WSURA Third Annual Reunion Luncheon, May 11, 2017
It is my pleasure to introduce someone we all think we already know, Dr. Lillie P. Howard. I’m pretty sure, though, that I can surprise you with one or two of the more esoteric facts about her life. Full disclosure: I spent my career in the Honors Program, which for many years reported to Dr. Howard, otherwise known to all as simply Lillie.
Lillie completed her PhD at the University of New Mexico at Albuquerque in English Literature and joined the Wright State faculty at the tender age of 25. She thought Wright State got a pretty good deal: as a Black woman, she saw herself as a “two-fer” who was also able to teach everything from Freshman Composition to graduate courses in Jane Austen or surveys of African-American Literature. She thought she would be here for just a few years, maybe long enough to get tenure, but, like so many of us, she stayed on until her retirement on June 30, 2010 after 35 years of outstanding service.
Twenty-eight of those 35 years were in administration, first in the College of Liberal Arts with Dean Perry Moore then in the Central Administration as Assistant and later Associate Vice President of Academic Affairs, working with Presidents Mulhollan, Flack, Goldenberg, and Hopkins. She worked with the Ohio Board of Regents to establish transfer and articulation policies and served as a consultant-evaluator for the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools.
Wright State recognized her contributions with many honors, culminating with the Presidential Award for Career Excellence. In 2007, Lillie was inducted into the Ohio Women’s Hall of Fame by Governor Ted Strickland.
Her scholarly work on Zora Neale Hurston, Alice Walker and other African-American writers is known around the world. Since retirement, she and her children, Kimberly and Ben, have launched a successful higher education consulting firm.
In the spring of 2014 she was asked to write a book about Wright State’s first 50 years. That work is about to come to fruition and Lillie is here to tell us all about it.
