Save the Date: Holloway in Rye Brook

Yale College Dean Jonathan Holloway '91MA '95Ph.D. will speak to alumni in Rye Brook, Mar.2 (Yale photos)

In all his decades at Yale, at no time was Dean Jonathan Holloway '91MA '95Ph.D. as busy as he was last fall on campus in New Haven.

Wrapping up his first full year as dean of Yale College, Holloway emerged to become a known face of Yale, while listening with concern to student demonstrators, developing plans to improve diversity in all aspects of Yale, devising an approach to address the naming of Calhoun College, promoting a new edition (with his own introduction in the front) of the seminal book (Souls of Black Folk) by scholar W.E.B. DuBois, teaching and doing research in Yale's African American Studies department, and responding to a stream of interview requests from the national media, including the New York Times and the New Yorker. 

In 2016, Holloway will slip away from New Haven for an evening to talk to alumni, when he will speak at the Hilton Westchester in Rye Brook, Wednesday, Mar. 2 at 6 pm.  His talk will be entitled "Continuing the Tradition of Civic Engagement in Yale College." Alumni and guests are invited and encouraged to register online.

The program is sponsored by YWAA, AYA and the Yale Alumni Association of Greenwich and follows a tradition of Yale leaders speaking to Westchester-area alumni, parents and students about Yale issues and programs.  (Yale president Peter Salovey '86Ph.d. spoke in Greenwich to a ballroom filled with alumni just weeks after his inauguration in Oct., 2013.)

Holloway was a popular master of Calhoun College for nine years before stepping into the deanship of Yale College in July, 2014. He was often called "Dr. J" while presiding over the college and was known to have memorized the name of every student in Calhoun every year. (He is also known to sport a different Yale tie for each day of the week.) "Part of why Calhoun is so cohesive is his force of personality," a student told the Yale Daily News in 2008.  "He is (the college)."

He has served as Chair of the Council of Masters and Chair of the Department of African American Studies.  He received Yale's DeVane award for outstanding scholarship and teaching in 2009 and wrote major reports encouraging Yale to expand the number of residential colleges by two.

Holloway has a resume' similar to those of Salovey and former president Richard Levin '74Ph.D. All three migrated to Yale for graduate school after receiving undergraduate degrees at Stanford. (Holloway, in fact, played football at Stanford.) All three served in senior administration roles at Yale.

In 2015, a favorite moment for him occurred hundreds miles from his office at Yale in Florida. Last July, Holloway, the former football player with no baseball experience, threw out the first pitch at a Miami Marlins game against the New York Yankees. The Yale connection?  The Marlins are owned by Jeffrey Loria '62.  Their president is David Samson, father of current student Hannah Samson '16.

To register for this event, click HOLLOWAY.  The online registration fee is $35.