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AN ‘AUDACIOUS’ IDEA TURNS 50
The P250 scholarship, launched by Albion student leaders in 1971, has benefited generations of Britons. The backstory might just be as big as the scholarship itself.
By Erin Peterson
Zahra Ahmed, ’22, had wanted to be a student leader at Albion College almost from the moment she first stepped on campus. She pursued her goals by getting involved in Student Senate, among many activities. She took courses to help her become a better leader. By her junior year, she had been elected Student Senate president.
Still, no courses could have fully prepared her to lead her fellow students through a worlddisrupting pandemic. She projected confidence and optimism as students returned to campus in the fall, but she also wondered if she was really up to the leadership challenge.
One thing that made a difference was the P250 scholarship she had received in spring 2020. The competitive scholarship, worth a quarter of Albion’s tuition, recognizes a handful of students for their leadership qualities, contributions, and service during their time at Albion. The value of the scholarship was significant. Ahmed was thrilled that she could spend more hours on meaningful volunteer work. And for the math/physics major, it was a psychological boost, too. “There definitely have been times that I felt kind of down about stuff,” she says. “But realizing that there were people investing in me, who really believe in my potential, helped me keep my head up and dream about what more I could do for the Albion community and how I could give back in the future.”
The P250 scholarship—short for President Bernard T. Lomas Endowed Scholarship Project 250—is designed to “encourage students to contribute significant improvements to the campus and the Albion community in and out of the classroom,” says Pam Schuler, assistant director for leadership and community service. It has supported hundreds of students over the course of five decades. And it got its start 50 years ago from a group of ambitious, forward-thinking students whose dreams were just as big as those of the students who receive it today.
Idealistic Thinking in an Age of Disruption
If there’s anyone who understands the challenges of student leadership during difficult times, it might be Lyn Ward Healy, ’72, one of the students who was instrumental in creating and fundraising for the P250 Scholarship in the 1970s.
Healy arrived at Albion in a time of extreme national and campus turmoil. She was on campus as a prospective student the weekend that Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated. Students protested the Vietnam War. Closer to home, Albion students were fighting campus rules, including women’s curfews.
Amid the tumult, President Louis Norris retired.
Healy, who was vice chair of Student Senate at that point, was taking it all in. After she and Student Senate Chair Rick Simonson, ’72, got back from a conference in Chicago for student leaders, she proposed a bold idea. “I said, ‘We’re going to have a new president, and we should honor him with a scholarship,’” she recalls.
Their fundraising aim was a cool $250,000, more than $1.6 million in today’s dollars. And Project 250, eventually shortened to P250, was born. The pair teamed up with Bill Healy, ’72, Jan Chamberlain, ’73, and John Gaskell, ’71, to get the ball rolling. With the blessing of the incoming president, Bernard Lomas, ’46, they were off.
The team mapped out an ambitious slate of $100 fundraising dinners (“Beefsteaks for Bernie”) in cities including Detroit, Chicago, and Cleveland. They created alumni raffles. And they reached out to Board of Trustees members and supporters including Stanley Kresge (Class of 1922) and Dow Chemical Chair Carl Gerstacker, who were happy to become some of the project’s earliest supporters. They recruited many fellow students to support their efforts.
While Healy acknowledges that they may have been a bit naive when they proposed the lofty goal, there was something uniquely inspiring about the aim. “Bill always said it was audacious,” she says. “And we had a plan.”
Even more than that, she says, she and others got to rub shoulders with extraordinarily successful people who were happy to mentor the group of young and hard-driving students. “These were business leaders to the nth degree—the Jeff Bezoses of their time—and upper level administrators for Albion,” Healy says. “They gave us so much support.”
In the end, the group didn’t just meet their $250,000 goal, they exceeded it: once they crossed the threshold, the initiative received another $25,000 matching gift from what is now the DeWitt Wallace Foundation. The astonishing success ended up getting national attention: a June 19, 1972 article in Time magazine noted that the group “received contributions from 48 states and five countries, including $5 in Vietnamese currency, two Bibles, and an Egyptian figurine.”
The scholarship itself immediately received plenty of student interest. The $1,250 initial payout represented more than 30 percent of Albion’s annual tuition. Today, the scholarship covers a quarter of a year’s tuition.
Lyn Ward Healy, ’72 (above); Zahra Ahmed, ’22 (top of story); the P250 launch was featured in the Detroit Free Press (below).
Michael Haines, ’85, hadn’t thought much about college when he arrived on Albion’s campus the summer before his senior year of high school for a football camp. But he was immediately captivated. “The campus was like something out of a movie,” he recalls. “It was gorgeous.”
Still, he acknowledges that he was anxious, even after he was admitted. As a first-generation
college student, he wasn’t sure how to navigate all of the challenges of higher ed. He worried that he might flunk out.
But he found plenty of mentors to help him along the way. He had a job in the Office of Student Life and wrote for the Pleiad. Later, he became president of his fraternity and editor of the newspaper.
He was thrilled to receive the P250. He had taken out significant loans to attend Albion, and it was a huge boost to get the financial support. It also felt like a vote of confidence. “It validated the work and the service that I had put in, and it boosted my self-esteem to know that the people who had mentored me had made a solid investment in me,” he says.
The scholarship helped give him the confidence to pursue big things after graduation. After a year working as a newsletter editor in Washington, D.C., he decided to apply to Columbia University’s School of Journalism, often considered the nation’s finest J-school. He was accepted. “The advice I got from my professors was, ‘You received a solid education. Apply to the best,’” he recalls. Today, he is a unit commissioner at Scouts BSA (formerly Boy Scouts of America). As he looks at the important inflection points in his own life, he believes his experience at Albion was among the most positive of his life.
Today, he continues to have a connection with Albion: he is in his third year of service to the Alumni Association Board of Directors and is the parent of a recent alum as well as a current student. He says that the P250 is a way to give student leaders the encouragement and the financial support they need to thrive at Albion and beyond it. “Anything we can do to defray the expenses for student leaders will validate their efforts,” he says. “This is a long-term investment in the community that builds and advances Albion’s reputation,” he says.
A Catalyst for Brave Pursuits
Maggie Fowler, ’19, checked all the leadership boxes as a student: she was involved in the Student Volunteer Bureau, the service fraternity Alpha Phi Omega, and the business fraternity Delta Sigma Pi. She played violin in the Albion College Symphony Orchestra. Still, to complete her double major in accounting and French, she knew she’d need to spend her last semester of college off campus. “Taking that step to move across the ocean was both exciting and scary,” she says.
She happened to be thinking about these big changes as she was writing an essay for the P250, in which she had to document, in a concrete way, her growth during her time at Albion. “I realized when I came to Albion that I had been super shy. I didn’t raise my hand in class or speak up in meetings,” she says. “But over the course of my time there, it brought out the leader in me. Writing that essay made me realize what a difference that education had made in me, and what a different person I had become.”
Fowler got the scholarship. She studied abroad. And the scholarship both made it financially possible and served as an affirmation that she was ready to take on bigger things. Today, she is a PCS assurance associate at PricewaterhouseCoopers, one of the “Big Four” accounting firms nationwide.
The P250 scholarship continues to pay dividends for students and alumni, a half-century after its remarkable start.
For Lyn Ward Healy, the fundraising process proved as valuable as the scholarship itself. A few years ago, for example, when her church launched a million-dollar fundraising drive, she drew on the confidence and insight she had gained from her P250 experience to support those efforts.
And Zahra Ahmed says she’s proud to be at a school that doesn’t just value the learning that students do in the classroom, but recognizes all the growth and impact they make outside of it. “These scholarships support students who contribute to the community more broadly, and it’s something that shows how much Albion values student leadership and development in the overall campus culture,” she says.
Standing from left: Jan Chamberlain, ’73, Bill Healy, ’72, Lyn Ward, ’72, and Rick Simonson, ’72, with President Bernard Lomas in 1971 during the time the student leaders fundraised for the newly created P250 Scholarship, which has benefited hundreds of Albion College students over a 50-year period.
Remembering a President, and His Presidency
Former Albion College President Bernard T. Lomas, ’46, passed away December 24, 2020 in Grand Rapids at the age of 96. Lomas was the College’s 12th president, serving from 1970 to 1983.
A native of Mackinaw City, Mich., Lomas spent many years in ministry, giving his last decade of service at the Epworth Euclid United Methodist Church in Cleveland, Ohio. Despite the distance and demands of that profession, Lomas was also devoted to his alma mater. At the time of his appointment to the Albion presidency, he was a member of the College’s Board of Trustees and had previously held a leadership position in the Alumni Association. Upon his retirement, Lomas also became the College’s first chancellor, continuing his service to Albion well into the 1980s.
Curricular and Campus Expansion
Unwavering in his commitment to the liberal arts tradition, Lomas also embraced educational and experiential opportunities that took students beyond the classroom. The Honors Program and Professional Management Program (now the Carl A. Gerstacker Institute for Business and Management) were established during his tenure, along with the originally named Gerald R. Ford Institute for Public Service, believed at the time to be the first such program in the country for undergraduate students.
Lomas also saw the first student participation in international internship programs, the establishment of practicums in psychology and healthcare, and academic concentrations in computer science, human services and mass communication.
The College completed a $15 million capital campaign during his tenure, resulting in the addition of Mudd Learning Center, Olin Hall, Herrick Theatre, Dean Aquatic Center, and Sprankle-Sprandel Stadium to the campus. The Whitehouse Nature Center was also created while Lomas was in the president’s office.
And he would continue to peer into possibilities for Albion years after his retirement.
“Dr. Lomas never stopped beating the drum for Albion College,” says Jim Whitehouse, ’69, recalling a visit to the Lomases at their North Carolina home in 1995. “I told them I was an astronomy enthusiast and Dr. Lomas immediately took me next door to meet the neighbors, Bill and Lois Stellman, who had a beautiful 14-inch telescope mounted in an observatory above their garage. Five minutes after we arrived, that telescope and its expensive mounting apparatus became the property of Albion College! A year later, the Stellmans supported the building of an enclosure to house the instrument on the roof of Palenske Hall, where it has been in continuous use since.”
President Lomas and Barbara Lomas on the steps of the President’s Home at 501 E. Michigan Ave., November 1979.
A Focus on Engagement and Growth
Lomas excelled in fiscal leadership, taking just two years to bring the College to a budget surplus that lasted for the remainder of his presidency. He further oversaw enrollment growth to an average student population near 1,800 in the 1970s. Lomas’ civic engagement included serving on the Albion Improvement Committee, the American Cancer Society of Calhoun County, and the board of directors for AlbionJackson City Bank and Trust. During his presidential tenure, he further was a consultant to the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research and held leadership roles with the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Michigan, the Great Lakes Colleges Association, the Michigan Colleges Foundation and the Michigan Intercollegiate Athletic Association Presidents’ Committee.
Lomas’ wife of 72 years, Barbara, passed away December 27, 2019. They are survived by their son Paul Lomas and Gayle Smith Lomas ’74, three grandchildren including Torrey Lomas, ’09, three greatgrandchildren, and extended family member Suzanne Scrutton, ’86, and Jennifer Scrutton Culbertson, ’88. Bernard and Barbara's son David Lomas, ’73, passed away in 2004. “Bernard and I both spoke at [longtime Director of Admissions] Frank Bonta’s funeral in 2017. He spoke without notes and it was on target and as good as I’ve ever heard him,” recalls retired men’s basketball coach Mike Turner, ’69, who led the Britons to the NCAA Division III Final Four in 1978 during Lomas’ tenure. “Usually when you talk to Bernard, it’s an hour. But he stuck to his four minutes. He was sharp to the end.”
