Long before darkness had given way to sunlight on a recent Friday morning, Dr. Wayne A. I. Frederick was already in the operating room at Howard University Hospital, gearing up to operate on his 86-year-old patient.
Working with Dr. Terrence Fullum, the interim chair of th Department of Surgery at Howard University College of Medicine, the 48-year-old surgeon was doing laparoscopic surgery — a minimally invasive procedure to repair a hernia in the patient’s groin area.
About a decade earlier, this patient would likely have spent three to five days recovering in the hospital. But after two hours in the operating room and dissolvable sutures that eliminated the need for stitches, the man was sent home the next day with instructions to follow up with Frederick for a routine checkup some four to six weeks later.
Though it’s hard to say for certain, it appears that Frederick — president of Howard University — may be the only U.S. college president who actively sees patients and conducts surgeries despite a punishing schedule as the leader of one of the country’s most prominent HBCUs, which is located in the nation’s capital.
There have been other physicians turned college presidents, like Dr. Michael V. Drake, a board-certified African-American ophthalmologist who took the reins of The Ohio State University in 2014, but Drake no longer practices medicine. In the 1980s, there were at least a handful of physicians who had been tapped to lead colleges and universities but the numbers have since waned.
The desire to practice medicine was so important to Frederick that when he was offered the job as president of Howard in 2014, after first serving as provost and later interim president, he told his lawyer that a clause had to be added into his contract that would enable him to still operate on patients. And he didn’t want to do surgeries on an ad hoc basic either.
“This was a major negotiating point when I was offered the job,” recalls Frederick, who is a triple alumnus of Howard. “At the time when I got heavily into administration, beginning with the provost position, I was very, very busy [with my practice].
