An Amherst County Circuit Court judge has approved a joint agreement between Sweet Briar College and Attorney General Jason Miyares that allows the tiny all-women’s school to bar trans women.
The politically-tinged agreement stems from a narrow read of the will of the school’s founder, Indiana Fletcher Williams, who stipulated that her charitable contribution was to be used for an educational institution for “girls and young women.”
The phrase “must be interpreted as it was understood at the time the Will was written,” Sweet Briar’s president, Mary Pope Hutson, wrote in a letter to the college community earlier this year.
Williams died in 1900, and Sweet Briar began operations in 1901.
What’s interesting about the will being interpreted as it was understood in 1900: the will explicitly dictated that her gift be used “for the education of white girls and young women.”
This inconvenient truth was behind the effort by Sweet Briar to seek permission from a federal judge to accept Black students after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law.
If you’re going to go all-out originalist interpretation, it seems fair to raise the issue: might Sweet Briar next seek to exclude Blacks and other people of color?
To that point, Sweet Briar is a private school, so it’s not subject to the requirements of the federal Title IX law.
That doesn’t mean the school isn’t subject to public pressure, including from students, faculty and alums who are concerned that the policy, which asserts that “an applicant is qualified for admission if she confirms that her sex assigned at birth is female and that she consistently lives and identifies as a woman,” will limit the pool of potential applicants.
That issue is not insignificant at a school that has just 460 enrolled students, and a financial situation that had Sweet Briar on the brink of closing in 2015.
The number of women’s-only schools is down from a high of more than 200 in the 1960s to just 30 today.
Currently, 23 of those schools admit at least some trans students, according to Genny Beemyn, director of the Stonewall Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Sweet Briar is one of three that will not admit trans women.
We haven’t heard from Hutson on this since the Amherst County Circuit Court ruling was handed down on Friday.
We did get a statement from Miyares.
“Sweet Briar College has a proud and long tradition of providing women’s education,” Miyares said. “As the father of young daughters myself, to see Sweet Briar maintain its unique tradition of integrity and excellence in women’s education is encouraging to say the least. Sweet Briar is a historic institution established for women. I am deeply honored to have played a role in ensuring the college stays true to its founding purpose of educating women.”
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Chris Graham
