Jonathan Holloway, the president of Rutgers University, will be stepping down at the end of this academic year, ending a turbulent five-year term in which he both strengthened the university and faced criticism and controversy.
Dr. Holloway, a historian of the African American experience who himself made history as Rutgers’ first Black president, said in a message on Tuesday to the Rutgers community that he plans to take a sabbatical in the 2025-26 academic year to work on longstanding research projects. He will then return to teaching at Rutgers full time.
“This decision is my own and reflects my ruminations about how best to be of service,” he said in the message.
Dr. Holloway said he was proud of what Rutgers had achieved since July 2020, when he started his presidency. Rutgers’ entering class this fall is the largest in its history. Its researchers received a record $970 million in grants this past year. And a new initiative Dr. Holloway championed has provided hundreds of students with paid internships in public service.
But there was also controversy. The school’s athletic director, Pat Hobbs, resigned suddenly in August, followed by news of an investigation into his conduct. There were allegations of verbal and emotional abuse of athletes in some of Rutgers’ athletic programs, including on its gymnastics and softball teams.
A strike by thousands of unionized university workers in 2023, which ended after five days with the help of the New Jersey governor, Phil Murphy, was rancorous. Protesters supporting the unions gathered outside of Dr. Holloway’s home, requiring campus police to post a squad car out front. He now has a police escort when he appears in public. He hadn’t bargained, he said, for that level of rancor.
In an interview, Dr. Holloway said he had made a commitment to Rutgers’ Board of Governors to fulfill his five-year contract. But when he took time to reflect this summer on what was next, he wondered whether the personal cost of the position “was just getting higher than I was comfortable spending, especially when I think of how this affected my family.”
The stream of “no-win situations,” he said, was unrelenting, and at times, the toxic nature of the criticism he faced impacted his and his family’s security.
“We’re living in an era where the first resort is righteousness instead of trying to figure out if someone else may be right,” he said. “And that cuts across the political spectrum. That’s not unique to Rutgers, but it is a real challenge when you’re the head of a hundred thousand person community stretching across the state.”
Dr. Holloway received a vote of no confidence from the university senate later in 2023 for how he handled the strike and other organizational moves, such as the merging of Rutgers’ two medical schools.
Then, last semester, Dr. Holloway became the target of national criticism over his handling of pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus. He brought a student encampment to a peaceful end in May by agreeing to some of the demands of protesters, including scholarships for some Palestinian students displaced by the war. He did not, however, agree to divest from Israel or cut ties with Israeli universities, the protesters’ larger asks.
He was brought before Congress to testify about what Virginia Foxx, the Republican chair of the Committee on Education and the Workforce, called his “shocking concessions” to the protesters. He fared better in the grilling than some of the other college presidents, defending his university’s response.
“We talked with Rutgers students,” he told the committee. “They were not, as some have characterized them, terrorists; they were our students.”
But that did not stop members of the committee from faulting him, underscoring the fraught position of university presidents trying to navigate the issue.
Of the seven college leaders who testified about antisemitism on campus before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce since the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, only two — Presidents Michael Schill of Northwestern and Sally Kornbluth of M.I.T. — have not announced their resignations. (The U.C.L.A. chancellor, Gene Block, had announced his retirement months before the hearing.)
On Tuesday, Representative Foxx called on Dr. Holloway to spend his last year “enacting policies to actually protect Jewish students and faculty” instead of “empowering antisemites and terrorist sympathizers.”
Earlier this year, Dr. Holloway, 57, was a candidate to be president of Yale University, where he had been a professor and the dean of its undergraduate college. Instead, the post went to Maurie McInnis, who led Stony Brook University in New York.
Dr. Holloway said he had no immediate plans to seek any other leadership position and was looking forward to getting back to working on a book about race and history that’s two-thirds done.
Amy Towers, chair of the Board of Governors of Rutgers, praised Dr. Holloway in a statement on Tuesday.
“Dr. Holloway’s decision was his and his alone; we respect it and thank Dr. Holloway for his passion and service,” she said.
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