Mary Rippon Endowed Scholarship for Single Parents

French professor and biographer Julia Frey created this fund to provide undergraduate scholarship awards for Colorado resident students who are single parents and/or the sole support of the child/ren and who demonstrate financial need. Women are particularly encouraged to apply; however, an applicant’s gender will not be considered a factor in the selection process.

During her first semester at CU, Frey was asked to do a small exhibition about Mary Rippon’s life and legacy, which she completed with undergraduate major Gwen Wells. They assumed Mary Rippon was exactly what she appeared to be; deeply religious, unmarried, straight-faced, strait-laced. More than 20 years later, to her great embarrassment, Frey discovered how wrong they had been.

The truth was far more subtle and far more interesting than she ever suspected. As a 37-year-old spinster, Mary Rippon fell in love with one of her students, 12 years her junior. Consequently, she not only became a single parent, but in order to keep her job, she had to deny her motherhood, her marriage and her subsequent divorce. Someone else secretly raised her daughter, who was told that Mary Rippon was her aunt. This taught Frey a lesson which she uses daily: Never Assume Anything! The more you know about a subject, the less clear the “truth” becomes.

This scholarship is for someone brave enough to get an education while raising the children Frey herself never had. The $26,000 gift which created this scholarship represents exactly two years of Frey’s first salary at CU in 1976, when she held the dubious honor of being CU’s lowest-paid professor.