The decision places Sweet Briar among few remaining women’s colleges in US with such policy.
Sweet Briar College, a private liberal arts college for women based in Virginia, United States just introduced a new policy of its admissions, and that is not to allow transgender women to join on campus for this new academic year, according to New York Post. By this decision Sweet Briar College has joined the few remaining women’s colleges in the United States that have taken similar stances.
As per the news outlet, college officials said the policy reflects the will of its founder, Indiana Fletcher Williams, who died in 1900. Officials explained that Williams’s will mandates the institution to serve “girls and young women,” and they assert that these terms must be understood according to the meaning they held at the time the will was written.
In a letter to the college community, Sweet Briar President Mary Pope Hutson and the chair of the board announced that the new policy requires applicants to affirm that they were assigned female at birth and constantly live and identify as women.
President Hutson made it clear that single-sex education was both a tradition and a singular cultural resource for the college. But the policy has outraged students and faculty, who said it could discourage prospective students-both transgender and not-from applying to the college at a time when many women’s colleges are closing, merging, or going co-ed. Sweet Briar itself almost closed in 2015.
Critics have also cited the originalist interpretation of the will – which at one point explicitly excluded non-white students from the college – by the board as something that is very problematic. The college did not begin to admit Black students until a federal judge gave approval after the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The reasoning behind the transgender policy was “absurd,” said John Gregory Brown, chair of the faculty senate and an English professor.