The Tony-winning actress and “Cosby Show” mom is stepping down after leading the school’s College of Fine Arts.
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.
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.”
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?’”
