Jonathan Holloway, a renowned historian who began his career at UC San Diego in the 1990s, is expected to be named the first black president of Rutgers University in New Jersey on Tuesday.

Holloway will step down as provost of Northwestern University and join Rutgers after his selection is formally approved by the university’s board of governors and board of trustees, according to the New York Times and NJ.com.

He will succeed Robert Barchi as president of Rutgers, a multi-campus public university that has nearly 70,000 students. It is one of the oldest colleges in the country, tracing its origins to before the American Revolution.

Holloway was born in Hawaii but grew up in Alabama and other locales because of his father’s service in the Air Force.


He earned a bachelor’s degree in history at Stanford, where he also played on the football team, then earned a doctorate in history at Yale.

From 1994-98, Holloway served as an assistant professor of ethnic studies at UC San Diego, where he was given the All People’s Diversity Award by the school’s Cross Cultural Center.

He joined the Yale faculty in 1999 and became well known for his research and writings about African American history and the black intellectual experience. In 2014, he was appointed dean of Yale College, the first black scholar to hold that position.

Holloway, who is now 52, soon became caught up in the racial tensions that roiled the university.


“There was a convulsion on Yale’s campus that was part of an international rise of student protests related to racial and social inequality,” Holloway told the publication World University Rankings in 2017.

“It was quite a shock to discover that so many students saw me only as an administrator who must be working against their best interests. If they had read anything I had written or had taken any of my classes, they would have realized that I was aligned with them. “

He later became provost at Northwestern, a major private research university.