Advocate hopes high court tears down race-based ‘barriers’

By M.D. Kittle | Wisconsin Reporter

MADISON – Columbia University, led by a president considered a paragon advocate for affirmative action, took a public relations beating when word spread that the storied institution still offered a “whites only” scholarship fund.

Facing an outcry of criticism and condemnation, Columbia last month called for the demise of the nearly century-old Lydia C. Roberts Graduate Fellowship. Roberts, a wealthy white woman, bequeathed her half-million dollar estate to Columbia upon her death, creating a scholarship that was only to award Iowans “of the Caucasian race.”

In a May 29 op-ed in USA Today headlined “Columbia right to act on ‘whites only’ scholarships,’ Jennifer Gratz, applauds the New York university’s decision, asserting that, “It is wrong for schools and employers and especially public institutions to discriminate on the basis of skin color.”

And Gratz should know. The white civil rights leader who founded the Michigan-based XIV Foundation, named after the 14th Amendment to “defend the principle of equal treatment and a colorblind society,” was the subject of a very public act of racial preference in the latter 1990s.

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