Jonathan Holloway, who last week became the first Black president in Rutgers University’s 254 year history, said he has no plans to change the school’s name, which honors a man who owned slaves.
But he did use his first press conference, which took place indoors on the school’s New Brunswick campus Monday, to say he hopes to increase diversity among faculty and have conversations about race and inclusion on campus as the nation grapples with racism and police brutality.
“We are not going to change the name of the university,” Holloway said, after speaking about plans to keep the school mostly remote this fall as the coronavirus outbreak continues. “That does not mean I’m opposed to having a conversation about it.
Rutgers, founded as Queen’s College in 1766, has three halls named for former presidents who were slave owners and anti-abolitionists. And the university’s namesake, Revolutionary War hero and philanthropist from New York City, Henry Rutgers, owned slaves, too.
On the heels of the national Black Lives Matter movement, students have started a petition to rename the three halls — Hardenbergh Hall, Frelinghuysen Hall and Milledoler Hall. The school’s history with slavery came to light with the publishing of the Scarlet and Black project in 2016.
The project also found that famed freedom fighter Sojourner Truth and her parents were enslaved by family members of the university’s first president, Jacob Hardenbergh.
Throughout his career, Holloway said, he was often the first Black man to hold a position, becoming a dean at Yale University and provost at Northwestern University. That trend continues as he takes the reins at Rutgers amid financial and health woes brought on by the coronavirus, paired with a national reckoning on racism, police brutality and mass incarceration.
Holloway has taught History and African American Studies, and in 2013, he published the book, “Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America Since 1940.”
“I shouldn’t still be the first,” he said Monday. “I will only ever be the first in my career, I imagine. I think I’m pretty good, but I’m not that good. I think that’s an indictment of the ability of our society to imagine excellence.”
Holloway said many of the initial attempts to diversify Rutgers will likely include back office changes, particularly with most students staying off campus this fall. He said he hopes to have conversations with students about the campus’s past, but does not see the name as one that determines the school’s legacy.
“The reason we’re not going to change the name is that names have value that exceed someone’s existence,” Holloway said.
“If I were to walk around feeling bludgeoned by every name I see, I couldn’t get out of bed.”
He said he has heard that at least one of the halls named for a slave owner is a “horrible” building on campus that could be replaced, and said he would not want it renamed for an enslaved person, given its poor condition.
The school has taken steps to honor former slaves and prominent Black figures, naming an athletic field after Frederick Douglass last spring, and in 2017 a residence hall and a library for Sojourner Truth and James Dickson Carr, Rutgers’ first Black graduate, respectively.
Like many institutions that predate the Civil War, Holloway said, Rutgers has ties to “blood money” and those who owned slaves. He hopes to retain current talent at the university, but also to diversify the faculty.
But he noted the problems exist throughout higher education and are not specific to Rutgers. To change them, he said, will require the school to embark on a long road that includes far more reform than renaming buildings.
“My existence, my humanity, my complexity, cannot be reduced by the fact that Rutgers was a slave owner, that he could not imagine me,” Holloway said. “That’s his problem.”
Our journalism needs your support. Please subscribe today to NJ.com.
Amanda Hoover may be reached at ahoover@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @amandahoovernj.