The Office of Academic Affairs hosts a lecture by Dean of Yale College and Edmund S. Morgan Professor of African American Studies, History, and American Studies at Yale University, Jonathan Holloway, on Tuesday, April 5, at 6 p.m. in Hibben Auditorium. The lecture is free and open to the public.

It will also be live-streamed and will be shown on the big screen in the SUB Atrium. Twitter will also be used to answer questions received from the audience watching.

Titled “Crybullies, the Death of Free Speech, and Other Red Herrings: Universities and the Public in the Age of Social Media,” the lecture is a first-person account of the turmoil at Yale in the 2015 fall semester, reflecting on the risks of difficult conversations on campus.

Holloway, the first African American dean of Yale College, was at the center of the student protests and controversy over respectful campuses and free speech at Yale last fall. Tracking events from opening of the school year in late August to progressive student activism in November, Holloway examines the tensions between the role of the university, the place universities occupy in the public imagination, and the disruptions that accompany a social media universe that is changing the way we talk, think, and act.

Holloway is a historian of post-emancipation United States history with a focus on social and intellectual history. He is the author of “Confronting the Veil: Abram Harris Jr., E. Franklin Frazier, and Ralph Bunche, 1919-1941,” and “Jim Crow Wisdom: Memory and Identity in Black America Since 1940,” both with the University of North Carolina Press. He helped to edit several other books and has written an introduction for a new edition of W.E.B. Du Bois’s “Souls of Black Folk,” published by Yale University Press in 2015.

Holloway won the William Clyde DeVane Award for Distinguished Scholarship and Teaching in Yale College in 2009 and the Before Columbia Foundation’s American Book Award in 2014. He served as the Master of Calhoun College from 2005-2014, and was Chair of the Council of Masters from 2009-2013. He served as Chair of the Department of African American Studies beginning in 2013. That term was abbreviated when he was named Dean of Yale College in July 2014.

He has held fellowships from the W.E.B. Du Bois Research Institute at Harvard University, the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Ford Foundation. He was an Alphonse Fletcher Sr. Fellow in 2011-2012. Currently, he is a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians.

This event is cosponsored by Academic Affairs, Center for the Southwest, School of Law, Office of Graduate Studies, College of Fine Arts, University College, The Project for New Mexico Graduates of Color, Africana Studies, Department of Sociology and the Department of American Studies. 

For more information on this lecture, or other events sponsored by the Center for the Southwest, call (505) 277-4344 or email us at cntrsw@unm.edu.