David M. Gray, retired Arcadia vice president and college study abroad pioneer, has died at 95
He established the Center for Education Abroad at what is now Arcadia University and the Institute for Study Abroad at Butler University.
In 1965, when he established the Center for Education Abroad at what is now Arcadia University in Glenside, Dr. David M. Gray supervised two dozen Beaver College women as they spent a semester studying in England at the City of London College.
By 1987, Dr. Gray was arranging for more than 1,500 students at more than 150 American colleges to spend at least one semester at more than 25 universities in the United Kingdom, Austria, Hong Kong, and elsewhere around the world.
Over those two decades, Dr. Gray’s program “directly addressed an unmet educational need among American undergraduates,” Beaver colleagues said, and became known as one of, if not the, largest study abroad initiative in the United States.
“Arcadia embraced it,” Andrew D. Law, the school’s academic dean of global studies, told Arcadia Magazine in 2025. “Study abroad became a defining element of an Arcadia education.”
In 1988, Dr. Gray left Beaver, cofounded the Institute for Study Abroad at Butler University in Indianapolis, and, until he left there in 2006, placed more than 3,000 students per year from 300 American colleges at 73 foreign universities. Overall, Dr. Gray told his family, from 1965 to 2006, he arranged for more than 100,000 American students to study abroad.
Ursinus College student Lisa Katz spent the 1985-86 school year studying economics in London through Dr. Gray’s Center for Education Abroad. She told The Inquirer in 1987: “If I could describe the whole year, it would be in two words. One would be freedom, and the other, confidence. … I grew up.”
On the flip side, from 2006 to his retirement in 2016, Dr. Gray, as chief executive officer of the Study Abroad Foundation, helped arrange for students in China, Japan, and South Korea to study abroad in the United States and elsewhere. Over his career, he created the National Advisory Board for International Programs and the College Consortium for Education Abroad, and served as executive director of the Pennsylvania Council for International Education.
On Wednesday, May 13, David M. Gray died of heart failure at his home in Ardmore. He was 95.
“He was a pioneer in study abroad,” said his son, Jonathan, “and a mentor to so many in the field of international education.”
Dr. Gray was teaching political science and searching for educational inspiration at Drew University in New Jersey in the 1960s when he joined a colleague and a few students on a study abroad trip to London. He was captivated.
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He had always valued education, loved to travel, and was adept at forging relationships. So creating innovative study abroad programs, he discovered, came naturally.
He established his own semester program in London for Drew in 1962, went to Beaver in 1964, and, with other study abroad pioneers, integrated foreign curriculum and standards of practice into the American college accreditation system. Those achievements, a writer for the Bulletin of Beaver College said in 1966, led thousands of students to “broadening and enrichening their education through participation in different cultural, social, and educational environments.”
Dr. Gray was an associate professor, vice president, acting dean, and director of international programs at Beaver. Earlier, he taught at Drew for four years and for three years before that at the University of Pennsylvania.
He did postdoctoral work at the London School of Economics and Political Science, and was one of three finalists to be Beaver president in 1983.
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He traveled to every country in which he arranged study abroad programs and earned fellowships from Penn and two colleges in London. In 2008, for his years of collaboration with the United Kingdom, Queen Elizabeth II named him an Honorary Officer of the Civil Division.
“We live in a world society now,” Bette E. Landman, then president of Beaver, told The Inquirer in 1987. “It’s important to see other countries … to find other solutions for living … another way of studying.”
David McDonald Gray was born March 20, 1931, in Richwood, W.Va. His family moved to Fulton, N.Y, when he was young, and he earned a bachelor’s degree in anthropology, a master’s degree in international economics, and a doctorate in political science, all at Penn.
He married Patricia Delano, and they had a daughter, Alison, and a son, Jonathan. After a divorce, he married Adele Hertz Stern. They divorced later, and he married Susanne Abplanalp Schantz. His wife died earlier.
Former colleagues at Butler marveled at Dr. Gray’s memory and joked about his scratchy penmanship and ever-present beat-up briefcase. He was a cofounder of the Philadelphia chapter of the French Heritage Society, co-chair of the Friends of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and active with the Friends of the Curtis Institute of Music.
Dr. Gray read newspapers and history books. “He was very social and seemed to know something about any topic you could bring up,” his daughter and son said. “He had unconditional love for us both.”
An avid sailor, he plied the Caribbean regularly and belonged to the Little Egg Harbor Yacht Club. He skied every winter until he turned 80 and considered his free senior citizen ski ticket a well-deserved reward.
“The ski resorts kept pushing out the age qualification,” his son said. “But he got there.”
In addition to his children, Dr. Gray is survived by two grandchildren, a sister, his second wife, and other relatives. His first wife, a sister, and two brothers died earlier.
He requested that no services be held.
