Court makes clear: Donor intent cannot be casually discarded

Here we go again.

If the University of Iowa and Iowa attorney general’s office get their way, a legacy gift from a grateful and accomplished graduate will no longer help students like him.

The graduate, Ezra L. Totton, was an esteemed chemist during the latter half of the 20th century. One chapter in his great American success story was written in the chemistry building at the University of Iowa in the 1940s.

Totton’s story deserves retelling because he was at the center of an Iowa Supreme Court decision last week.

The court rebuffed the university’s attempt, at least for now, to modify the conditions Totton established for a scholarship he funded. The court sent the case back to Johnson County for a judge to determine what will become of Totton’s scholarship if the university cannot abide by his eligibility requirements. The options could include returning the gift or keeping Totton’s money and using it in ways he never approved.

This is not the first time an Iowa Board of Regents university has sought to disregard restrictions attached to a gift. Every time it happens, public confidence suffers because universities appear willing to accept gifts with strings attached and later disregard donor intent.

In the case of Ezra Totton, his gift demonstrated his desire to make sure students like him received opportunities from the University of Iowa as he had.

Totton was a bright young man who grew up in racially segregated North Carolina. He graduated in 1935 from Knoxville College, a private historically Black college in Knoxville, Tennessee, that was founded after the Civil War by the United Presbyterian Church.

Totton excelled in chemistry and sought admission to the University of Tennessee’s graduate program. But Tennessee law at the time barred Black students from enrolling at the state university.

Totton and five other Black applicants challenged the discriminatory policy in court, represented by NAACP attorney Thurgood Marshall, who later became the first Black justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. Their Tennessee lawsuit was unsuccessful. But Marshall and the NAACP continued to fight school segregation, ultimately prevailing in 1954 when the nation’s highest court issued its landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision.

Totton was not deterred either.

After Tennessee turned him away, he enrolled at the University of Iowa, where he earned a master’s degree in chemistry. Totton headed to the University of Wisconsin, where he received his doctorate. He then embarked on a long and distinguished teaching career at North Carolina Central University, where the chemistry building now bears his name.

When he died in 1996, Totton’s will provided funds to the University of Iowa to endow a scholarship in his name “for Black students majoring in the physical sciences, preferably chemistry.”

Iowa accepted his money knowing his intent was to ensure others did not experience the mistreatment he had.

The scholarship operated under those requirements without controversy until last year, when the university went to court seeking permission to remove the requirement that recipients be Black. Instead, the university proposed making the scholarship available to first-generation college students of any race or ethnicity who majored in the physical sciences, preferably chemistry.

The Iowa attorney general’s office argued this rewriting is necessary because of a 2023 U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down Harvard University’s use of race in admissions decisions. The attorney general contended Totton’s scholarship requirement is unlawful.

But the question before the Iowa Supreme Court was not whether Iowa’s admissions process must be race-neutral. It was whether the university may continue administering a privately created and privately funded scholarship whose eligibility requirements reflect the donor’s unambiguous wishes.

That distinction matters — and it matters beyond a single scholarship.

All members of the Iowa Supreme Court agreed the university may not unilaterally rewrite the terms of the Totton scholarship, even if its conditions are impracticable to administer now. The court held that donor representatives should be involved in modification proceedings, and changes should remain consistent with the donor’s original purpose unless clear evidence indicates that cannot lawfully occur.

The court did not declare a race-based scholarship is automatically lawful. It also did not rule that Iowa’s colleges and universities may ignore constitutional limits established by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Instead, the Iowa court focused on a longstanding principle written into Iowa statutes and even the University of Iowa’s gift acceptance policy: When a donor makes a charitable gift, courts and universities should respect the person’s stated wishes unless a compelling legal reason prevents it.

In other words, donor intent cannot be casually discarded.

All Iowans need this premise to continue if we hope to see more gifts that promote education and worthy causes. People endow scholarships because they want to advance a purpose. Some seek to help students from rural counties, where statistics show residents are primarily white. Others want to encourage future teachers, nurses, or chemists. Still others want to assist students who overcome significant hardships or barriers.

Ezra Totton’s decision to establish a scholarship reflected his belief that education can open doors, and he wanted to help young Black students walk through those doors.

His intent could be accommodated by removing race from the scholarship criteria and instead limiting eligibility to graduates of historically Black universities. Failing that, as a friend-of-the-court brief submitted by the ACLU of Iowa and the Iowa-Nebraska Conference of the NAACP suggested, if the University of Iowa maintains that it cannot carry out Totton’s wishes, it should return his contribution to the Totton family or to another institution he named in his will.

The Totton dispute has parallels to the unseemly handling of a restricted gift 35 years ago by Iowa State University.

In 1987, Marie Powers arranged to leave her 240-acre Webster County farm to a university foundation, stipulating that it be operated in memory of her late husband in a manner that maintained and improved the land and buildings. 

Marie Powers died in 1995. The following year, the ISU foundation obtained court permission to sell the farm and use the proceeds for other university purposes. That sale triggered a national scandal over whether university foundations were transparent and followed donor restrictions.

The public’s conclusion was damning: ISU was taking donated property and ignoring donor wishes. 

As Ramona Lee, Powers’ niece, said at the time, “They violated Marie’s trust.” Lee’s husband, Bill, agreed: “It’d be hard for us to understand how anybody donating to the foundation would have any assurance that their wishes would be honored.”

And that brings us back to Ezra Totton and the University of Iowa. He intended for his gift to benefit students like him, not a broader group of first-generation college students. Sadly, if Iowa keeps Totton’s money in 2026 but uses it for other purposes, the university would hardly look better than Tennessee did in the 1940s when the state derailed his hopes.

One college denied Totton an education because of his race. The other will have prevented him from remedying that injustice through a donation he intended would share his good fortune with students like him.