Sweet Briar College in Virginia has implemented an admissions policy that will exclude transgender students from the next school year, making the school an exception among the dwindling number of women’s colleges in the country.
The private liberal arts school for women said the policy stems from the legally binding will of its founder, Indiana Fletcher Williams, who died in 1900. Sweet Briar leaders said the document requires it to be “a place for ‘girls and young women.’”
The phrase “should be interpreted as it was understood at the time the will was made,” Sweet Briar’s president and chairman of the board wrote in a letter to the university community earlier this month.
The new policy requires an applicant to “affirm that her assigned sex at birth is female and that she consistently lives and identifies as female.”
“Sweet Briar College believes that single-sex education is not only our tradition, but also a unique cultural and social resource,” President Mary Pope Hutson said in a statement to The Associated Press.
The new guidelines have been criticized by some students and most faculty, who warn that the politically charged policy could drive away potential students — not just transgender women — as women’s colleges close, become coeducational or merge with other schools. Sweet Briar almost closed in 2015.
Critics also question the board’s originalist interpretation of a will, which explicitly excluded non-white students.
Williams’ will stated that the school should be a place “for the education of white girls and young women.” The university had to get permission from a federal judge to accept black students after the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
John Gregory Brown, professor of English and chair of the faculty council, said the reasoning behind the transgender policy is “absurd.”
“Williams also would not have considered that someone with a disability could be a potential student,” Brown added.
On Monday night, the faculty voted 48 to 4, with one abstention, to call on the board to rescind the policy, Brown said.
Sweet Briar has approximately 460 students, known as Vixens, and was founded in 1901 on the Williams estate, a former plantation in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
On August 10, the Sweet Briar College Student Government Association said the policy was “alienating, unnecessary, and reflective of the rise of transphobia in our country.”
Isabella Paul, president of the association and a senior who identifies as nonbinary, told the AP that at least 10% of students use other pronouns and would not fit the policy’s description of women.
“And there are allies here who may identify as women, but have friends and loved ones and family members who are nonbinary, genderqueer and transgender,” Paul said. “So that also impacts their pride in their institution.”
It is unclear how the policy will affect current students. When asked, Sweet Briar’s president said the school tries to “ensure that all of our students feel welcome on campus.”
Hutson acknowledged that a board member resigned over the policy and that alumni on both sides “care deeply about the future of our university.”
“Many want Sweet Briar to remain a place where women can thrive, and they believe that broader policies are a slippery slope toward coeducation,” Hutson said. “They strongly support this policy.”
Women’s colleges in the US began admitting transgender students about 10 years ago, including Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts and Spelman College, a historically black school in Atlanta.
“What it means to be a woman is not static,” said Lynn Pasquerella, then-president of Mount Holyoke told the AP in 2014. “Early feminists argued that reducing women to their biological functions was a basis for the oppression of women.”
Currently, 23 historically women’s colleges have policies that allow at least some trans students, said Genny Beemyn, director of the Stonewall Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Beemyn, who tracks such policies, said three historically women’s colleges ban the most trans women, including Sweet Briar.
Admission policy for private bachelor’s degree programs are exempt from Title IXthe 1972 law prohibiting sex discrimination in education. So Sweet Briar would not be affected by the New Rules from the Biden Administration under Title IX, which limits discrimination on the basis of gender identity.
Most Republican attorneys general are challenge those rules in courtAnd judges have halted enforcement in 26 states, including Virginia, while the lawsuits proceed.
But schools including Sweet Briar would not be immune from any lawsuits filed by current students, said Nicholas Hite, a senior attorney at the LGBTQ+ rights group Lambda Legal.
Hite said Sweet Briar’s policy could be problematic because it explicitly attempts to define for current students what it means to “live and self-identify as a woman.”
“That is something that every cis and trans woman should be able to decide for themselves,” Hite said.
Sweet Briar did not have an official transgender admissions policy until this year, according to the school board’s letter. Previously, the university handled applications on a case-by-case basis.
But then the Common Application, a nonprofit that helps students apply to schools using one standardized form, added more options for a person’s legal gender, “X” or “some other legal gender.”
According to Sweet Briar leaders, the additional options created confusion and challenges for applicants and school staff.
Emma Steele, a spokesperson for Common Application, said in a statement that the changes “were all made to better serve the more than one million students who use Common App each year.”
In 2015, Sweet Briar nearly ceased to exist as a school. The leadership at the time announced the closure, citing financial challenges, declining enrollment, and other issues.
The school was saved after multiple lawsuits, lengthy negotiations, and the raising of millions of dollars by its very determined alumni.
Sweet Briar is one of 30 schools in the Women’s College Coalition. The United States had more than 200 women’s colleges in the 1960s.
The chair of the faculty council said the new policy will likely reduce the pool of already valuable candidates.
“It really excludes any student who would be offended by those positions … who doesn’t want to be in a place where discrimination is codified in this way,” Brown said. “I think it’s a financially disastrous decision for the university.”