Central College will receive a gift of $500,000 from Paul Poppen, a 1969 Central graduate, to establish the Poppen Fund for Social Justice Programs and the Poppen Diversity Scholarship.

The Poppen Fund for Social Justice Programs will support funding requests in areas of social justice, including legal, health, financial and environmental. The program will support research, scholarship, education and remedial activities at Central while encouraging student involvement in issues of social justice. This includes collaborative research with faculty and students; development of workshops for faculty; new courses; and visitors and guest lecturers.

“Even though we aspire to have liberty and justice for all in this country, it’s not necessarily equal,” Poppen says. “Some of the facts we’ve known for a long time about social equity haven’t been brought into a framework where people can really think about and discuss them to try to figure out what we can do to make things better. And I want to encourage the Central community to listen, to learn and to do what they can.”

The Poppen Diversity Scholarship will support students of diverse backgrounds who are underrepresented in higher education.

Poppen majored in psychology at Central and received a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 1973. He is the Thelma Hunt Professor of Psychology at George Washington University in Washington, D.C, where he has taught for nearly 50 years. He served as chair of the department of psychology for 12 years. Poppen’s research in the past decade has focused on gender, culture and health, especially HIV/AIDS. In 1991, he was honored with a Central Alumni Award.