Earlham College | News from Public Affairs

As president and chief executive officer of the United Negro College Fund, Dr. Michael Lomax heads an organization that in more than six decades of service has distributed nearly $2.5 billion, helping scores of institutions with operating and program costs and assisting nearly 300,000 students in earning their college degrees.

RICHMOND, Ind. — When Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates and his wife, Melinda, went looking in 1999 to make the largest private gift ever to American higher education — $1 billion — they scanned the list of possibilities all the way down to "U." However, their fingers came to rest finally not on some prestigious "u"niversity, but rather on the United Negro College Fund (UNCF).

With the gift (a near doubling of all the financial resources the UNCF had raised and distributed throughout its preceding 55-year history) the group, until then identified largely by its "A mind is a terrible thing to waste" campaign for support, leapt into the education and philanthropic headlines as the administrator of the Gates Millennium Scholars Program, expanding undergraduate and graduate-level educational opportunities for outstanding minority students.

Since 2004, the nation's largest and most successful minority higher education assistance organization has been led by former Dillard University president Michael L. Lomax, who will probe "Building Majority-Minority America: Who Will Take Responsibility?" at 7:30 p.m. on Monday, Oct. 9, in Goddard Auditorium of Carpenter Hall on the Earlham College campus. The lecture, by special arrangement of Earlham President Doug Bennett, is free and open to the public.

UNCF annually provides operating and program funds to 39 member institutions, all historically black colleges and universities. In addition, the Fund manages more than 400 scholarship programs supporting nearly 10,000 students at some 900 U.S. colleges and universities. In its six decades of service, the UNCF has assisted more than 300,000 students in earning their diplomas.

As the former president of a university located in New Orleans, Lomax was among the first to respond to the emergency that Hurricane Katrina created for dozens of institutions and thousands of students in the path of the country's most destructive and costly natural disaster. He pledged the organization's support to find "education solutions for every affected student."

Prior to being named president at Dillard, Lomax was a professor of English over the course of 20 years at historically black Emory University, Spelman and Morehouse colleges near Atlanta. The fullness of his experience now suggests to him that African Americans are at a crossroads, as more colleges, more jobs and more opportunities of every kind are open to them thanks to the Civil Rights revolution and the years of progress that followed. Yet, he laments, African Americans remain underrepresented among college graduates and the ranks of professionals and managers.

At Earlham, Dr. Lomax will consider two contending views about what needs to happen in order to close these gaps. One suggests that societal institutions — schools, colleges, employers, governments — need to change to enable African Americans to fulfill their educational, economic and political potential. The competing view, however, says that society has done enough, and that it is up to African Americans themselves to change their ways so they can realize success on their own.

Contact:
Katrina McQuail, assistant to the president
765/983-1645 — E-Mail Katrina