The Virginia school Sweet Briar College will be focusing on protecting the biological female students as it instituted an admissions policy that bars transgender women next school year. This admissions policy at private undergraduate colleges is exempted from Title IX, the 1972 law that bars sex discrimination in education.
The private women's liberal arts school said the policy stems from the legally binding will of its founder, Indiana Fletcher Williams, who died in 1900. Sweet Briar's leadership said the document requires it to "be a place of 'girls and young women.'"
The phrase "must be interpreted as it was understood at the time the Will was written," Sweet Briar's president and board chair wrote in a letter earlier this month to the college community.
The new policy requires an applicant to "confirm that her sex assigned at birth is female, and that she consistently lives and identifies as a woman."
"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 are facing criticism from some students and most faculty. They warn the politically fraught policy could repel potential students — not just transgender women.
Last 26 August, the faculty voted 48 to 4, with one abstention, to call on the board to rescind the policy, John Gregory Brown, an English professor and faculty senate chair, said.
Sweet Briar has about 460 students —- known as Vixens — and was established in 1901 on Williams’ estate, a former plantation in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Hutson acknowledged that a board member has resigned over the policy and that alumnae on both sides "care deeply about the future of our college."
"Many want Sweet Briar to remain a place where women can thrive, and they believe that a broader policy is a slippery slope toward co-education," Hutson said. “They strongly support this policy."
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