Columbia University has found itself in an awkward situation, offering a "whites-only" scholarship that can only be offered to benefit Caucasian students from Iowa, though the university is now trying to rectify the situation.
The Lydia C. Roberts graduate and traveling fellowship has been offered by Columbia University since 1920. Now, the university has filed an affidavit with the Manhattan Supreme Court to change the grant, citing its "impossible" limitations, according to the New York Daily News.
"Columbia University is now prohibited by law and University policy from discriminating on the basis of race," reads the affidavit. "Circumstances have so changed from the time when the Trust was established," making it "impossible" to comply with the scholarship's stipulations.
The scholarship was established by Lydia C. Chamberlain, who moved to Manhattan from Des Moines, Iowa. She donated her $500,000 estate to the university to create the grant before she died in 1920. The grant is now administered by J.P. Morgan Chase, according to the Lookout, a Yahoo! News blog. The grant has not been awarded since 1997 and the funds have now increased to $800,000.
The scholarship contains clauses that only allow white men and women from Iowa to be eligible for the grant, as well as prohibiting the recipients from studying law, medicine, dentistry, veterinary surgery or theology, and they must move back to Iowa for at least two years after graduating.
Even though the grant is in violation of the law, it can't be altered without a court order, which is why the university has brought forward the affidavit.
The NAACP questioned the fund in 1949, according to the New York Post. The provost presiding over the university at the time, Grayson L. Kirk, defended the fund requirements and it was allowed to stand.
"We do not feel we are justified in depriving some of our students of the benefits of restricted grants simply because they are not available to everyone," Kirk said at the time.
The last time the scholarship was offered, in 1997, it was in the amount of $22,000 per year, which is less than half of a full year's tuition.
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