The recently renovated Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture, which is partnering in the direction of the new Reginaldo Howard Leadership program.
Across the country, diversity scholarship recipients believe their institutions are not fighting for equity and inclusivity. In a rising national trend, colleges and universities are eliminating race-based scholarships and diversity programs while providing limited transparency around future programming details.
For 45 years, Duke’s Reginaldo Howard Memorial Scholarship Program provided full-ride scholarships for a select group of Black undergraduate students. According to Provost Alec Gallimore, the “merit-based, need-blind” aid was provided to 234 students over the years before the program was discontinued in April.
Duke is one of several universities to discontinue diversity scholarships in the wake of last year’s Supreme Court decision that ended race-based affirmative action in college admissions.
University administration maintains that the decision to end the scholarship program “was not a result of the SCOTUS decision,” but rather is “part of [Duke’s] ongoing efforts to best support the current needs of our Black students on campus,” according to Frank Tramble, vice president for communications, marketing and public affairs.
“Those needs extend past solely financial support for tuition to internship cost and support, study abroad, supportive around-the-year programming, [and other financial needs],” Tramble wrote in a July 1 email to The Chronicle. “Our commitment to supporting our Black students is growing, not diminishing.”
In observance of the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court’s June 29, 2023, ruling, The Chronicle spoke with diversity scholarship recipients from the University of Missouri (Mizzou) and Ohio University — where race-based scholarship programs were recently discontinued — to contextualize the experiences of Duke’s “Reggie Scholars” within the broader higher education landscape.
“It’s the erasure of history,” said Piper Molins, a senior Latina student at Mizzou who received a scholarship for “underrepresented students.”
“It’s the erasure of equity, and it is the erasure — at the end of the day — of the sentiment that people of color are valuable and that we deserve to be at those institutions and that we deserve just as many resources as anyone else,” she said.
Missouri was one of the first states where race-based scholarships faced scrutiny. The day the Supreme Court released its affirmative action decision, a letter from Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey called for colleges and universities in the state to “immediately halt the implementation” of “all policies that give preference to individuals on the basis of race,” specifically mentioning race-based scholarships.
That same day, Mizzou terminated race-based financial aid practices and race-based scholarship programs that amounted to roughly $12.3 million in the 2022-23 academic year. Mizzou’s administration noted it would honor scholarships already in place at the time the policy change was made, though students viewed the initial announcement as ambiguous.
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost sent a memo to universities the day after the decision was made directing them to eliminate any “disguised race-conscious admissions.” Following a Jan. 26 call between Yost and university administrators in which he inferred that race-based scholarship programs were unconstitutional following the ruling, Ohio University moved to temporarily pause such scholarships in February to ensure they remain legally compliant.
Before the policy change, the university had 130 diversity scholarships accounting for $450,000 in financial aid.
Conservative advocacy groups and politicians continue to pressure universities to end diversity scholarships, arguing that any policies that consider race as a factor are unconstitutional. However, some experts argue this interpretation is politically motivated and extends beyond the ruling’s scope.
Several students feel that universities did not advocate for their scholarships after the affirmative action ruling. This sentiment is shared by a number of experts who believe university administrators may be following an overly broad interpretation of the ruling.
Wil Del Pilar, senior vice president at advocacy group The Education Trust, identified the current trend of eliminating race-based scholarships as a kind of “repressive legalism” on the part of university administrators.
“Institutional actors — so presidents [and] administrators at the institutional level — as a result of a legal decision will go way beyond the decision because they’re afraid of getting sued,” he said.
According to Del Pilar, the affirmative action ruling “was specifically about the use of race as a factor in admissions — it wasn’t about the use of race as a factor in awarding financial aid.” He worries that institutions are preemptively ending their race-based scholarships without leveraging legal strategies because “[universities] weren’t committed to them anyway.”
“My issue with the university is that I didn’t feel like they fought,” said Carrington Peavy, a senior at Mizzou and Black diversity scholarship recipient, regarding the university’s decision to end her scholarship immediately after the ruling. She said that she feels as though university administration “laid on their backs” and complied with the ruling instead of reaching out to students to “work together and figure this out.”
OU sophomore Levi-Joseph Facun, a recipient of a full-ride scholarship awarded to students of Indigenous descent, explained that while he isn’t aware of the kind of legal pressures his university faces, he feels like there was no “fight from them” to preserve his scholarship.
“Everything was just removed right away without any kind of resistance,” he said.
“Were we not worth fighting for?” asked senior Reggie Scholar Lauren Relaford. She said that she feels like Duke did not value the Reggie Scholarship and “let go of our community so easily … like we were expendable.”
Current Reggie Scholars and alumni of the program were told in an April email that the decision to eliminate the scholarship was made “in light of changes to the legal landscape related to race-based considerations in higher education.”
While she acknowledges the additional challenges of continuing the Reggie Scholarship program under the new admissions regulations, Relaford believes “it was drastic to end the program fully,” especially since she reported being told by administrators that the termination of the program was not in response to legal action against Duke.
Gallimore explained in a July 1 email to The Chronicle that the decision to end the scholarship program was “part of a review of all the ways Duke supports our students to meet their needs.”
“After discussions with various key stakeholders including current students, we reimagined the Reginaldo “Reggie” Howard program to expand the impact of Howard’s legacy to many more Duke students with a commitment to leadership and social justice,” Gallimore wrote.
Del Pilar, however, agreed with Relaford. He expressed his “hope that institutions with resources like Duke University would have waited to see if there was a suit and allow for the legal process to take its place” before eliminating their race-based scholarships.
“Acting in absence of that, to me, is acting in fear,” he said.
Current recipients of race-based scholarships are relieved their scholarships were honored but saddened that future students of color will not have the same opportunities. They also fear that students will not enroll at their universities without the scholarships.
“It was just nice being around people who are similar to me,” said Facun.
Both Mizzou and OU have low levels of racial and ethnic diversity compared to other institutions. 18% of students at Mizzou are from racial-ethnic minority groups. At OU, racial-ethnic minority students make up only 16.1% of the student population.
Institutions of higher education have tried to address their lack of racial-ethnic diversity by offering race-based scholarships as a recruitment tool, Del Pilar explained. Beyond financial support, most diversity scholarships offer academic support, professional development, mentorship programs and community building events to help students succeed.
“The support and the spaces that have been opened have been transformative,” Relaford said. She described finding a camaraderie within a community of Black “changemakers on campus” through her scholarship program.
Duke’s administration believes eliminating the Reggie Scholars program will make space for new initiatives that better meet the needs of Black students on campus.
“The redefined program will provide to hundreds of students each year the kind of support our students have told us they need, including increased need-based financial aid through the Office of University Scholars and Fellows, funding for internships and research, strengthening of community ties and developing scholarly programming that highlights Black excellence through the Mary Lou Williams Center for Black Culture,” Gallimore wrote in the July 1 email.
Still, students worry that taking away these scholarships threatens educational equity, even if they are replaced by socioeconomic-based scholarships — a strategy many universities are pursuing as a way to support students from underserved backgrounds without taking on the potential legal liability of considering race-based characteristics.
“Because inequity is systemic and affects the entirety of the system, equity solutions must also be systemic and affect the entirety of a system,” Molins said. “And money is only one part of that system.”
Relaford agreed, arguing that the national movement to replace race-based scholarships with need-based scholarships “reinforces stereotypes” and is “not sufficient” for fostering a community in which students of color feel they belong.
“Socioeconomic status and racial background are not synonymous, and they will never be synonymous,” she said.
Facun is disappointed that his younger brother will not have the opportunity to apply for the same scholarship program if it is not reinstated in the coming years.
“There’s already so [few] opportunities for people of Indigenous descent,” Facun said.
Students also worry about the future of funding for diversity, equity and inclusion efforts on campus. Peavy fears her university will reach a point “where [Mizzou doesn’t] have any [diversity] programs.”
As president of the Legion of Black Collegians, a leading voice for Black students at Mizzou that has been recognized by the university’s administration as an official governing body since 1969, Peavy hopes to “figure out” the university’s plans for “keeping people of color here” following the recent setbacks.
Current race-based scholarship recipients feel frustrated by their institutions, which they say have failed to provide clear answers about future programming.
Diversity scholarship recipients at Mizzou thought they lost their scholarship funds after receiving a “vague” email from the financial aid office the day after the affirmative action decision. The message stated that despite recent legal changes, the university would “honor the financial aid package that was previously awarded to [race-based scholarship recipients] for the 2023 fall semester.”
Trying to figure out if their financial aid was secure was an “emotional roller coaster” for Molins and Peavy. Peavy said she was prepared to transfer schools and “uproot [her] entire life” if her aid was denied. It wasn’t until after students emailed the financial aid office several times that it became clear that their scholarships would be honored until graduation.
Facun dealt with a similar lack of transparency at OU. He found out his scholarship program was facing potential termination when the scholarship was “unlisted” from the university’s website. According to him, the university never directly communicated this update to the scholars, which he believes was “probably intentional.”
Students at both OU and Mizzou are uncertain about how the funds previously allocated for their scholarships will be used, or if they will be reallocated at all.
“I don’t know that even after I leave that institution I’ll ever know what happened to that program, or what will become of that money,” Molins said.
Relaford also experienced a “communication flaw in the initial rollout of the decision” when the Reggie Scholarship ended. According to current scholars, they were not consulted before the program ended and were informed of the decision just one day before the official announcement.
Relaford sees Duke’s substitute programs, such as additional need-based aid and a leadership program, as a first “step.” However, she urges the University to be transparent about the specific design and outcomes of the new leadership program and need-based aid in order to have a chance to “regain the trust of Black students and Black alumni.”
Tramble wrote in the July 1 email that the new program, which was “established in partnership with the Mary Lou Center for Black Culture and the Office of University Scholarships, aims to provide financial support informed by input from students and alumni as well as our partnering offices.”
Students also want people to know that just because they criticize their institutions doesn’t mean they aren’t grateful for them.
“I want other people of color to experience the community and the love and the support that I got,” Peavy said.
“If we didn’t care about the institution, if we didn’t get anything from our education, we wouldn’t be fighting so hard,” Relaford said.
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Rae Rackley is a Trinity sophomore and a staff reporter for the news department.
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