A white male student at Northern Virginia Community College is charging that a minority scholarship program at the school violates his constitutional rights, pointing to a federal court ruling that banned a university from awarding publicly-funded scholarships exclusively to African Americans.

"As a student at Northern Virginia Community College.... I wish to file a civil rights complaint that this institution discriminates against white male and female students by continuing to offer race and ethnicity-based scholarships that appear unconstitutional," wrote Christopher Thompson, a political science student at the Annandale campus, in a May 26 filing to the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) in the U.S.

Department of Education. The focus of his complaint is the Leslie V. Forte Scholarship, a privately funded program named after the first Black professor of English at NVCC. The Forte scholarship offers five recipients $500 a year and is one of two minority scholarships at NVCC out of more than 100 scholarships at the college.

In an August 28 filing to OCR, the college responded: "NVCC believes that affirmative action is a means to an end. It is a tool which we temporarily employ to help the college achieve its ultimate goal of providing equal educational opportunities to all people."

The scholarship program, which officials say is open to several minority groups, is administered by the NVCC Educational Foundation and housed on NVCC's campus. Officers of the college's Affirmative Action/ Minority Affairs offices help select recipients and make announcements to attract candidates.

NVCC officials also sit in on foundation meetings, according to officials. The use of NVCC's facilities and the involvement of state-paid NVCC officials could make the scholarship more of a "semi-private" program, legal observers say.