A white male student at Northern Virginia Community College is charging that a minority scholarship program at the school violates his constitutional rights, pointing to a federal court ruling that banned a university from awarding publicly-funded scholarships exclusively to African Americans.
“As a student at Northern Virginia Community College…. I wish to file a civil rights complaint that this institution discriminates against white male and female students by continuing to offer race and ethnicity-based scholarships that appear unconstitutional,” wrote Christopher Thompson, a political science student at the Annandale campus, in a May 26 filing to the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) in the U.S.
Department of Education. The focus of his complaint is the Leslie V. Forte Scholarship, a privately funded program named after the first Black professor of English at NVCC. The Forte scholarship offers five recipients $500 a year and is one of two minority scholarships at NVCC out of more than 100 scholarships at the college.
In an August 28 filing to OCR, the college responded: “NVCC believes that affirmative action is a means to an end. It is a tool which we temporarily employ to help the college achieve its ultimate goal of providing equal educational opportunities to all people.”
