For Winston Churchill High School graduate and Yale professor Jonathan Holloway, being selected as the new master of one of the school’s 12 residential colleges was a lot like being tapped for one of Yale’s famed secret societies.
“That’s exactly what it’s like. There’s no application,” Holloway said. “I literally didn’t do a single thing for this. I had no idea I was on list.”
The house master position is one of Yale’s most prestigious, and those selected are “typically members of Yale's faculty who have somehow achieved distinction in their respective academic fields,” according to the school’s Web site.
Holloway, a tenured professor in History and African American Studies, is the author of “Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919-1941,” and editor of a never-before-published manuscript by Bunche, a 1930s black intellectual. He is currently on leave from Yale as a fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center, where he has completed two more academic projects with a third underway.
Holloway is also an unconventional choice for the position. At 37, he is 15 years younger than most of his colleagues and among the youngest men ever to be selected as a house master.
An All-American football star at Churchill and Stanford, where he studied as an undergraduate, Holloway had set his sights on orthopedic medicine and then law before turning to academia. As a college senior he became close to a history professor who encouraged him to consider the field.
“The more I heard about it the more I got interested,” Holloway said. “Really if it weren’t for this one advisor pulling me aside my senior year, telling me to think about it, it never would have happened.”
Holloway earned his masters and doctoral degrees at Yale became enamored with the intellectual spirit of college campuses.
“Overall, I think I’m very happy,” he said. “I love being at Universities. I guess in a way this mastership is a great opportunity for me because I got to do something besides teaching or research and still be at university.”
“That’s a serious love affair, with Yale,” said Jonathan Holloway’s father Wendell Holloway, who lives on Canfield Drive in Potomac. Wendell Holloway said his son is an attractive choice to students, “because A he’s young, B because he has a whole different background of all of the other academics, with the football and everything.”
YALE’S RESIDENTIAL colleges are loosely modeled after the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge Universities. Though the colleges do not have their own faculties and academic courses as they do in England, they do have distinct personalities and are the social and cultural centers of most students’ lives at Yale.
“The best way to describe them is as if they’re sort of like dorms on steroids,” Jonathan Holloway said. While freshmen live together in dorms separate from the colleges, most students live in them for the remaining three years, take most of their meals in them, study in them, and eventually, graduate in their courtyards, in separate ceremonies. “Your best friends, they’ll mostly be in the same college.”
As master, Holloway too will live in the college, together with his wife Aisling Colon, also a Churchill grad, and their two children, Emerson, 5, and Ellison, 3, named for the authors Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ralph Waldo Ellison.
THE MASTER’S RESPONSIBILITIES are far-reaching. Each college also has a dean, whose job it is to guide the students academically and make sure they are keeping up. Everything else is up to the master — everything from presiding over move-in and graduation and hosting regular speaker events to the more serious tasks resolving roommate disputes, breaking up parties before the police do, and helping troubled students.
“I’ve been told, every few years you’ll have someone with a serious mental illness,” Holloway said. He said he anticipates “some really rough things are probably going to happen, and probably tragic things, but mostly fun things too I think as well.”
One person who can vouch for that is Calhoun’s outgoing master, Dr. William Sledge, a professor of psychiatry at Yale School of Medicine, who has held the position for 10 years.
“The master is the CEO of this college and is responsible for everything that goes on there,” Sledge said. He said he was at first not prepared for all of the challenges of the position or the extent of interaction with the students. But that’s not a bad thing. “I was really unprepared for how smart and with it everybody was and how exciting it was to work with them,” he said.
“They’re going to be terrifically successful,” Sledge said of Jonathan and Aisling Holloway. “They have all the qualities. … They’re resourceful and thoughtful and young and bright and energetic and they’re going to be a great hit.”
Sledge said that the time was right for him to move on from the position. “I have in the last year had three jobs and I’m eager to have two,” he said, but he relishes the intimate relationship he has grown to have with Calhoun’s students. “After 10 years my enthusiasm for that is undiminished.”
HOLLOWAY AND COLON were sweethearts at Churchill. Both grew up in Potomac; Holloway had attended Hoover Middle School and Colon Cabin John.
They broke up when Holloway was at college at Stanford and eventually completely lost touch for six years. They found each other over e-mail, an unknown medium when they had first dated “and then the saccharine, hallmark, made-for-TV movie begins,” said Holloway.
As Associate Master, Colon will oversee the Master’s Teas program, which brings prominent figures to speak at the college in the masters’ quarters, a role for which she is well-qualified as a former event planner.
Colon, an actress and singer, is also looking forward to interacting with the college’s performing arts students.
Holloway said that a special perk of the new position will be the influence it will have on Emerson and Ellison. Young children living in the colleges tend to become unofficial mascots he said, and he looks forward to their having the chance to interact with vibrant and intelligent young people
“I think it’s a wonderful opportunity for them to be around all these adopted big brothers and big sisters,” he said.