The start of a new month brought a new leader to Howard University, as former president Wayne A.I. Frederick returned as interim while the Board of Trustees searches for a permanent successor.
Frederick served as the 17th president of Howard from 2014-2024. He holds three degrees from Howard, earning a Bachelor of Science in Zoology in 1992, a Doctorate in Medicine in 1994 and a Master of Business Administration in 2011.
On the morning of his third day back, he met with student leaders to answer their questions — including the 49th Mister and 87th Miss Howard University, undergraduate and graduate student government representatives and the Editor-in-Chief of The Hilltop.
The following has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Frederick declined to comment on any matters related to former President Ben Vinson III, Ph.D. stepping down, saying he didn’t know the details and did not want to speculate. However, Frederick did have a message about his time as interim president.
This is my second time being interim, so I’ve been here before. And last time I didn’t spend time on what happened, I tried to spend time on how to move forward. That time I was encouraged to apply for the job, this time that’s not gonna happen. Dr. Frederick is not a candidate to be 19, he’ll be 17 Prime. That’s it. There’s no 19 involved here.
How will you respond to concerns over the past few months about student account balances?
We’ve been working on the WorkDay issues. We’re trying to get better on that, but I’m also trying to work on the balances. For instance, this morning and yesterday I met with three students to get letters of recommendations for them. I’ll be writing the letters myself, and I found an organization that will pay their balances for them so they should get that money in their account by Friday. We have some restricted account money, for the students who have balances, so we’re looking at trying to match those as best we can, so we can try to get those.
We have about 250 students who graduated, but we haven’t conferred their degrees yet. They had balances of about $1.7 million. We’re going to try to confer their degrees. We’re holding their diplomas while we try to match those accounts so that we can get the balances paid off as well, so that they can get them.
Howard has an endowment of over $1 billion. Where is that money going, and can it be used to tackle some of these issues?
Although we now have over a $1 billion dollar endowment it doesn’t mean that I can just take that money and apply it to any and everybody or any and everything. The largest part of our endowment has very little to do with donors. It is because in 1986, Congress said, “We will give you a federal appropriation.”
This is the unusual thing about Howard. This is one of two nonmilitary schools that gets a federal appropriation, [approximately] $250 million a year. But we have to spend it in the same year. That’s how appropriation works. However, in ’86, somebody came up with the bright idea that they would give us $3 million, and we would raise $3 million, and $6 million would go into an account that we couldn’t touch for 20 years in the endowment. And so the largest part in the endowment, when I started my last tenure, was because of that money. It was $300 something million of the $500 million endowment.
Students have said the shuttle for the off campus apartment Mazza Grandmarc is not running regularly enough and some blame Howard. Is there a plan to address this?
Campus apartments agreed to use Mazza. As part of that deal this year, we also told them they needed to get the shuttle service. The shuttle service they got is inadequate. We’ve made that clear to them already, even in just, I think I’ve given them 48 hours now. I sent a note to their company. They need to increase the shuttle service.
If they don’t do it by the end of business today [Sept. 3], I’m going to pay for it and then I’m going to charge them for the extra hours that need to be added. It’s provided by Mazza True Campus Apartments as part of the agreement we signed with them to put students there. The problem I think is the company they got doesn’t have the capacity to do what we need them to do. So we may need to just go back and hire a separate shuttle service and then build that out on the back end.
Are any steps being taken to ensure all classes are assigned classrooms and the professor is present?
We have a unionized faculty, we have to make sure that they get contracts on time and there have been a couple of delays. The provost has a system for getting information from anybody who’s not in a classroom. Unless we are told somebody’s not in a classroom we’re never going to know. We walk around but that’s a miss or hit. We need a warning system to tell us where. And sometimes it’s just a mix up, like the faculty member has the assignment but didn’t get the right classroom assignment, and sometimes there’s some little technical things that we could solve very quickly. But again, we need information back to us.
Many students were caught off guard by the size of this year’s tuition increase. How can you assure students that they know exactly what the amount will be every year by the time that they are requested to pay it?
I can’t speak to what happened the last two years. The TRAC (Tuition and Rates Advisory Committee) is made up of all of the deans, and a few staff members, the provost oversees it with the CFO and there are two student representatives who come to the meeting. The goal of those student representatives is to bring the sentiment of the students around what needs to happen. Our expectation is that they are representing the students in terms of the conversation about what tuition should be.
The recommendation they made to me that I then take to the board is based on a vote. None of it happens without the students knowing exactly. As a matter of fact, I go to the first meeting, I make a point that if the students don’t show up to the meeting, then they need to change students, because we cannot have a vote without the students. And it’s not one meeting, by the way. It starts around November, and there’s a series of meetings that take place from November, and we go over tuition and fees, for every school and college, because everybody doesn’t have a lab fee, everybody doesn’t have a clinic, there are several other things that are embedded. We bring market data for where we are.
The process is that the TRAC committee meets, they vote, they give me the recommendation, I give it to the board, the board approves it, and then we publish it, actually. We send out an email, and we put it on the website. Now, I have to admit, when we do it is not ideal, because that process happens around April, May, June, you guys are moving out. Even if I sent you something and I said tuition went up $20,000, you guys are going to be like, these people are crazy, but I’m moving out, I’m done considering that. But as soon as you start coming back to school, you start getting the bill, so we have to do a better job of making sure that grabs people’s attention.
What should we expect in your time as interim president?
My big focus is making sure that we just do the right things by you guys and you guys have the best experience possible. Recognizing as well that I’m gonna be fully transparent and honest with you about the things that we can do. And I think most of the times when I run afoul with students it is because I’m very honest about what is real and what I can and can not do, and I don’t make false promises or tell people what they want to hear, which is what the reality is. And I think that’s something that I’m going to continue to do, probably with a slightly different perspective, and that perspective is that what we want to do is to make sure that we’re dealing with facts and that we’re getting you to what you want to do. So meeting with you more regularly, having The Hilltop here, so nobody’s speculating about what Frederick said, what he thinks. I can’t talk to all 13,000 of you, but the ones that I do have access to, I’m going to tell you exactly what it is I’m trying to do.
There has been conversation about your first tenure as president, with current students going based on information they’ve heard from before. In a time where Howard is facing some criticism, how will you rebuild trust?
The way people may distort things or how people do things, I can’t control that. I know who I am. I came here, I benefited from this place. This place transformed my life in a way that is incredible. Why would I not want to do things in the best interest of this place? It doesn’t make sense to me.
I’m gonna do my best to make sure things are right. I’m going to have way more engagement with you guys, especially the student leaders, so that it’s very clear what I’m doing. I’m also going to hold the people around me accountable. I wish we could do more to be quite honest. I wish we could do it faster, but I can guarantee you that I’ll do my best to get it done.
And students are my priority, I still teach, I’m going to still lecture. Yesterday was my second day on the job. I was up at 7 o’clock, making rounds with the students in the med school. I’m going to do that every day.
I came here as a kid, this place transformed me into a man. I’m in love with the place. You’ll never hear me refer to that library after my name. That’s crazy. I’ve never taken a picture in front of that library. I never will, because that’s the reverence I hold of those things. This space is special. And so trust me, every day, I’m going to give you 110 percent, to make this every single day. I’ll get it done. We’re in a little tough patch, we’ll get out of it. We don’t always get it right, I don’t always get it right. I want to be very clear about that as well. But what I don’t get right is not because I’m trying to do the wrong thing, it is because I just didn’t throw all the pieces together, but it’s really because I’m trying to do the right thing.
Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article referred to the TRAC (Tuition and Rates Advisory Committee) as the “track committee” and said President Wayne Frederick has a Ph.D. The article was updated to reflect the accurate terminology and credentials.
