An Academic Life

A Memoir

Hanna Holborn Gray

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780691179186
• eBook ISBN:
  9781400889341
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Biographies

A compelling memoir by the first woman president of a major American university

Hanna Holborn Gray has lived her entire life in the world of higher education. The daughter of academics, she fled Hitler's Germany with her parents in the 1930s, emigrating to New Haven, where her father was a professor at Yale University. She has studied and taught at some of the world's most prestigious universities. She was the first woman to serve as provost of Yale. In 1978, she became the first woman president of a major research university when she was appointed to lead the University of Chicago, a position she held for fifteen years. In 1991, Gray was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, in recognition of her extraordinary contributions to education.

An Academic Life is a candid self-portrait by one of academia's most respected trailblazers. Gray describes what it was like to grow up as a child of refugee parents, and reflects on the changing status of women in the academic world. She discusses the migration of intellectuals from Nazi-held Europe and the transformative role these exiles played in American higher education--and how the émigré experience in America transformed their own lives and work. She sheds light on the character of university communities, how they are structured and administered, and the balance they seek between tradition and innovation, teaching and research, and undergraduate and professional learning.

An Academic Life speaks to the fundamental issues of purpose, academic freedom, and governance that arise time and again in higher education, and that pose sharp challenges to the independence and scholarly integrity of each new generation.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1: From Berlin and Heidelberg to Exile in London
• 2: The Search for Academic Work in Exile: London and New York
• 3: The Academic Émigrés in America
• 4: Growing up in New Haven and in Washington, DC
• 5: An Education at Bryn Mawr College
• 6: A Year at the University of Oxford
• Plate 1
• 7: Graduate Study and Teaching at Harvard
• 8: The First Round in Chicago and Evanston
• 9: The Yale Years
• Plate 2
• 10: President of the University of Chicago
• 11: Finale
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index