Hampden-Sydney College adds chapter to its long history

HAMPDEN SYDNEY Christopher B. Howard is president of a college so steeped in history that its students fought in both the Revolutionary and Civil wars.

Howard is making history himself at Hampden-Sydney College simply, as he puts it, by the way he looks.

On July 1, he became the first black president of the all-male liberal-arts college in Prince Edward County, the heart of Massive Resistance to desegregation in Virginia.

"It's a compelling part of our American narrative that a person who happens to look like me can be named president of a college that happens to look like this," Howard said.

Soon after arriving on campus, he was struck by what this moment in history means when his African-American barber learned whose hair he was cutting.

"The look in his eye," Howard recounted, showed "the pride he had in how far this town and this state and this region" have come.

"That's about as America as it gets," Howard said.

But it's not so much the color of his skin but the content of his lengthy résumé that has intrigued others on the campus of 1,120 students near Farmville.

When Howard's appointment was announced in December, the talk on campus was mostly about his credentials, said Eduardo Soto, a junior from Alabama majoring in religion.

Most students "look past race and see his potential" and how much he has already accomplished at a young age, he said.

A graduate of the U.S. Air Force Academy, the 40-year-old Howard is a Rhodes scholar with a doctorate in politics from Oxford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School.

He came to Hampden-Sydney from the University of Oklahoma, where he had been vice president for leadership and strategic initiatives since 2005.

Howard also has a list of distinctions from double careers in the military and corporate worlds: He earned a Bronze Star in Afghanistan and headed Bristol-Myers' HIV/AIDS initiative for Africa, among other honors.

He is also an Air Force lieutenant colonel who serves in the reserves as a defense attaché to Liberia, where he spent two weeks on duty last month before reporting to his new post at Hampden-Sydney.

Howard puts the diplomatic skills he needs as an attaché to use on campus, such as when he stopped to chat up a father and son checking out the college one recent afternoon.

Earlier that day, Soto got a chance to meet the new president when Howard came into the campus bookstore where he works. Howard bought a Hampden-Sydney logo belt and impressed Soto with his friendliness.

"I really like him," he said. "He'll definitely do a lot for the college."

. . .

Howard is alone for now in the 1825 Federal-style home on campus that he'll share with his wife, Barbara, and their two sons Cohen, 16, and Joshua, 11.

"The Howards do everything in phased deployment," joked Howard, whose family will move in next month.

Howard met his wife on a visit to South Africa while he was at Oxford. Now a U.S. citizen, she grew up in Johannesburg under apartheid. That experience led Howard to found the Impact Young Lives Foundation, a nonprofit that provides scholarships and travel opportunities to South African students of color.

Hampden-Sydney, which officially took a neutral stance during the Massive Resistance era that closed Prince Edward's public schools in 1959, admitted its first black student in 1968.

This past school year, the college had 57 students who described themselves as African-American or biracial. Howard sees that number increasing as the campus embraces diversity to equip students to be part of "a very complex global community."

But he said he does not expect to move fast to change other aspects of the campus culture. He is committed to Hampden-Sydney's mission of "educating good men and good citizens in an atmosphere of sound learning," he said.

"You don't progress past moral integrity and character."

Howard said that after he received the Hampden-Sydney job, he set up his own tutorial, phoning about 20 other college presidents to get their counsel.

"To a person, they said don't go too fast," he said.

That is advice he plans to follow.

"When people have been at a place more years than you have days, you probably are well served to listen first," he said.

But he will be looking for places to apply the best practices he saw at the University of Oklahoma and in his previous military and corporate jobs.

He also sees a need to end the "false dichotomy" between the academic and extracurricular worlds through discussion groups and readings of great literature.

"Let's bring the life of the mind out of the classroom into the dorms and the frat houses," he said, "and then let's also bring the character building from the football field and the student government into the classroom and let it coexist."

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One tradition at Hampden-Sydney he supports unequivocally is its single-sex mission. With more women than men earning college degrees now in this country, places such as Hampden-Sydney can be part of the solution to motivating young men, he said.

His own sons attended an all-male school near Boston at one point, and he saw how they benefited:

"Seeing my son in a school play, seeing him lighten up on the machismo, ironically, in an all-male school because it was OK to be artistic and to be athletic and to be well-spoken and to wear a coat and tie to school, and to pull your pants up."

From lessons learned from his sons, he has also adopted the strategy he'll apply to young men on campus.

"You want to reach them but not preach to them," he said.

He wants to reach them with a message of "individual and collective responsibility -- you are your brother's keeper."

Osric Forrest and Basil Panton, international students from Jamaica, say they have found that sense of community on campus.

It sounds like "a cliché, but it really does exist," Forrest said.

The two biology majors, who are working on research projects this summer, said they have found a warm and friendly campus where classmates invite them home for holidays.

"It's not a very diverse campus, but they're very accepting," Forrest said.

He sees Howard's appointment as a positive step. "It's good to be steeped in tradition but also to move forward."

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But tradition does run deep at Hampden-Sydney, a college organized in 1775 with Patrick Henry on its first board of trustees.

When Howard accepted the job offer from today's board, he was standing in front of a portrait of Jefferson Davis at the once all-white Commonwealth Club in Richmond.

The college has strong ties to Richmond -- Union Theological Seminary was founded there, and the Medical College of Virginia was established as the medical department of Hampden-Sydney.

The school also has a strong military connection. In the Revolutionary War, students marched off in defense of Williamsburg and Petersburg wearing shirts dyed purple with the juice of pokeberries, and gray trousers -- now the school colors of garnet and gray.

In the Civil War, a regiment called "The Hampden-Sydney Boys" was captured and then paroled by Gen. George B. McClellan on the condition that they return to their studies.

The military tradition continues today. When political satirist Stephen Colbert -- who attended Hampden-Sydney for two years -- took his Comedy Central show to Iraq to entertain troops for the USO last month, "we were overly represented" in the audience, Howard said.

He said he has had a military uniform in his closet since he was 14. "It's a big part of who I am," he said, but not the essence of what he wants to do.

Nor could he be content "to just sell something" in the corporate world. "I always wanted to do good while I was doing well," he said.

In higher education, he believes, he has found that mix.

"I can help accelerate the leadership odyssey of young people. I can touch their lives, help them figure things out and live meaningful and purposeful lives," he said. "And that's what I can do in higher education that I can't do in corporate."

Contact Karin Kapsidelis at

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