We're pleased to see Lincoln University entities that were previously fractured pledge a united front on behalf of the university.
"Over the last three years, the national alumni association was discounted by the Lincoln University leadership and the Lincoln University Foundation was removed from campus. In the last 10 years, our enrollment has dropped to a 60-year low," Board of Curators President Victor Pasley said in a recent story we published. "As a curator, I spent the last two years trying to figure out how to put the team back together."
A fight between Lincoln University and its foundation over control of funding had boiled over into the courts.
The foundation has existed to solicit donations for the school, then disperse the money in ways to benefit the university and its students, including through scholarships.
The university helps the foundation, and the foundation pays a portion of what it makes in donations back to the university for that administrative support. The two entities have a written agreement, last amended in 2015.
A 2019 lawsuit said the university wrongly took control of more than $667,000 from the foundation, as well as keeping files the foundation said it owns. The university said the foundation is part of the university, and the university is the ultimate owner of all paperwork, donor information and money.
The problem started, the suit said, after former Lincoln President Jerald Jones Woolfolk tried to change the agreement between Lincoln and its foundation. The suit said Woolfolk wanted to transfer funds from the foundation to the university.
When the foundation balked, the university's Board of Curators terminated the agreement between the university and foundation, effective Dec. 31, 2018.
Woolfolk proposed a new agreement in which the foundation would give her control of half of the foundation's funds. When the foundation didn't agree, Lincoln told the foundation it would stop providing administrative services to the foundation, the suit reported.
Woolfolk is no longer Lincoln's president and the problems seem to be a thing of the past.
Sherman Bonds, a two-term president of the Atlanta Alumni Chapter of LUAA, was officially named LUAA president last week during Lincoln's Homecoming week.
Kayla Allen, faculty member and active member of the Jefferson City Chapter of LUAA, was named secretary.
As we recently reported, the two of them, along with LUAA Treasurer Charles Glasper, will lead the university's alumni organization in fundraising efforts, engaging graduates to bring them into the alumni community and recruiting new students for the university.
The foundation is back to working with the university and LUAA in supporting academic scholarships for students and donations from alumni.
"Pasley said it right, we're going to do a good job as long as we do it together," 62nd & 65th Regiment Legacy Foundation President Hardy Dorsey said.
On Thursday, the foundation donated $100,000 in scholarships to the university. On Friday, Bonds presented Moseley with a $100,000 check for student scholarships.
We previously paraphrased the Bible in saying "a house divided against itself cannot stand." Fortunately, Lincoln appears to have let bygones be bygones.
We hope Lincoln's newly united front makes the university stronger than ever.
News Tribune