For the second time this year, the University of Wisconsin System’s Lawton Minority Undergraduate Retention Grant has come under fire for being a race-based scholarship.
UW professor emeritus of economics and longtime critic of affirmative action Lee Hansen filed a formal complaint to the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights April 1.
Hansen said his decision to pursue action against the Lawton grants came after the federal government forced the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction to change their race-based scholarship. The DPI’s minority scholarship program formerly targeted only minority students, however as the Precollege Scholarship Program it is open to all students.
The federal government’s success in changing the scholarship helped Hansen decide to pursue action against the Lawton grants.
“The Lawton program looks exactly parallel [to the DPI scholarship case],” Hansen said. “It seemed the appropriate time to move ahead.”
While Hansen’s primary focus is the Lawton program, others were also mentioned in his complaint, including the UW Chancellor’s Scholarship Program and the McNair Scholars Program.
The Lawton Grant currently gives up to $12,000 or eight semesters of funding to recipients and provided 292 Madison students with a total of $736,141 in 2003, according to the Wisconsin State Journal.
Wisconsin college sophomores, juniors and seniors of African-American, Hispanic-American, Native-American and Southeast-Asian descent and having a cumulative 2.0 grade-point average are open to apply for the scholarship.
Hansen initially challenged the Lawton grants when he brought the case to a Virginia-based Center for Equal Opportunity, which has worked with Harvard, Yale, MIT and Princeton to change practices involving race-based initiatives.
According to Hansen, Lawton grants are breaking UW System policy.
In a letter to Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights James Manning, Hansen said, “the [UW System prohibits] from discriminating against students based on, among other characteristics, race, ethnicity and national origin.”
Still, UW System officials are not willing to give up the Lawton grants, because of their commitment to increasing diversity at UW campuses.
According to UW spokesperson Doug Bradley, the UW System will fully cooperate with the OCR and provide any information they request.
“We are going to stand by this program and our students who get support from it as long as we can,” Bradley said.
Bradley added the Lawton grants were part of Wisconsin state law, and would be debated differently from the DPI scholarship.
“This becomes a bit more complicated because it’s state law,” Bradley said.
However, UW Board of Regents President Toby Marcovich argued the Lawton grants were meant to serve an important purpose for the UW System in promoting diversity.
Marcovich also argued the case would be debated differently from the DPI scholarship case, since Lawton grants target students of higher education and not K-12 students.
Despite feeling the UW System and state would prevail over federal pressure, Marcovich said he is worried about the impact it would have on minority students.
“It has a tendency to deter minority students to come to the campus,” Marcovich said. “They’ve indicated they start to feel less welcome.”
