An Interview with Howard Dodson

Abstract

An Interview with Howard Dodson Charles Henry Rowell and Howard Dodson (bio) This interview was conducted on August 19, 2013, in the office of Howard Dodson at Howard University in Washington, DC. ROWELL: Before accepting the position of director of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center here at Howard University, you were enjoying retirement. From 1984 to 2010, you had served as director of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York. What motivated you to leave retirement and take on another major responsibility—this time in Washington, DC? DODSON: Well, as I was telling you earlier, my intention had been to retire at the end of 2010 after twenty-five years. Connected to that intention was this notion that I was going to be going off to see the places in the world that I had missed thus far in my travels. I had no intention of taking on a position of any kind. But a very interesting thing happened. I had announced that I was going to retire about a year before I actually did, and that year a major crisis developed here at Howard University in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. Howard University had offered an early buy-out program for staff and faculty, and of the senior leadership at Moorland, all, with one or two exceptions, took the buy-out. This meant that the Center lost nearly all of its senior administration in one fell swoop. And as it turned out, the same thing happened with the university library system. At the time, and I said this to myself—and to nobody else—the only thing I would consider postponing my retirement for would be to try to help get the Moorland back on its feet. To be perfectly honest, my motivations were really quite self-serving. My thinking went something like this: if Moorland was in crisis and part of that crisis stemmed from the fact that, for whatever reasons, Howard University had not been supporting it, why should I assume that the New York Public Library would continue to support the Schomburg Center? So, strategically my thinking about even considering the position here had to do with making sure that this place stayed strong. As long as Moorland stayed strong, there was no rationalization for the New York Public Library to change its supportive relationship with the Schomburg Center. When I was entering my last months at the Schomburg, I learned that the young man who had been selected to succeed me there, Khalil Muhammad, was under contract with his university and couldn’t start work until July, even though they had made the selection in October or November of the previous year. So my staff and I spent the intervening six months or so with him coming to the Schomburg at least once or twice a month, doing the [End Page 119] kind of succession transfer activities that were needed. In the last month, the beginning of July, I got a call from Howard University asking if I would consider coming down to consult with them about how to fix Moorland. I agreed to do that thinking that it would be a conversation. Well, in the midst of that conversation, which I held primarily with the then-Provost at the time, I learned about Moorland’s issues as well as other issues within the university library system as a whole. We started talking more deeply about what needed to be done with both the library system and Moorland. Before I finally retired from the Schomburg, I had a contract to consult with Howard. Basically, I was asked to conduct a study of the two entities and make recommendations as to how they could be reorganized. I completed that study in December 2011, and then Howard made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. I started work here in February of 2012. [Laughter] That’s basically it. ROWELL: As you speak, you seem to suggest that there is a direct relationship between the Moorland-Spingarn and the Schomburg. Of course, I can see the relationship in terms of them being two of the most significant centers for the study of African and...