Preserving the White Intellectual Underclass
THE New York Daily News last week reported an unpublicized whites-only graduate fellowship at Columbia University, and the news quickly spread throughout the country that J.P. Morgan, the bank which oversees the fund, and the university have gone to court and asked to remove the whites-only clause.
The intentions of Lydia S. Roberts, a wealthy Iowa widow who bequeathed her entire estate of $500,000 to Columbia in 1920 to set up the graduate fellowship, will likely be discarded in Manhattan Supreme Court and her wealth used for purposes other than those she specified. You might call this theft, but if it is, it’s not a new type of theft. Many of the people who bequeathed their hard-earned wealth to American colleges and universities surely never intended to subsidize students from Saudi Arabia or China or to deny financial assistance to applicants purely because they are white.
Fortunately Mrs. Roberts does not have the ability to object. If she were somehow brought back to life, she might ask some embarrassing questions about the tens of thousands of students who receive scholarships reserved for nonwhites every year. She might not understand that the vast white intellectual underclass, faced with crushing debt and dim prospects, represents a form of justice. But then she was the product of an un-enlightened era.
Mrs. Roberts has been posthumously educated.



