Good morning, POU! Today I am highlighting the works of Jonathan Scott Holloway.
Jonathan Scott Holloway (born 1967) is an American historian of post-emancipation American history and black intellectual history.
Holloway has been named as the next President of Rutgers University and is expected to assume the position on July 1, 2020. He is Provost of Northwestern University, a position he has held since August 1, 2017. He is Northwestern University’s Chief Academic Officer and an ex officio member of the faculty of each school. Prior to that, he was the Dean of Yale College and Edmund S. Morgan, Professor of African American Studies, History, and American Studies at Yale University.
Holloway is the author of Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919-1941 (2002) and Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America Since 1940 (2013), both published by the University of North Carolina Press. He edited Ralph Bunche’s A Brief and Tentative Analysis of Negro Leadership (NYU Press, 2005) and co-edited Black Scholars on the Line: Race, Social Science, and American Thought in the 20th Century (University of Notre Dame Press, 2007). He wrote an introduction for a new edition of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk, published by Yale University Press in 2015.
Holloway grew up in Montgomery, Alabama and at several other military stations while his father served in the U.S. Air Force. He was a star football player at Winston Churchill High School in Potomac, Maryland,[3] and he was named an All-American honorable mention by USA Today.
Holloway was recruited to play linebacker at Stanford University but graduated in 1989 without starting a game. Holloway earned a Ph.D. in history from Yale University in 1995.
He began his academic career at the University of California, San Diego, before returning to Yale and joining its faculty in 1999. He became a full professor there in 2004.
Holloway was appointed Master (now known as “Head”) of Calhoun College in 2005 and chaired the governing body of Yale’s residential colleges, the Council of Masters, from 2009 to 2014. As a Master, Holloway was respected for his approachability, charisma, and involvement in student life. For several years, he opposed the change of name of Calhoun, despite student demands, and noted the irony of his serving as the Master of that college; but he changed his mind as many students became more vocal in their opposition to the name in 2015. He was considered a candidate for the Yale College deanship in 2008, when Mary Miller was appointed. He was appointed as her successor in May 2014 by Yale President Peter Salovey.
During the protests regarding Halloween costumes at Yale in November 2015, while he was Dean, Holloway strongly supported the costume guidelines issued by his office (guidelines which some critics saw as unnecessary, as infantilizing of the students, and as presuming to curtail their free speech, in contravention of Yale’s commitments under the “Woodward Report”) as “exactly right.” Holloway is a supporter of affirmative action programs and reparations.
Holloway left Yale and became Provost of Northwestern University on August 1, 2017.
On January 21, 2020, Rutgers University announced that Holloway has been selected as the university’s twenty-first president. He will assume the position on July 1, 2020, following the expected resignation of the university’s current president, Dr. Robert L. Barchi.
Holloway is married to Aisling Colón, and they have two children. His older brother Brian Holloway played professional football in the NFL.