Almost every media account of Jonathan Holloway’s announcement this week that he’ll resign as president of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, adds that he is Rutgers’s “first Black president.” But Holloway’s race hasn’t figured at all in the toxic crosscurrents, coming from left and right, that have driven him to resign after finishing his first five-year term at the university. Race hasn’t figured in his own personal calculations, either, as I know from having spoken with him often during our years teaching at Yale, where he taught African American history; headed a residential college named for the infamous American advocate and architect of slavery John C. Calhoun; and then served as dean of the whole of Yale College before becoming the provost at Northwestern University and, in 2020, the president of Rutgers.

“[University presidents’] jobs are difficult in good times,” Holloway recently told the Newark Star-Ledger’s Tom Moran, “but when you’re facing absolutely no-win situations constantly, in this era of hyperbole about failing to do X, Y, and Z.… None of us signed up for that, just like I didn’t sign up to have a police detail with me everywhere I go.”

Let “X” designate a labor strike, last year, unprecedented in Rutgers’s history as a public university, by faculty and staff unions raising pressing concerns about pay, equity, and work rules but also prompting harassment of Holloway and his family at their home and elsewhere on campus. He sought an injunction against the strike because New Jersey law prohibits strikes by public employees, but Governor Phil Murphy intervened to settle matters less confrontationally, with significant increases in pay.

“Y” can represent the challenges posed by some pro-Palestine student protesters whom Holloway persuaded to dismantle........

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