Cathy N. Davidson, visionary founder of the Futures Initiative and Senior Advisor to the Chancellor on Transformation, has been awarded the 2025 Harold W. McGraw, Jr. Prize in Higher Education, one of the field’s most prestigious honors. We are overjoyed to celebrate this recognition of her as a scholar whose transformative career has reshaped how the world thinks about learning, equity, and innovation.

Selected by a distinguished jury, Davidson was honored for her extraordinary leadership, groundbreaking ideas, and global impact. Across 20 books and more than 200 scholarly essays—published in multiple languages and read on every continent—her work has influenced institutions as wide-ranging as the Nobel Prize Committee Forum on the Future of Learning, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, HASTAC, CUNY’s Office of Transformation, and, as a presidential appointee, the National Council on the Humanities. This year, she will also join the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton as a Visiting Scholar. There, she will collaborate with an exceptional cohort of international scholars advancing bold, multidisciplinary approaches to social research, with a specific focus on AI. The 2025–26 theme, Digital (In)Equality, and the 2026–27 theme, Emerging Forces in Global Political Economy, set the stage for urgent and inspiring new conversations that will shape higher education—and the world.

We invite you to read more about Davidson’s McGraw Prize and her remarkable life’s work here.