Honoring the First Ladies: Scholarships Make College More Affordable for AU Horticulture Students

By: Jamie Creamer

What started out as an Auburn University Campus Club fund-raising plant sale four years ago has blossomed into an endowment that eventually will fund at least 18 annual $1,000 scholarships for AU horticulture majors.

The club established its First Ladies' Endowed Scholarships earlier this year with an initial gift of $5,000 from the club plus $80,000 from an anonymous donor. Since then, the endowment has received another $5,000 donation and a $10,000 pledge, bringing the total thus far to $100,000.

That's a sound start to the group's half-million-dollar goal, says Mary Lou Matthews, Campus Club past president and current scholarship chair.

"Now, we're going to be out beating the bushes for more donations to build the endowment," she says.

The Campus Club hasn't always been of the fund-raising mindset. In fact, for its first 50 years, it was a social organization only.

A couple of AU faculty members' wives organized it in 1946 as the Newcomers Club, to welcome the wives of new faculty members to the Auburn community. Two years later, Caroline Draughon, wife of then-AU president Ralph Brown Draughon, renamed the group the Campus Club and expanded it to include all faculty wives as well as all women faculty and staff. It remained primarily a social club.

In 1996, the Campus Club's 50th anniversary, membership was expanded to include all AU employees and their spouses, as well as all friends of the university. To honor its founder, the club also established the Caroline M. Draughon Endowed Scholarship.

Following that successful endowment effort, the club in 2001 established the Auburn University First Ladies Award program, in which at least one $1,000 scholarship would be awarded annually to a student in any major at Auburn. Each award was to be made in the name of either one of AU's past first ladies or the current president's wife.

To raise money for the scholarships, Matthews and then-Campus Club president Trudy Baker, both gardening enthusiasts, decided to organize a plant sale, and they shared their plans with CoAg's horticulture department.

The department joined in the effort, offering dozens of healthy plants left over from research projects. The sale was a whopping success, and to show its appreciation to the department, the club voted to earmark all of its scholarships for students majoring in horticulture.

The link between AU horticulture and the Campus Club was formed then, but it grew much stronger late last year when Jeff Sibley, AU horticulture Alumni associate professor and Department of Horticulture scholarship chairman, notified Campus Club officers that an anonymous donor wanted to contribute $80,000 toward an endowment to fund horticulture scholarships.

Currently, it takes about $25,000 in an endowment to yield a scholarship award, so the $100,000 in the First Ladies scholarship endowment will mean scholarships for four hort majors a year. At $500,000, the endowment will fund a scholarship in the name of each of Auburn's 17 past first ladies, the current first lady and future first ladies.

"This is the largest full endowment ever for the Department of Horticulture, and it has the potential of having the broadest impact of any endowment in the College of Agriculture," Sibley says.

Both the Department of Horticulture and CoAg's Development Office will be working with the Campus Club to cultivate donors to the endowment. And Sibley, for one, isn't interested in stopping at the half-million-dollar mark.

"What we need," he says, "is $2.5 million, because that would let us give at least 18 full-tuition scholarships, and that would allow the department to make tremendous advances."

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