Colin Powell Donates $1 Million To Policy Center at City College
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The City College of New York “is loaded with future Colin Powells,” the real Colin Powell said yesterday, and now the college will have more funds to help them realize their potential.
A former secretary of state, Mr. Powell, said yesterday he is donating $1 million to a policy center he founded at City College, his alma mater.
In announcing the donation at the school’s campus in Harlem, Mr. Powell also said that 20 prominent Americans had agreed to serve on the advisory council of the Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies. The list of luminaries includes two former state secretaries, Henry Kissinger and James Baker III, as well as the broadcast journalists Tom Brokaw and Barbara Walters.
Mr. Powell graduated from City College in 1958 after growing up in the South Bronx. He hailed the school as one that accepted students from all walks of life, including those who didn’t necessarily excel academically. “I was one of them,” he said. “This college took a chance on me.”
The money will go toward expanding the policy center, which has sponsored conferences and financed scholarships and internships through a student leadership program. The former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff had previously given $350,000 to the college to establish a scholarship named after his parents.
“This is a huge commitment on his part, because he is not an extremely wealthy man,” the City College president, Gregory Williams, said. While he has authored a best-selling memoir and is highly paid for public speaking engagements, Mr. Powell has spent virtually his entire adult life in the military and public service. He resigned as secretary of state early last year.
Responding to questions from reporters, Mr. Powell also stood by his comments of last week, when he said that as state secretary he had urged a larger troop presence in Iraq, an opinion not shared by top military officers. “Ultimately, the president went with the commanders and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staffs, which is what the president should do,” he said yesterday.
Mr. Powell said the retired generals who have called for Secretary Rumsfeld to resign “have contributed to the public debate,” but he would not say whether he agreed with them.
