PROGRAM
The Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College welcomed Hanna Holborn Gray, former President of the University of Chicago, for a conversation with Jonathan Fanton. She reflected on her tenure as a leader in American higher education, a board member of major foundations and research institutions, her historical studies, and the values that have guided her throughout her career.
SPEAKERS
Hanna Holborn Gray President Emeritus and the Harry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History University of Chicago
Hanna Holborn Gray was President of the University of Chicago from July 1, 1978 through June 30, 1993. She is now President Emeritus and the Harry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of History of the University of Chicago.
Dr. Gray is a historian with special interests in the history of humanism, political and historical thought, and politics in the Renaissance and the Reformation. She taught history at the University of Chicago from 1961 to 1972 and is now the Harry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor of History in the University of Chicago’s Department of History.
She was born on October 25, 1930, in Heidelberg, Germany. She received her B.A. degree from Bryn Mawr in 1950 and her Ph.D. in history from Harvard University in 1957. From 1950 to 1951, she was a Fulbright Scholar at Oxford University.
She has been a Fellow of the Newberry Library, a Fellow of the Center of Behavioral Sciences, a Visiting Scholar at that center, a Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and a Visiting Scholar for Phi Beta Kappa. She is also an Honorary Fellow of St. Anne’s College, Oxford.
Dr. Gray is a member of the Renaissance Society of America. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society, the National Academy of Education, and the Council on Foreign Relations of New York. She holds honorary degrees from a number of colleges and universities, including Oxford, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Princeton, Duke, Harvard, and the Universities of Michigan and Toronto, and the University of Chicago.
She has served on the boards of the Harvard Corporation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Marlboro School of Music, and the Smithsonian Institution.
Jonathan Fanton FDR Visiting Fellow and Interim Director, Roosevelt House
Jonathan Fanton is a Franklin D. Roosevelt Visiting Fellow at Hunter College and was President of The MacArthur Foundation from 1999-2009. Mr. Fanton holds a Ph.D in American History from Yale University where he taught and was Chief of Staff to President Kingman Brewster. He was Vice President of Planning at The University of Chicago and for 17 years was President of The New School for Social Research.
He is author of Foundations and Civil Society, Volume I and II (2008), and The University and Civil Society, Volume I and II (1995, 2002).
