FOURTH CLARK KERR LECTURER NAMED

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Hanna Holborn Gray, former President of the University of Chicago, has been named the fourth Clark Kerr Lecturer.

The Clark Kerr Lectures on the Role of Higher Education in Society are administered by the University of California through the Center for Studies in Higher Education on the Berkeley campus. They recognize Clark Kerr, the first Chancellor of the Berkeley campus, serving from 1952 until 1958 and then as President of the University from to 1958 to 1967. The Lectures are supported through generous grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the University of California Office of the President, appropriately recognizing Clark Kerr’s close association with the University of California and then the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education and the Carnegie Council on Policy Studies in Higher Education, which he headed from 1967 until 1979.

Hanna Holborn Gray is one of the most distinguished and accomplished leaders of American Higher Education. She served as President of the University of Chicago from 1978 through 1993, and now holds the titles of President Emeritus and Harry Pratt Judson Distinguished Professor of History at that university. Her scholarly interests are in the history of humanism, political and historical thought, and politics in the Renaissance and the Reformation. Following education at Bryn Mawr, Harvard and Oxford, as a Fulbright Scholar, her early academic career was at Harvard, the University of Chicago and Northwestern. She was Provost of Yale University from 1974 to 1978, serving also as President of Yale for 1977-78. As one measure of her distinction, she holds honorary degrees from over sixty colleges and universities, including Oxford, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Princeton, Duke, Harvard, the Universities of Michigan and Toronto, and the University of Chicago.

Dr. Gray will present the series of three Clark Kerr Lectures during the week of November 16-20, 2009. The first two lectures will be held on the Berkeley campus, on November 16th and 18th, while the third lecture will be held on the Davis campus and beamed back to Berkeley as well on November 20th.

Previous Clark Kerr Lecturers have been Harold Shapiro (2003), Charles Vest (2005), and Donald Kennedy (2007). Starting with Vest’s lectures, the contents of the lectures are being published jointly by the University of California Press and the Center for Studies in Higher Education.