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The Whites Only Scholarship was founded by Jason Mattera, a Puerto Rican Roger Williams University student and member of the school Republican Party. The scholarship was a proposal to parody and highlight the inequity and unfairness of racial preferences at his school, and on colleges across America, Mattera said [1]. Mattera argues that he supports private organizations such as the Hispanic College Fund, The United Negro College Fund, and other groups that are privately funded and ethnically-based that award scholarships to members of their own communities, a position he claims is fully in line with freedom of association. However, he is opposed to federally subsidized institutions creating two classes of persons by imposing different standards on them. Either such universities should compile race-based scholarships for all students, or they should award scholarships on the basis of merit alone, he writes[2].

Roger Williams University chapter of the College Republicans (RWUCR) was condemned by Rhode Island's Republican Party and were no longer allowed to use a capital "R" in their name [3]. The group still used the "R" in defiance. The student who won the scholarship donated the prize money to those affected by the 2003 Station Nightclub Fire.

A similar scholarship was offered two months later at the University of Missouri-Columbia by Colin Kerr [4], a sophomore who had just retired from running the campus' conservative political magazine. While Kerr consulted with Mattera before the release of the scholarship, he maintains it was independent project planned months before the release of scholarship at Roger Williams. Under the auspices of a group called the Kerr-Otis Partnership for Socio-Economic Scholarships (KOPSES), Kerr echoed similar arguments to that of Mattera, though his scholarship eligibility requirement of 1/8 European-American descent mirrored that of the University of Missouri-Columbia's criteria for minority status [5]. Furthermore, before the announcement of the scholarship Kerr brokered a deal between both the leaders of the liberal and conservative campus publications to remain neutral in their coverage. The essay contest asked students to describe "how their European-American heritage affected their view of race-based scholarships." An Asian-American student, whose essay detailed a history of discrimination by his Asian relatives for being partially Caucasian, was awarded the scholarship. It was estimated that at the height of the controversy, 70% of the university's student body supported the white scholarship protest.^{[citation needed]}

Kerr's KOPSES organization eventually received wide multi-party support and later morphed into the American-Coalition for Socio-Economic Scholarships (ACSES), a short-lived national awareness group that lasted for over a year until its original funding ran short of its operating costs.

The trend in more sophisticated race-based scholarship protests continued when a white scholarship was offered at Boston University, known as the Caucasian Achievement and Recognition Scholarship. Similar to the KOPSES scholarship, the CARS scholarship required applicants to have at least 1/4 Caucasian heritage and although it required a photograph, did not specify that the photograph would be used as proof of race (since partially Caucasian applicants can apply).

• "Whites-Only Scholarship Revisited", Lewrockwell.com, March 4, 2004. 
• "New Scholarship Created for Whites Only", CNN, February 16, 2004. 
• "Roger Williams U. Group Offers Whites-Only Scholarship", The Daily Texan, February 17, 2004. 
• "Duo creates ’White Scholarship’ as protest", Columbia Missourian, April 15, 2004. 
• "Editorial Missed the Point of White Scholarship", The Maneater, April 27, 2004. 
• "Asian Student Awarded White Scholarship", Equitas, March, 2004.