Howard names alumna Phylicia Rashad dean
Accomplished actress and director taking over at the College of Fine Arts
The actress behind Clair Huxtable is returning to her alma mater, as a dean.
Howard University on Wednesday named multi-award winning TV, stage and film actress and director Phylicia Rashad as dean of its College of Fine Arts.
Rashad, who began her career on Broadway before moving on to play Bill Cosby’s TV wife on the long-running 1980’s hit “The Cosby Show,” was a theater acting major at Howard when she graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor’s in fine arts in 1970.
Now, Rashad, 72, said she looks forward to returning to the northwest Washington school that shaped her theatrical skills while she also studied courses such as psychology, French history and Greek theater.
“I would like to see the work that was established during my time blossom again with a new thrust,” Rashad said in a recent telephone interview.
“I would like to see a program contemporized without losing knowledge. I would like to see faculty empowered to create and produce and design robust systems and a robust program. I would like to see students engaged in the disciplines of fine arts as they participate and engage in the university at large. I would like to see us graduate artists who are scholars as well,” she said. “And I would love to see us be a premiere program at the university. I would like to see the College of Fine Arts not only reestablished, but see it exulted.”
Rashad’s hiring also marks the return of Howard’s College of Fine Arts as an independent school within the university. In 1998, as part of a cost-cutting move by previous administrators, the university merged the College of Fine Arts within its College of Arts and Sciences. The absorption angered many of the school’s performing and visual art students, faculty and alumni, including Rashad.
“The discipline and study of fine arts are not understood. They are undervalued. And that happens so much around the world. People imagine musicians, designers and actors just wake up and do what we do. And that couldn’t be farther from the truth,” she said. “The discipline of fine arts was like training for the military.”
Howard had 307 students enrolled in its fine arts program this spring, according to the university.