Inspiring teacher, committed scholar, accomplished administrator and distinguished academic leader, Hanna Holborn Gray has been a pathfinder in American higher education since she enrolled at Bryn Mawr College when she was fifteen. Graduating from her alma mater summa cum laude, she continued her studies as a Fulbright Scholar at St. Anne's College, Oxford University, and completed her doctorate in Renaissance intellectual history at Harvard University. In 1972, after holding faculty appointments at Harvard, Chicago and Berkeley, Professor Gray became Dean of Northwestern's College of Arts and Sciences, and then served as Provost and acting President of Yale. Among her many professional achievements, she has been co-editor of the highly respected Journal of Modern History, a research fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, and a member of the Board of Directors of both the American Council of Learned Societies and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Since 1978 she has been President of the University of Chicago, where she has responded creatively to the many challenges of contemporary education, articulating a vision of future possibilities that has injected a renewed energy and sense of purpose into her own institution. For her enduring accomplishments as a teacher-scholar and as the first woman to become chief executive of a major American private university, Southern Methodist University is proud to confer upon Hanna Holborn Gray the degree Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa.