Jonathan Holloway on the Hot Seat

Earlier this month, Jonathan S. Holloway made his latest controversial decision.

Holloway is president of Rutgers University’s three campuses, in Camden, Newark, and New Brunswick, New Jersey. On April 29, pro-Palestinian student groups at New Brunswick set up tents on the elm-dotted Voorhees Mall, in the heart of campus. Four days later, the campers planned a rally, leading administrators to postpone some final exams. Holloway and other college leaders brought in law enforcement.

Administrators told activists they had to negotiate or be cleared by force. They reached an agreement with the students in which they promised to meet some, but not all, of the demands. In return, the students voluntarily packed up their encampment.

For some faculty members, it was a win — no violence and no arrests, not like what they had seen just days before at colleges across the country. For Rep. Virginia Foxx, a Republican of North Carolina, however, it was a “shocking” sign that Holloway had “surrendered to antisemitic radicals.” Foxx called Holloway, and two other college presidents, to testify before the House of Representatives’ Committee on Education and the Workforce and account for their approach to pro-Palestinian protests. The fallout from the same committee’s earlier hearings had eventually forced the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania to step down.

Holloway, who is rumored to be in the running for Yale University’s presidency, heads to Congress at a vulnerable time for his leadership. Even before the October 7 Hamas attack brought Israeli-Palestinian politics to the fore of campus activism, Holloway had been in a tough spot. In September, the university senate, which represents faculty and staff members and students from all the campuses, passed a vote of no confidence against him. (The senate has only an advisory role, and Holloway kept this job.) Then came the protests.

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A snapshot of Rutgers reveals a university seemingly divided on everything: on how the encampment on the New Brunswick campus ended; on how serious a problem antisemitism is at the university; on whether the congressional scrutiny will be helpful; and on other aspects of Holloway’s leadership unrelated to Middle East politics, such as his handling of faculty-union negotiations that predate the Israel-Hamas war. It’s a division made more challenging by the sheer size and diversity of the university, which has Jewish and Muslim student populations that number in the thousands, and a student body of about 67,000.

Holloway was unavailable for an interview, according to Dory Devlin, a spokesperson for the university. Devlin emailed answers to questions instead. “As a state institution, we are guided by the First Amendment, and its exceptions for harassment, incitement, and discrimination,” she wrote. “President Holloway has done his best to balance the competing needs and interests of one of the most diverse university communities in the nation.”

Holloway is a historian of the post-emancipation era in the United States. He received his doctorate from and held his first tenured faculty position at Yale University. A decade ago, he moved into administration, becoming dean of Yale’s undergraduate division, and soon found himself confronting a large protest at the university over student safety and belonging. Some protesters at the time acknowledged the difficulty and high expectations of his role as the first Black dean of Yale College. After Yale, he served as provost at Northwestern University before coming to Rutgers.

Holloway’s start at Rutgers also ran into unexpected challenges. After being named president in January 2020, he planned numerous campus visits to get to know the community he would be leading, he told The Chronicle in October 2021. Covid interrupted his intended travel. Much of his community-building had to be done over Zoom, he said. For the future, he said, “I want precedented times. I want boring.” He didn’t get it.

The encampment agreement at issue for Foxx’s education committee was not a total victory for protesters at Rutgers. Administrators agreed that Holloway would meet with small groups of students to discuss their No. 1 demand, that Rutgers divest from companies “supporting the state of Israel’s settler colonialism.” Administrators denied students their second demand, that the university end its partnership with Tel Aviv University. Holloway had previously written that he believes the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel is “wrong,” although he allowed a student-government vote on the issue to take place.

The university did agree to a number of demands having to do with academic exchange with Palestinians and support for Rutgers students of Arab descent.

Some Jewish students and faculty members saw the agreement as a betrayal.

“It sets such a bad precedent for our campus, that if you interrupt and take over our campus, we’ll abide by your demands,” said Joe J. Gindi, a junior at the New Brunswick campus.

For Gindi, the encampment had created an atmosphere where “the vast majority of Jewish students were not welcomed.” Common encampment chants, like “from water to water, Palestine is Arab” — chanted in Arabic, which Gindi is minoring in — call for the ethnic cleansing of Jews, he believes. Earlier in the year, he testified before the Committee on Education and the Workforce himself, one of nine Jewish university students to do so. He spoke about witnessing a march led by Students for Justice in Palestine at the New Brunswick campus’s student center in November. Marchers “screamed” at him, according to Gindi, calling him a murderer and European colonizer. “Ironic, since my family came to America from Aleppo,” he said.

An adjunct faculty member, who requested her name be withheld because she’s worried she won’t be an effective instructor to some of her students if they knew she was Jewish, told a story about walking with a student after class. “We need to wipe them all out,” she said her student told her, seemingly unaware of her heritage. “The Jews own the United States, and they own half of Europe.”

“Then you go and negotiate with these groups. How do the rest of us feel?” she said. “I hold the president accountable.”

Even before his congressional testimony, Gindi had been part of the New Brunswick chancellor’s Advisory Council on Antisemitism and Jewish Life. Despite his disappointment with the encampment resolution, the regular meetings seem to have given him a more-forgiving view of the Rutgers administration. “The chancellor and the president both want to make our campus better,” he said. “It’s just difficult finding that line.”

Not every Jewish community member at Rutgers felt threatened by the pro-Palestinian protests.

“I have family in Israel. I have family I lost in the Holocaust. I saw no antisemitism at all in the encampment,” said Todd Wolfson, an associate professor of journalism at the New Brunswick campus and president of Rutgers’ union for faculty members and graduate workers. (He doesn’t consider the rhetoric in phrases like “from the river to the sea” to be inherently antisemitic.) “Antisemitism was a charge that was used to shut the protest up,” he said. “I really feel that.”

The union strongly supported pro-Palestinian protests as a matter of free speech, even calling for tenured faculty volunteers to stand in front of students on May 2 and offer to be arrested first, if it came to that.

A number of union and university senate members, including Wolfson, followed a similar arc in their evaluation of Holloway’s leadership. Last spring, negotiations over employment contracts got ugly. As the unions representing full- and part-time faculty members and graduate students considered a strike, Holloway threatened to sue. He only backed down after Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat, intervened. That rancorous process, along with other complaints, led the university senate to pass a vote of no confidence in Holloway in September.

Then came the recent deal with protesters.

“He honestly should feel proud that he was able to resolve those protests peacefully,” said Paul Boxer, a professor of psychology at the Newark campus and a member of the university senate’s executive committee. “He should know that on this issue, he does have the support of the university senate.” It was high praise, considering another one of Boxer’s comments about Holloway’s leadership — that he would “never, ever forget or forgive” Holloway for declining to renew the contract of Nancy Cantor, the Newark campus’s “beloved” chancellor of 10 years. Cantor’s removal was another major motivation for the no-confidence vote.

Several university senate members said that their votes did not mean they wanted to see Holloway go, necessarily. They wanted him to consult with them more. Some feared that a leader less responsive to the senate and harder on student protesters could replace him. Most of all, despite their own sharp criticisms, they don’t want to see their president painted in a bad light by a congressional committee they see as politically motivated and operating in bad faith.

“This is absolutely just an attempt to win an election in November and control our campuses,” said Wolfson.

The New Brunswick encampment may have ended “peacefully,” but Aseel Abukwaik, a Palestinian American senior and a member of Students for Justice in Palestine, was still in turmoil more than a week later.

“President Holloway has been very consistent in refusing to meet with us,” she said. “Multiple times he has failed to recognize Palestine and Palestinians, making very evident his undying support for the genocide.”

Devlin, the university spokesperson, wrote that Holloway has met with Rutgers’ Muslim Public Relations Council and members of the Center for Islamic Life. She didn’t know whether Holloway had met with representatives of Students for Justice in Palestine.

Abukwaik called the administration’s strategy of bringing in law enforcement on May 2, even if they were not deployed against students, “psychological warfare.” Over the course of several hours, 125 officers from the Rutgers University Police Department, other local police departments, and the New Jersey State Police gathered on campus, Devlin wrote. “They gave us a 60-minute deadline to decide whether or not we want to deal with police brutality, or accept eight out of 10 demands,” Abukwaik said. Devlin said the amount of time the protesters were given to decide could have been longer, with administrators telling protest leaders “by midafternoon” that they had to clear their encampment starting at 4 p.m.

“Just because we took the deal, that does not mean that this is the end of our struggle on campus,” Abukwaik said, although she didn’t share plans for further action. The terms of the agreement between the student groups and Rutgers administrators are “contingent upon no further disruptions and adherence to university policies,” according to a document from the administration.

It seemed to Abukwaik that Rutgers leaders repeatedly expected ill intent from her student group. In December, the university suspended the New Brunswick chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, following a protest at the business school and other events that administrators said disrupted classes, which is against university rules. The group is now on probation. In April, the group canceled a planned walkout in support of the people of Gaza because administrators sent organizers an email that said the group “could be held accountable for disruptions, damages, or violence stemming from your promotion” of the event, according to a post on the chapter’s Instagram account.

“Rutgers basically assumed that we would be violent and damage things,” Abukwaik said. The group uses strategies like sit-ins and marches that have a long history in nonviolent protests, and it’s racist and Islamophobic to assume otherwise, she said.

Students for Justice in Palestine advocates for a single Palestinian state in the area that is now Israel. The question of what would happen to Jewish Israeli citizens if that should come to be is not one that Palestinians need to answer, according to an opinion essay Abukwaik wrote and pointed to when asked. “This is the colonizers’ problem,” she wrote.

The Anti-Defamation League has called out some Students for Justice in Palestine chapters, though not Rutgers’, for their use of pro-Hamas language, while acknowledging that group members have a “right to their views and to express them.”

For Abukwaik, her anti-Zionism is rooted in her family’s experience with the Israeli government, she said. She was born in the United States, but her grandparents originally lived in the city of Lydd — Lod, in Hebrew — in Israel. Her extended family now lives in Gaza and is being displaced again. “We want to be normal students, but we can’t because we have survivors’ guilt and we want to protect our families,” she said. “We want to end the Palestinian suffering and Rutgers can simply do that, but they choose not to.”

In between views like “Rutgers is a hotbed of antisemitism” and “the administration should fully support pro-Palestinian protesters” are other, more-moderate opinions. There is the Jewish student who supported the encampment’s right to exist, but didn’t find peers who share her “middle ground” views in either the Jewish student groups or the encampment. There is the faculty member who was disturbed by stories students told him about antisemitic interactions with classmates, but who also thought the expectation of student emotional safety at college has gone too far.

Some community members said they could focus on academics when they needed to, or avoid the New Brunswick encampment if they found it disturbing, while others found their academic year consumed by fear and conflict over Israel’s war. Leaders of the university senate shut down its email discussion list for a few days this month because messages were getting mean.

Most faculty members and students acknowledged that Holloway has a near-impossible job. In 2024, it feels like you cannot win as a high-profile university president. Yet almost no one expressed genuine enthusiasm for Holloway, not after the tumultuous last nine months. Perry Dane, a law professor who teaches at the Camden campus, gave perhaps the most positive assessment of Holloway: “He’s faced some difficult situations, and he’s tried hard.”

Should Holloway leave for the presidency at Yale, few sounded like they would be deeply disappointed. “If he does stay, I am still optimistic that we can rebuild that relationship with the senate and faculty and with the students,” said Heather Pierce, a lecturer at the New Brunswick campus and university senator. “If he goes, then I wish him well.”