago in 1960 and Hanna went with him “assuming that her academic career had very likely ended.” But this was to become the real beginning, and Chicago her ultimate home. Not long after her arrival she was offered an assistant professorship in the history department, with a charge to teach mainly in the “college,” the product of educational innovations introduced earlier by Robert Maynard Hutchins. Originally, the “college” had offered a uniform core curriculum oriented toward “the great books”; in its heyday it allowed students to graduate after they had passed exams in all the core courses. Because early admission was also available, the Hutchins college was once called “the greatest magnet for juvenile neurotics since the Children’s Crusade.” By Gray’s time, much of the Hutchins program had been dismantled; the iconic early-entrant “Aristotle Schwartz” had long since tearfully departed, dragging with him his duffel bag of metaphysics. But the “college history course” was still controlled by an old guard that saw to the entire staff hewing to a prescribed curriculum. Gray immediately was made chair of the “College History Group,” a committee that she candidly admits was “invented out of the blue.” This allowed her to institute individual discretion for each faculty member teaching the course as well as greater links with further studies in the history department proper.

The sixties at Chicago, as elsewhere, was a decade of student political activism. Already in 1962, a young Bernie Sanders led students to protest the university’s ownership of segregated apartment buildings. Vastly the most dramatic Chicago event took place in the winter of 1969: a protest of a decision not to rehire a young radical, Marlene Dixon, who had a joint appointment in an interdisciplinary unit and the Sociology department. Several hundred students seized control of the university’s administration building and escalated their demands from challenging the Dixon decision to greatly increasing the number of female faculty, having students participate in hiring and personnel decisions, and making courses more “relevant.” Because President Edward Levi decided not to call the police the sit-in lasted sixteen days, attracting much publicity. During this time, Levi appointed a faculty committee to investigate the circumstances of the Dixon case, with Hanna Gray as chair. Gray writes that committee members often had emotional arguments with each other, and that she never had “been more absorbed by the task of finding a way through the complexities of ascertaining essential facts or working through differences of opinion and perspective to reach a reasonable and explicable judgment.” The Gray report helped calm the waters, and Gray became noted for her judiciousness in the cause of order. With this she was on her way from teaching and scholarship to administration. She writes that “events at Chicago had made me in a minor way visible,” and that when she was offered a position in the summer of 1970 to become dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern, she “was ready to try something new.”

HANNA GRAY served as dean at Northwestern for three years, from 1971 to 1974. Her sense then was confirmed that she “liked chairing meetings, finding ways to move toward consensus, and coming to consequential policy recommendations and actions.” During her third year at Northwestern she was invited to become provost at Yale, with the announcement being accompanied by “a cascade of news stories” about a woman reaching such a lofty position. Already in 1970 she had been a “fellow” of the Yale Corporation (the board of trustees), composed of “Old Blues” and mostly “Skull and Bones” men. Since these men knew and had confidence in her, they were able to move with the times. Gray did not disappoint them. During her tenure as provost she worked to bolster Yale’s finances and steer the school firmly through academic freedom crises. William Shockley, notorious for his views on racial genetics, was once invited to speak, with noisy threats of disruption, but Gray and President Kingman Brewster faced down crowds of demonstrators outside the building, and by the end of the evening “the university had passed its test: there had been no disruption.” Later, another challenge was posed by an invitation to a man on the left: C. Vann Woodward, the noted American historian, had recently penned a report on the importance of upholding freedom of thought and expression in the university, but now the Marxist historian and avowed member of the Communist Party, Herbert Aptheker, had been recommended for a semester-long visiting lectureship at a residential college. Woodward was so outraged that he called for the recommendation to be rejected. Vigorous discussion followed before Woodward’s call was rejected and Aptheker arrived to teach.

Brewster took the post of U.S. ambassador to the United Kingdom in the spring of 1977, and Gray thereby became acting president of Yale, serving in that position for fourteen months. She writes: “because I served for more than a year I am counted officially in the line of Yale’s presidents (my portrait, however, hangs with the provosts).” Speculation was rampant about the succession to the full presidency, and Gray writes frankly that it had been uncomfortable for her to be the subject of rumor in the months before the announcement that the choice had fallen on A. Bartlett Giamatti. But she did not actually desire the Yale presidency. She explains that there would have been such enormous opposition, especially among the alumni, to the appointment of someone who not only was female but also not true Blue (her father had long taught at Yale but that was irrelevant) that this most likely would have stalked her throughout her term. Nor was she bereft, for by Christmastime she was weighing an offer to become president of the University of Chicago, an institution more to her liking. Soon after her interview in Chicago she had to attend a meeting of Ivy League presidents, held to discuss Ivy policies on athletics “at boring length.” As she continues: “I wondered whether this was really how they should be spending their days (or mine) and was moved to depart the room early. Once in the lobby I called to accept Chicago’s invitation.”

During her previous stint on the faculty Hanna Gray had developed a rapport with the institution: “people actually talked without embarrassment about a mission that had to do with the life of the mind.” Whereas she had faced discrimination because of her sex at Harvard, at Chicago “it was taken for granted that women should enter the Quadrangle Club through the front door.” The undergraduates had been and remained intellectually earnest and nonconformist. They resisted big time football tenaciously. Once in the sixties, when a mere scrimmage was held with North Central College, students had staged a sit-on on the fifty-yard line and police had to be called in. When Gray returned as president she held a party for undergraduates in her first year; one student thanked her politely and then “fixed [her] with an indignant glare. ‘I hope you’re not going to make this into a fun school.’”

GRAY ORGANIZES her chapter devoted to her fifteen-year long presidency of the University of Chicago as a tour through a huge number of administrative and academic policy decisions. We learn that she introduced a sorely needed professionally staffed development office, and gathered funds to build a repertory theatre, an art museum, a law school annex and a downtown conference center. (Consulting with architects about the design of new buildings was “great fun.”) She established a school of “Continuing Liberal and Professional Studies” housed in the downtown center to facilitate attendance for the many who would not have travelled to the main campus on Chicago’s South Side. She added other academic programs and also subtracted, closing the geography department and the library school. She notes that “closing down the [library] school involved endless time and discussion.” But on reading this long chapter, one is moved to ask “what didn’t?” After all, in protracted discussions concerning financial decisions “committee members inevitably wanted to gore oxen other than their own”; governing medical centers called for “enormous amounts of time”; regarding the building of a school of public policy, “pressures to approve and begin on the project [were] intense”; and even establishing a date for a centennial celebration “turned into a contentious and time-consuming issue.” Yet Gray was endowed with sitzfleisch and even admits disarmingly to “having greatly enjoyed” her work. (She was proud also about having thrown out the first ball at a Chicago White Sox game: “it reached the plate, just barely.”)

As a long-time student of humanistic prose, Hanna Gray knows how to deliver forcefully the messages she finds most important. Regarding whether the university was to divest stocks in companies that did business with apartheid South Africa, she takes the position that “the university needs to resist speaking as a corporate entity when its own principal purpose is to create the conditions under which its members can speak individually and freely for themselves, whatever their views, on topics of common concern.” Regarding campus demonstrations against controversial speakers (in this case Robert McNamara), she states “we had made the point that unpopular speakers who might express very unpopular views [. . .] were to be heard and, if opposed, opposed in a way consistent with the norms of an academic community.” What about spending valuable funds on a Hittite dictionary, begun by the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago in 1975 with many long years still to go? Gray writes:

Universities exist for the purposes of education and discovery, and also for the imperative of keeping alive subjects that might otherwise vanish and studies that might not be in fashion or attract large numbers but that are indispensable to preserving and interpreting the heritage of the past and its meaning in the present.

Robert E. Lerner is the Peter B. Ritzma Professor in the Humanities Emeritus at Northwestern University. He is the author or coauthor of ten books, including The Age of Adversity, The Heresy of the Free Spirit, The Powers of Prophecy, The Feast of Saint Abraham, Western Civilizations (coauthored), and, most recently, Ernst Kantorowicz: A Life.