William Jacob Holland

William Jacob Holland (1848–1932) was the eighth Chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh (1891–1901) and Director of the Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh. He was an accomplished zoologist and paleontologist, as well as an ordained Presbyterian minister. His 1890s administration is best known for dramatically growing the university (then called the Western University of Pennsylvania). Holland was born August 16, 1848 in Jamaica, West Indies, the son of a minister. He attended Moravian College and Theological Seminary; Amherst College, (A.B., 1869), and Princeton Theological Seminary (1874). In 1874 he moved to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to become pastor of the Bellefield Presbyterian Church in the city's Oakland neighborhood. At this time Holland was also a trustee of the Pennsylvania College for Women (now Chatham College), where he taught ancient languages. He also was active in the sciences, serving as naturalist for the United States Eclipse Expedition, which in 1887, at the bequest of the National Academy of Sciences and the U.S. Navy, explored Japan. In 1891 he became chancellor of Pitt, where he taught anatomy and zoology. In 1901 his friend Andrew Carnegie hired him as director of the Carnegie Museum, where he remained until retirement in 1922. Holland was America's great popularizer of butterflies and moths in the first half of the twentieth is century. Holland's The Butterfly Book (1898) and The Moth Book (1903) are both still widely used. Holland donated his private collection exceeding 250,000 specimens to the Carnegie Museum . He supported active collectors worldwide, obtaining major collections from previously uncollected regions between 1890 and 1930 through the efforts of William Doherty, Herbert Huntingdon Smith, H.L. Weber, J. Steinbach, S.M. Klages and many others.

In 1879 Holland married Carrie T. Moorhead. They had two children. He died on December 13, 1932. The University of Pittsburgh's Holland Hall at 3990 Fifth Avenue is named in his honor. It is a student residence for 600 upperclass and first-year women students and is part of the Schenley Quadrangle complex. The University Book Center is on the ground floor of Holland Hall.

References

• Alberts, Robert C. (1987). Pitt: The Story of the University of Pittsburgh 1787-1987. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. ISBN 0-8229-1150-7. 
• "William Jacob Holland" in American National Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.