ANNANDALE, Va.
A Virginia community college will end five small
ace-based scholarship programs following a complaint filed with the
U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights.
The case involving Northern Virginia Community College in suburban
Washington, D.C., is unusual because the scholarship funds came from
private donors, not the college’s own dollars. However, the institution
did administer these programs, a practice that officials with the
Office for Civil Rights found unacceptable given the current legal
climate.
Despite support for the scholarships among faculty and staff, the
federal agency’s decision was not a surprise given the string of recent
setbacks for affirmative action, said Dr. Richard Ernst, the college
president.
“This is a national trend,” he said, “and we’re now part of it.”
Northern Virginia’s case also is another extension of a 1994 Fourth
U.S. Circuit Court of Ap- peals ruling against the University of
Maryland and its Benjamin Banneker scholarship program. That
scholarship funded with public money, not private .dollars as in the
Virginia case – came under attack in the court case of Podboresky v.
Kirwan.
One expert says the source of funding is less important than who
bears responsibility for running the program and selecting scholarship
recipients. Northern Virginia Community College administered all of
these scholarship programs, making decisions about which students
received funds.
The key issue is “not who financed the scholarship, but who
administered it,” said Michael Olivas, a law professor at the
University of Houston.
