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By Patty Marsicano, Minnesota Public Radio
October 8, 2001
When Augsburg College accepted $500,000 from a Woodbury man in 1987, officials didn't know he was an apparent racist. Tax laws prevented the school from giving the money back. Now, years later, the college has a plan for the cash.
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Starting Monday, the name Elroy Stock won't mean quite the same thing at Augsburg College. The school has found a way to resolve a financial and public relations nightmare brought on by the contentious Augsburg alumnus.
Augsburg announced the creation of a scholarship fund in which five students-of-color each year would split the yearly $25,000 in proceeds from a $500,000 set-aside out of the school's endowment. The school hopes to add students each year so that eventually it's giving funds to 20 students-of-color a year. The money equals the amount of money Stock gave the school in 1987, before it learned that he was the author of thousands of anonymous hate letters to people-of-color, interracial couples, and whites adopting children-of-color.
When Stock's letter-writing campaign became public, Augsburg kept his donation, despite his insistence that it be returned. The college said giving it back would have threatened its status as a tax-exempt institution and argued that as long as it used the money as intended - a new communications facility - it had the right to keep the funds.
But taking the money from an apparent racist cast a shadow over the institution, a shadow it hopes to lift with the creation of the new scholarship fund. The saga has dragged on for years, partly because Stock filed a lawsuit against the school 12 years after making his donation, alleging breach of contract for changing its mind about naming a building wing after him. It wasn't until August that a judge dismissed that suit, although Stock is appealing.
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Augsburg President William Frame said 17 percent of Augsburg's 3,000 students are students-of-color. But he emphasized the school's commitment to diversity.
"We got a lot of criticism for having kept (the money) even though we were advised that we could not return it. Since the dismissal, we have been looking vigorously for some way to respond in the name of our deep commitment to diversity, to this suit, and to establish...in the minds of this community our deep conviction that educational excellence in our time is impossible except in the midst of a diverse learning community," he said.
The announcement was a mixture of pride and humble pie for the school. Syl Jones, an African American alumnus and well-known Twin Cities writer and journalist, created the idea for the scholarship fund. But he pulled no punches at Monday's press conference when he revealed he was one of those who had believed the school should have returned Stock's money. Jones also spoke of the unfriendly atmosphere for people-of-color when he went to school there in the 1970s and even today as an alumnus.
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"This is Homecoming Week at Augsburg, an annual occurrence, and as a graduate of Augsburg, you might think that I would be here regularly. But actually nothing could be further from the truth," Jones said. "As many Augsburg College graduates-of-color will tell you, this school has not necessarily been an especially welcoming school. Getting an education here in an environment I would characterize as missionary in its zeal to prove that race does not matter, was extremely difficult at times and finding caring students and faculty that could mentor us with peculiar challenges as people-of-color was very difficult."
Given that the school had already spent the Stock donation on its new communications facility and that it was not going to return the money, Jones said "My solution was to use Mr. Stock's donation in a way that he and others who support him would find abhorrent. We were taking Mr. Stock's money which we are using to further the education of students-of-color. We have taken his perverted concepts of race and cleansed them and we have used Mr. Stock's gift to bring the college together, rather than tear it apart."
This year, five Augsburg college students are each receiving $5,000 plus the time and energy of a mentor to help them in their academic pursuits....in the program called Scholastic Connections. The students are Jennifer Boswell, a Native American from Leech Lake, studying social work; Camilo Power, a Venezuelan majoring in international relations; Matthew Shannon, an African American studying graphic design; Gianna Sorrell, a Pan-Afrikan studying urban studies and religion; and Xia Xiong, a native of Laos.
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