Mme. President

But at Chicago, not Yale

When Yale Provost Hanna Holborn Gray was named acting president of the university last May, she became a strong candidate to succeed Kingman Brewster. Before being named U.S. Ambassador to Britain, Brewster himself had followed that very route, vaulting from provost to president. Gray's credentials, moreover, were solid. As provost she was Yale's first top-ranked woman administrator. Before that she served as one of the university's first two women trustees. But last week Hanna Gray, 47, took herself out of the tight competition for the top job at Yale in a most positive and dramatic way--she accepted the presidency of the prestigious University of Chicago.

A European-history scholar (out of Bryn Mawr and Harvard), she has been involved in academic life since her father Hajo Holborn, a history professor at Yale, brought the family to the U.S. from Germany when Hanna was four. She married a fellow history student, Charles Gray, taught at Chicago for eleven years, then was appointed a dean at nearby Northwestern in 1971 before moving on to Yale.

A cool, straightforward woman, Gray won grudging respect even from her adversaries at Yale for her toughness in the face of fiscal adversity. She stood up to a protracted strike of college service workers and even--to save about $85,000 a year--closed the Yale Faculty Club.

Gray will remain at Yale until next June. As Chicago's tenth president, she will have to deal with a celebrated and reputedly contentious faculty--which has included 42 Nobel prizewinners--as well as with some 2,500 studious and competitive undergraduates. Like Yale, Chicago has been making staff cutbacks, and a fund drive has fallen far short of its $280 million goal. Gray seems unintimidated. As one Chicago professor explains, "She knows the faculty and administration and has a sense of the student body's peculiarities." Says Gray, with a fine disregard of gender: "A university president doesn't give orders. He must persuade."

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