“One to One” with President Holley
Alum Sheryl McCarthy ’69 interviewed Mount Holyoke College President Danielle Holley on the CUNY TV show “One to One.” They explored topics such as the role of women’s colleges and the power of humanities in today’s career-focused world.
Alum Sheryl McCarthy ’69 hosts the CUNY TV show “One to One,” where she speaks with newsmakers, notables and experts about the issues of the day. She recently interviewed Mount Holyoke College President Danielle R. Holley on the television series.
During the half-hour episode, McCarthy and Holley explored such topics as the role of women’s colleges today, the path from enthusiastic student to distinguished educator and the power of humanities in today’s career-focused world.
“It was a long journey but very consistent with my upbringing. I’m the daughter of two academics; my father was a law professor, [and] my mom was an accounting professor at a historically Black college, at Texas Southern University in Houston. So I grew up in the university atmosphere and just really loved it,” Holley said about her career trajectory. “When I came to Yale, the whole world opened up for me. I’m a proud humanities major, a history major, and that led me to wanting to go to law school and then to being an academic and then finally really wanting to really serve students.”
“Why Mount Holyoke?” McCarthy asked.
“What I saw at Howard University and at [the] University of South Carolina is the difference higher education makes when it’s mission driven,” Holley said. “Mount Holyoke has one of the most important historical legacies of any college or university ever founded in the United States. … Mary Lyon, the founder of our College, believed that we could go where no one else could go and do what no one else could do. And that still fuels us, that belief that women and people marginalized on the basis of their gender have a special role to play in our democracy, have a special role to play in breaking glass ceilings and demonstrating what women are really capable of doing here in the United States and around the world.”
McCarthy also asked about the pressure on colleges and universities to replace their humanities courses with more career-focused classes.
“I think humanities are the basis of everything we do in higher education,” Holley said. “We know that when you produce scientists who don’t have the context of the humanities, you get something very different. We start all biology students at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum and look at photographs and drawings of the human body so [they] have that emotional connection to the people [they’ll] treat and to the body itself. So we believe that scientists we produce at Mount Holyoke are fundamentally different because they’re exposed to art; they’re exposed to music.”
