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[lively jazz music] ♪ ♪ - Hello.

This is John Harmon.

- Hello.

This is John Harmon.

Founder, president, and CEO of the African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey.

Thanking you for tuning in today to "Pathway to Success."

Today's guest is Dr. Jonathan Holloway, president of Rutgers University.

Dr. Holloway, we're just delighted to have you today.

Welcome to "Pathway to Success."

- Thanks for having me.

I'm thrilled to be here.

- So let's just get right into it.

A little bit about your upbringing.

Where you're from.

Where did you go to school?

Why did you choose those institutions?

- Sure, so like another president of a different institution, I was born in Hawaii.

I've got the birth certificates.

Don't worry about it.

Was born in Hawaii.

My father's in the air force, so we bounced around a lot.

Before I turned seven, we lived in Hawaii, California, Massachusetts, and Alabama, and then I turned seven.

He retired from the air force.

This was 1974, and we were in Maryland, just outside of D.C.

I'm the youngest of three.

We, you know, went to these great public schools, and then my brother was recruited to play football at Stanford University out in California.

He went.

My sister, a year behind him, went to Stanford, as well, as an engineer.

And I'm seven years behind them, basically, but I spent summers hanging out in Palo Alto, California, with my siblings, so I just thought that's where Holloway kids went.

I had no sense of Stanford University being a particular kind of place.

So I had the great fortune to be recruited to play football at Stanford, and so that was it.

That was the destination, and then I was off and running.

- Three siblings at the same university, and I'm sure that made the university extremely proud.

Your dad was an air force guy, which afforded you all an opportunity to travel throughout the United States.

Golden résumé philosophy.

Can you speak to that?

- The golden résumé.

My father was always a planner.

Like, he wanted us-- "What's your five-year plan?

Your rolling five-year plan," and part of his agenda was about positioning so you can be successful, so I get that.

And he really--the phrase "golden résumé."

You gotta build a golden résumé, and from his perspective, that meant building networks on the East Coast and on the West Coast.

And we all rolled our eyes at the same lecture, over and over again, but we all ended up doing the very thing that he talked about.

And while I'd like to think I still could have been successful without doing the East and West Coast thing, the fact is I do attribute much of my success to having been all over the country and building networks everywhere basically.

So that golden résumé thing, as much as I, as a child, hate to confess that my father was right, he was right, at least in this instance.

- So your dad-- mission accomplished.

Other influences in your life?

[chuckles] - Well, my father-- on the professional front, my father was clearly a strong influence.

You know, I am a planner.

I do create these five-year plans and think about what I might need to do to get to that place.

On the personal side, although my father certainly played an important role there, I really give credit to my mother.

I mean, she was a true saint.

I mean, patient, kind, generous, and I really-- and filled with integrity.

And I try to live to those ideals-- those standards, really-- every day.

And you know, I'm not successful every day, but trying is important, and so I think I bring both of my parents' sensibilities to the table.

Very focused, professional.

Very pragmatic, but also very empathetic and very determined to recognize that everybody brings something to the table.

That's part of my mother's generous-- her spirit of generosity is that everybody has value, and we need to respect their journey, so that's who I'd like to think I am.

I certainly try to be.

- If more people in this great world that we live in had a fraction of those qualities, you know, we'll have a little more harmonious coexistence on this Earth.

That said, "The Cause of Freedom."

What led you to pen that book?

- So this is my most recent book.

It's, by design, a very short book on a very big history.

So I was approached about-- from the editor at Oxford University Press, who published the book, would I write a short history of the African American experience?

We went back and forth a whole bunch, and I finally confirmed, "Okay, so this is about the post-Emancipation experience."

That's what I work on as a scholar.

She goes, "Oh, no, no, no.

It's all of the African American experience."

And I'm like, "Wait, you want 500 years of history in"-- I was given 130 pages-- I'm like, "That can't be done."

Obviously, she talked me into it, and it ended up becoming a really great experience.

And it's not the complete history of the African American past.

That would be thousands of pages long.

- Mm-hmm.

- But what it is is a book that asks a number of key questions, the most important of which is, "What does it mean to be an American?"

And that if you use that question and look at the African American past as a way to answer that question, you realize this is not a simple question.

This is a very complex question, and that's a question that was asked many different moments before the founding of this country.

I mean, at the founding of this country.

Been asked many times as the country is going through its sectional crisis, in the middle of the 19th century.

It's being asked today.

Literally today.

You know, what does it mean to be American?

And what one comes out with is that being an American means being in an argument.

You know, it's about wrestling with the very idea of citizenship, of democracy, of belonging.

And that is so much of the African American experience.

Wrestling with that idea of who belongs and on what terms.

- So Dr. Holloway, that was great.

Just that whole experience of putting together a book, and I'm still contemplating writing a book one day.

I haven't quite gotten there, but the mission of Rutgers University.

Could you share that with our viewers?

- Happily.

I mean, look, we are-- the title of the university.

We are the State University of New Jersey.

We have--I'm coming to you now from New Brunswick, our headquarters.

We have campuses in Newark, of course, a campus in Camden, and we are all over the state through our agricultural extension stations.

So we represent higher education in the state of New Jersey, and to that end, our mission is very simple: to serve the citizens of the state of New Jersey.

And in this way, our service is giving a world-class education, but our mission doesn't stop within the boundaries of the state.

We are here to serve the state, the nation, and the world.

And I mean that quite seriously.

How we do that service is through providing the materials that we have-- a first-rate faculty-- that they can do the research that brings in ideas that literally might change how we live our life on a daily basis or how we think of the past or imagine the future.

And that we also provide our students, through exposure to this great faculty, we bring to our students ideas that will test them.

That will challenge them so they will be forced to look at the world in entirely new ways, or to develop the skills to defend their view of the world.

- Mm-hmm.

- And this means that our mission is to educate and to challenge people, and that is all in service of making a better citizen.

And that's what a state university does, I think, is about building a better citizen.

And I'm determined that we do that as best we can.

- And I know that you have a large, diverse student population at Rutgers, and many of the students and friends and faculty that I come across-- they have great pride when they talk about Rutgers.

But specifically, as a Black man and Black students, not only at Rutgers, but across the world, the significance of a quality education-- what would that mean to a Black kid, a Black young man, a Black woman, if they should attain that?

- Right.

I talk about Rutgers representing the democratic possibilities of this country, and of course, I believe in higher education.

So when you're thinking specifically of that young Black child, like, what would Rutgers represent to them?

To me, Rutgers represents possibility, and it doesn't matter to me whether they come from wealth or from poverty.

We know that race is one of the controlling factors in the way this country's articulated, and so Rutgers represents possibilities for them to develop the intellect, the skills, or the resources to write their own future as much as they can.

And if we are able to deliver that, if our students can develop those skills and the resources and the network to write their own future, we'll have done a great good for anybody.

But particularly for, as you mention, that young Black child who's looking around his or her world and has to be curious or confused about the messages that he or she is receiving about what possibility looks like.

What it means to belong in the state of New Jersey.

What it means to be in a state with incredible wealth and incredible poverty, and what the cultural meaning of being Black is, and how that can indicate one's future possibilities.

Rutgers represents a vehicle to answer a lot of those issues or to give them the skills to navigate those issues, and frankly, for an in-state student, it gives them the chance to do so at a very reasonable cost too.

- Well, that's the bottom line.

We're gonna just take our first break right now.

We're having an amazing conversation with Dr. Jonathan Holloway, President of Rutgers University.

We'll be back in a minute.

- The African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey is your pathway to success.

We encourage you to visit our website at www.aaccnj.com, or call us at 609-571-1620.

We are your strategic partners for success.

- Welcome back to "Pathway to Success."

I'm your host, John Harmon, founder, president, and CEO of the African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey, and today's guest is Dr. Jonathan Holloway, president of Rutgers University.

So Dr. Holloway, let's continue.

You're now the president of Rutgers University, and what is a typical day at Rutgers, being the president?

What is that like?

- I mean, I am all over the place at any given moment.

One of the big challenges we have is trying to find time where I can get in front of students because I'm meeting with my staff, with other administrators, I'm meeting with people who we're trying to raise donations from, I'm doing media interviews like this one, which I always enjoy doing, but we are all here to serve the students, and they're the group I have the hardest time meeting, which is ironic.

- If you had more time to be in front of the students, share with us some of the things you might engage them in.

- If I were talking to first-year students-- undergrads I'm talking now-- I would encourage them to explore as much as possible.

That is, they are not going to have another time in their life where they have such freedom to go exploring and figure out who they are.

And you know, they may know that they're going to be a chemistry person.

Someone working in industry.

That's great.

I fully support that, but while they're doing that, you know, take a literature course, and vice-versa for someone else who knows they want to teach high school English, and, like, that's great.

Take an anthropology course you would never have thought about.

I want the students to explore because they might find a passion in them, and I want students to find their passion and follow that dream.

And then, you know, if I were talking to seniors, people at the other end of the spectrum, I would counsel them about what their next steps are gonna look like, as far as not just six months out, but two and three years out, because you know, they have been trained to push, push, push, to get to that job, to get to that thing.

But I always have told students while you're chasing the thing, keep your mind open-- or listen to yourself, I should say-- about what is animating you because we are taught in this country so often, one of the things you're chasing is the dollar bill, and, look, people need to have jobs.

You need to have a roof over your head, of course.

You need to pay for things, but at the end of the day, is that the thing that'll bring you the greatest happiness?

- Wow.

- And I want to push people to ask that question, because as my mother told me many times, you only get one shot at this thing called life, and it is a marathon.

God willing, it's a marathon, not a sprint.

- So that said, coming in as the new president at the height of a pandemic, you had a vision.

You had operational plans that you wanted to execute.

You know, how did that change?

Walk us through that a little bit.

- Oh, it changed.

It changed a lot.

So I was announced January 20th, I believe, in 2020, as the next president of Rutgers, to start July 1.

And at that point, you'll recall that this thing called coronavirus we thought then was this thing happening overseas.

Unaware that it was already in the United States.

- Right.

- And we didn't know where this was headed, and it closed in.

And so when the nation shut down, essentially, in March, I realized pretty quickly the presidency I thought I had no longer existed.

Or at best, it's gonna take two or three years to get back to that place, and that premonition about the situation was really correct.

So it really became, "Okay.

What's the scope of damage from"-- you know, there's the psychological challenges.

There's also the financial challenges.

What it has meant is, it has changed my presidency.

I mean, every day, there's a meeting, in some way, that's related to COVID or, you know, some COVID-related phenomenon.

And you know, how we do our work, where we do our work has radically changed, and some of those changes will be permanent, certainly.

We're still trying to figure out what that means.

And then, of course, there's the-- just the day-to-day work of the university.

Like, we are a major industry... - Absolutely.

- Within the state of New Jersey, and we are suffering the same challenges of the Great Resignation that other businesses are.

You know, we can't staff up like we need to, so it's a multi-level... - Wow.

- Really complex situation.

- How can the community play a greater role in helping you and the university be the best that we can all be collectively?

Can you speak to that a little bit?

- Rutgers is a major entity in the state, so when I think of the community, I'm thinking of, you know, which part of Rutgers is touching that part of the community?

Now, the most prominent places are, of course, in Camden, New Brunswick, and Newark.

And so Rutgers prides itself on being an anchor institution in each of those three places.

That we are totally wed to those three cities, and those cities' success affects our success, and vice-versa.

You know, we are a major employer, and so we are really always looking for partnerships, whether it's corporate partnerships, research partnerships, non-profit partnerships.

So if they look at Rutgers as a vehicle to help move an agenda forward, that's a really constructive way of being a partner to the university.

A positive aspect of my presidency is feeling support, specifically from, in broad strokes, the African American community in New Jersey that, you know, is proud of the fact that, you know, the first Black president of the institution is in place, but I also know that's not enough.

Like, I've gotta go out and deliver.

You know, yes, there is an era of good feelings, of heartwarming and feeling supported, but you know, it's roll-up-the-sleeves time, as far as I'm concerned, and for me, it's about partnerships.

- So my question to you.

Ways in which you think we could be better partners to you in your effort.

I'd like to hear a response to that.

- To look for opportunities where I can be introduced.

I mean as--and I don't have to tell you.

This chamber of commerce-- it's about building networks, right?

- Right.

- And so the more I can be brought into networks in New Jersey, the better job I can do, but remember that Rutgers is a 100,000-person large community.

Faculty, staff, students.

It covers the entire state.

My job is to serve everyone, and that's not easy, but it's really important, and if I can have networks I can lean into as I do that work, that's wonderful.

But those networks need to understand I need to network all over the state with all different types of people in order to deliver the very best possible product in terms of a higher education opportunity for state residents.

- I know we're in the pandemic, I know you had to pivot, but nonetheless, you have a plan.

And so could you give us a glimpse of where you hope to-- what you hope to accomplish, if you will, in the next three to five years and beyond?

- One of the things I did on the very first day in office, essentially, was to call attention to a program we call Scarlet Promise Grants, which is a series of financial aid packages and emergency relief packages that help students who otherwise would not be able to complete their Rutgers education or even start their Rutgers education.

And it was a modest program.

I would say, "Let's make it bigger.

Let's just grow this thing."

I donated a lot of money to it personally, and you know, trying to raise $10 million that first year for it, which we did.

I just had my inauguration a couple of weeks ago.

Delayed because of the pandemic.

And I said, "Basically, we're doubling down."

You know, we are gonna raise $50 million over the next three years for the Scarlet Promise Grant.

It's about accessibility.

That's what the grants are about.

So we are gonna increase our accessibility to the institution for all kinds of reasons that you and I have already been talking about today.

It's really important.

We are going to create opportunities to increase the research opportunities for our faculty.

And then one thing I announced at my inauguration is, I want Rutgers to be a leader in service.

So I really do believe that we are in a crisis in this country right now.

I do believe that democracy is not promised.

- Mm-hmm.

- And I believe that we all, as citizens, need to step up and contribute in some way to making our democracy more robust, to protecting it.

Higher education has a role to play there.

It's about developing better citizens.

Training better citizens.

So we've launched a program that will pay for some of our service internships for people who otherwise could not afford to take a non-paying internship in the summer.

We are going to pay for that, and this is a way of trying to emphasize the importance of civic engagement, of good citizenship, and to have the major research university in the state be the engine behind that kind of commitment I think is really important.

So for me, these are the agendas.

It's about accessibility, it's about research, and it's about civic engagement.

And if we can increase all of those things during the course of my administration, I think I will be proud of what we have done.

- Well, I think we all will be proud.

We're proud of you now.

Honored to have you in our state.

Honored to have you leading Rutgers University, notwithstanding the 200-plus years it took for them to recognize that when you have individuals like yourself, it really sets up for an opportunity to be transformational, to really be best in class.

And that's my words, but we want to thank you, Dr. Holloway, for being with us today and thank everyone for tuning in to "Pathway to Success."

Until the next time, this is John Harmon.

Have a great day.

- Thank you for having me.

[lively jazz music] ♪ ♪ - The conversation today with Dr. Jonathan Holloway was--it was not only inspiring, but also it really confirmed that education-- a quality education-- is transformational.

It unlocks the possibilities.

It allows young men, young women, old men, old women, the opportunity to really become whoever they want to be.

Our viewers, if you have kids that are desiring to go to college, not look at the cost.

I think Dr. Holloway referenced his father having a plan.

This golden résumé.

And he didn't think about what it would cost, but he just said, "Map out where you want to go "and be very intentional about it, "and then get it done.

"And on the other side, "you will then find out your true potential.

Your true passion and what you have to offer."

You know, I don't like to use myself as a personal example, but here it is.

You know, I'm one of seven kids who stumbled into college.

I was not the best student in high school or in middle school, but somehow I figured it out, and the lightbulb came on, and I became a more proficient student.

And then I went onto a two-year school, graduated, and then a four-year school, and graduated.

I was able to get a professional career in banking.

I owned my own business for 16 years.

I'm now the founder, president, and CEO of the African American Chamber of Commerce of New Jersey.

I'm also in a position where I can change lives through hiring folks, mentoring folks, giving advice.

I serve on a number of public and non-public boards where I'm able to influence decisions or lend advice.

At the end of the day, God has blessed me to have an education and being able to utilize that education.

Not just for me personally, but to invest in others, to help them realize their dreams in being the best person they can be.

Thank you.

♪ ♪ - Support for this program was provided by Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey.

PSE&G.

JCP&L.

Investors Bank.

Berkeley College.

NJM Insurance Group.

New Jersey Economic Development Authority.

♪ ♪