The first thing to understand about Phylicia Rashad, the outgoing dean of Howard University’s Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts — as opposed to Phylicia Rashad the two-time Tony-winning actress and TV mom emerita — is that she really didn’t want to do this interview. Not because she was too busy (though Commencement was just a week away) or media-shy (pfft), but because she didn’t get all the fuss.
Phylicia Rashad brought more than star power to Howard University
The Tony-winning actress and “Cosby Show” mom is stepping down after leading the school’s College of Fine Arts.
After all, she’s one of three deans leaving the school this spring, “and the work that they have accomplished is outstanding,” says Rashad, 75, from her office in Lulu Vere Childers Hall on Howard’s Northwest Washington campus. Then she dips her head ever so slightly, fixing you with her signature glare.
Remember those sharp yet soothing mini-lectures on life that Rashad was known for as Clair Huxtable, the majestic working mom on “The Cosby Show”? Clair smiled when she schooled you. This was a very light version of that.
To Rashad, focusing on her work over the past three years leading the arts program from which she graduated in 1970 “just seemed kind of odd.”
Odd? Or newsworthy that a veteran artist — one who’s still working steadily as a stage actress and is increasingly one of the go-to directors of the Black theater canon — took on rebuilding a fine arts college after one of her first students, Chadwick Boseman, placed a perfectly timed bug in her ear?
“It doesn’t surprise me that Phylicia says you don’t need to write about her,” says Rashad’s little sister, actress and director Debbie Allen, also a Howard alumna. “That’s just who Phylicia is. She did this out of her heart and service to the university.”
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Rashad doesn’t shun the spotlight, she redirects it. “My nickname for her is ‘I’ve got a secret,’” Allen says. “She’s always doing things we don’t know about.” Adds the acclaimed playwright Pearl Cleage, Rashad’s Howard classmate and friend of 50 years: “She doesn’t like to talk about herself. She’s very humble as a human being. She’s been meditating for years and years and years. I think that is part of what we receive when we talk to her. She wants to do the work.”
Now the work here is finished — or just about. “Where’s my phone?” she asks before retrieving it from a desk, which is blanketed by dozens of copies of Toni Morrison’s “The Source of Self-Regard.” She proudly shows off a snippet of a student film project. “Just press that arrow and see the quality,” Rashad says, beaming as we watch a young woman dressed in a black suit perform Matrix-style acrobatics.
Rashad has an open-door policy. She is no Great Oz. If it’s office hours and her door is ajar, any of the college’s 579 students can walk in, no appointment necessary. Today she is stately but casual, dressed in a delicate kimono embroidered with dragons, her silver hair protected in boho braids. “I wanted the students to have access to the professionals,” she says. That starts with her.
They often begin with the same question, says the college’s assistant dean, Denise Saunders Thompson. “They want to know, ‘What did you do to get to where you are?’”
So let’s start with Rashad’s half-century love story with Howard.
“Donny Hathaway was out there singing every Friday with the Alphas. Umm hmm. This place was humming with music, buzzing with art, aloft in theater,” she says. “There was something going on in every moment, all the time. This was a grand place to be.”
When she arrived in fall 1966, the native Houstonian had never been to Washington. But Howard University had been a fixed place in her mind since she was a girl.
She points to a black-and-white class photo hanging high on the wall behind her desk. On that framed yearbook page is Rashad’s father, Andrew Arthur Allen, who graduated from Howard University’s College of Dentistry in 1946.
“He talked about Howard University as far back as I could remember because he loved it so much,” says Rashad. So when a teenage Phylicia Ayers-Allen, who knew she was destined for the theater, was contemplating colleges, there was really only one choice.
“My father said,” Rashad remembers, summoning Allen’s Louisiana-inflected accent, “‘Darling, you can apply to whatever school you want to, but you’re going to Howard.’”
Freshman year at the College of Fine Arts was like boot camp. One was not late, one came to rehearsal prepared, one lived and breathed the department. “Our faculty loved us,” says Rashad, who watched her first homecoming game — a pinnacle of Howard life — from the window of the scene shop where she was working.
Rashad spent the summer after sophomore year in New York at the newly formed Negro Ensemble Company, watching Black actors on the stage doing what a White instructor at Howard told her was impossible. “She was Irish. She meant well,” Rashad says before slipping on the professor’s voice.
“And she said: ‘Surely you must know I have an affinity for the Negro people. Why else would I be here? But I must tell you, in all honesty, there is no room in the theater for the Negro. You should explore another vocation.’ And we sat there looking at her just like you’re looking at me now,” Rashad says.
Amid America’s convulsions from the Vietnam War and the Black Power movement, Rashad and her classmates pushed for an Afrocentric curriculum — a new concept at a 100-year-old historically Black university — and slowly things began to change. She won’t say what tactics they used, just that “we were not about … breaking windows and throwing trash everywhere.” Soon plays written by and about African Americans were taught, spirituals entered the musical canon.
“That spirit lives here. It just does,” Rashad says. “And you don’t necessarily realize not only what it’s giving you, but how it’s living in you. You have to go away and come back for that one.”
So she did. But first, Broadway.
After graduation, Rashad acted steadily in New York theater. She played a Munchkin in the original production of “The Wiz” and was Sheryl Lee Ralph’s understudy in “Dreamgirls.” In 1983, Rashad was playing Woman Two in Cleage’s avant-garde “Puppetplay,” about two women married to a marionette, when she got the call that she had been cast opposite comedian Bill Cosby in “The Cosby Show.”
“All of us who wrote for the stage were like: ‘Don’t do it. Don’t leave,” Cleage says. That role as a lawyer, wife and mom of five living in brownstone Brooklyn would become iconic, cementing Rashad’s cultural status but hardly curtailing her artistic ambition or reach. To this day, “The Cosby Show” probably looms largest in Rashad’s career — even as the show’s legacy has become muddier following the disgrace of her co-star — but the actress’s contributions to the culture far exceed that sitcom. In 2004, she was the first Black woman to win a Tony for lead actress in a play, for her role in the revival of “A Raisin in the Sun.” She won a second Tony in 2022 for Dominique Morisseau’s “Skeleton Crew.”
“She’s the top of the Mount Rushmore of theater,” says Kenny Leon, who directed Rashad in the “Raisin” revival. “If I said I need this emotion in blue, she would say, ‘What shade of blue would you like, sir?’ She can do that like no other actor on the planet.”
It was that talent — not just Rashad’s TV star power — that led the legendary stage actor and longtime Honegro e professor Al Freeman Jr. to invite her to return to “the Mecca” and teach for a semester. At the time, she was acting once again with Cosby in the CBS series “Cosby,” and Fridays were her only day off.
“I’m not really a teacher, you know. He said, I think you are. And I said, well, I might know enough to know it, but I don’t know enough to teach it. He said, I think you do,” remembers Rashad. She walked into Childers Hall that semester wondering What in the world am I going to say to these young people?
Among the talent in that class: future “This Is Us” actress Susan Kelechi Watson, Apollo Theater executive producer Kamilah Forbes and “Black Panther” star Boseman. Students from that group, including Watson and Boseman, spent the summer studying Shakespeare at Oxford University at Rashad’s urging. She also made sure it was paid for.
“She called Denzel Washington and asked him to write a check,” says Allen. “Of course it was done quietly. That’s how Phylicia rolls.”
Giving back was one thing, but being the dean never occurred to her. Until Boseman brought it up. “It was strategic,” she says with a smile.
They were having lunch in Los Angeles when Boseman shared the news that the College of Fine Arts, which had been absorbed by the Arts and Sciences College in 1998, would become an independent college once more. Ms. Rashad, wasn’t that great news? And wouldn’t you be a great dean? He still thought of her as his teacher, but she wasn’t quite convinced; it didn’t look like a job that left much time for acting. So she set the idea aside.
“Some months passed and so did Chadwick,” Rashad says of her friend and former student, who died of colon cancer in 2020. She was poring over magazine covers featuring the actor when she thought to call the university’s then-president, Wayne A.I. Frederick. “Perfect timing,” he said. As it turned out, Howard had just begun the search process. Rashad threw her hat in the ring.
Saunders Thompson, the assistant dean, remembers being on a Zoom call for fine arts alumni in which Rashad made her case. Her vision for the college involved new curriculum, new faculty, professional access and a new state-of-the-art multiuse building on campus. “I would come back for that,” thought Saunders Thompson, who became Rashad’s first hire.
A month into her three-year term, Rashad had her first and only controversy. Cosby had been released from prison after his 2018 conviction for sexual assault was overturned in Pennsylvania because prosecutors had violated his right to due process. Rashad tweeted: “FINALLY!!!! A terrible wrong is being righted-a miscarriage of justice is corrected!” Howard alumni and the broader public immediately criticized the actress, calling for her to step down for defending a figure who has been accused by more than 60 women of sexual assault and other acts. Rashad issued “my most sincere apology.”
“That was that,” says Saunders Thompson. “We dealt with the media for a minute with the university, and it hasn’t been brought back up.”
Eric January, a 2023 graduate who as a senior displayed an abstract painting at the NBA House in Salt Lake City during All-Star Weekend, says Rashad’s biggest impact “was refocusing the spotlight, reminding the world that we are still here. She was our champion.”
She’s the one who made the call to former Alvin Ailey principal dancer Desmond Richardson who then brought his company, Complexions Contemporary Ballet, to teach and perform with students. In December, Rashad and a small group of Howard artists traveled to Art Basel Miami Beach to exhibit their work. Still, Rashad insists that she isn’t the sole source of the college’s reinvigoration.
“It’s everybody working together. That’s what makes it happen. It’s never one person. No, it’s people working together,” she says.
But people are shaped by a leader?
“People are included or excluded by a leader. I’m not shaping anybody. People are shaped and very well formed,” Rashad says. “All they need is an invitation and understanding that they matter, that their voices are valued, not tolerated.”
On the second Saturday in May, 72 seniors will graduate from the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts. Somewhere in the bags they pack will be one of those Toni Morrison books from Rashad’s desk, each with a personal note from the dean. She’s busy signing them on the day we speak.
“I really want them to have a good sense of self,” Rashad says. “I want them to take that with them wherever they go. When you turn the focus inside to one’s own self, that quiet space within. That’s the one to be satisfied.”
Is Rashad satisfied? Yes and no. When she scans her office, decorated wall to wall with artwork from her students, the first word that comes to mind is “full.” That was the feeling she had when first entering the room in 2021 and the tears came. She’s proud of her work at Howard and in her artistic life, but …
“Whenever I think there’s nothing else to do, there’s always something more,” Rashad says. “I’m very grateful for that. The best part is performing work that serves people, that reaches beyond the confines of perceived limitations. Because all these limitations that we set on ourselves, they’re not the truth, you know?”
