Presidential Medal of Freedom honoree Hanna Holborn Gray, who served as president of the University Chicago and as provost and acting president at Yale University, will give the James P. Elder Lecture at 6:30 p.m., Thursday, April 16 in Whitley Auditorium. Gray's talk is titled "Education and Utopia."
Gray is a historian with special interests in humanism, political thought, and politics in the Renaissance and the Reformation. A Fulbright scholar with a doctorate from Harvard, she served as provost at Yale University (1974-78), acting president at Yale (1977-78) and was the first female president of a major co-educational university, leading the University of Chicago from 1978 to 1993. She has served on numerous nonprofit and corporate boards and holds more than 60 honorary degrees from universities throughout the United States, Britain and Canada.
Gray has served on the boards of such major organizations as the Smithsonian Institution, the Mayo Clinic, the Brookings Institution, the Harvard Corporation, the Yale Corporation and the Council on Foreign Relations. She is currently chairman of the board of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the second largest foundation in America.