Howard University alumna and legendary actress Phylicia Rashad has been announced as the commencement speaker at Oakwood University. The commencement will be held at the Von Braun Center in Huntsville, Alabama, on May 8th.
Rashad most recently served as the dean of the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts at Howard University. She returned to her alma mater to assume the role in May 2021.
“It’s a privilege to serve,” she said about her role as dean in an interview with The Hilltop’s Eliana Lewis. “Service is…building a collective constituency…honoring the needs of faculty, honoring the aspirations of students is service, honoring the discipline is service for me. That’s what I want to do here. But then, there are those other things that a Dean is responsible for. It has been likened to being a CEO of a company… It’s that complex and that involved and those are the responsibilities that one holds. There are more administrative tasks than you can imagine.”
During her tenure, she made several bold moves to grow the capacity of the program, which was named the Chadwick A. Boseman College of Fine Arts in honor of the Howard University alumnus and late actor Chadwick Boseman.
She spearheaded the securement of $5.4 million from Netflix in a gift to establish the Chadwick A. Boseman Memorial Scholarship, which offered a four-year scholarship covering the full cost of university tuition to incoming theater students. She also was pivotal in hiring several distinguished faculty members before her retirement from the position in August 2024. She then went on to continue her acting career, joining season 3 of HBO's The Gilded Age.
