Sorry, white people from Iowa. Columbia University’s Lydia C. Roberts scholarship, established in 1920, offered financial aid to your kind and your kind only. Not a “[person] of the Caucasian race, of either sex, born in the State of Iowa,” who “graduated from a college or university in the State of Iowa?” You’re not eligible for the funding. But now, Columbia associate provost Lucy Drotning is taking legal action, asking a Manhattan judge to change the requirement that the scholarship’s recipient be white. /r/Whiterights, start your engines!
As Gothamist points out, the scholarship is still listed on the school’s website, with one important detail conspicuously missing:
Open to persons born in Iowa who have been graduated from an Iowa college or university. In addition to the stipend, the fellow is reimbursed the cost of traveling once from Iowa to New York City and back. Special provisions: holders may not concentrate their studies in law, medicine, dentistry, veterinary medicine, or theology, and each holder must, when accepting the award, state that it is his or her purpose to return to Iowa for at least two years after completing studies at Columbia; holders are eligible for reappointment.
