Bravo For Sweet Briar College!

Well done, Vixens!

Sweet Briar College, a small all-women’s liberal arts college, has announced a firm new policy barring the admission of transgendered students. In the past, acceptance was decided on a case-by-case basis, according to a story by insidehighered.com.

Officials said they made the move to comply with recent changes to the Common Application, used by more than 1,000 higher ed institutions, which now lists four legal gender options. That change, Sweet Briar’s leaders said in a message to the campus community, “presents a challenge both for students applying for admission and administrators and staff making admissions decisions.”

Sweet Briar College was founded in 1901 by the estate of Indiana Fletcher Williams, who wanted to honor her deceased daughter, Daisy. The woman who left the sprawling campus was specific: Her legacy was intended to establish a place of learning for “girls and young women.”

That was a straightforward mission at the turn of the last century. It’s straightforward now.

According to the AP, in an August letter, the college president and board chair reiterated the school’s determination to follow their founder’s directions.

The phrase (girls and young women) “must be interpreted as it was understood at the time the Will was written,” Mary Pope Hudson wrote in a letter earlier this month to the Sweet Briar 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 Hudson said in a statement to The Associated Press.

In other words, boys sashaying around in skirts and lipstick are not welcome to matriculate. Neither are girls shot so full of male hormones that they’re growing beards. Sweet Briar is determined to remain a women’s institution of higher learning. Not a clown college.

Good for them!

This wouldn’t have been controversial 10 years ago, but in today’s woke world the school’s determination to keep men out of this exclusive female space is making national headlines.

Single-sex education has all but disappeared from the American landscape. In 2015, thanks to massive mismanagement, Sweet Briar College in Amherst County almost closed. The mighty Vixen alumnae - small in numbers, but large in determination - rose up and raised millions to save their alma mater.

I wrote in support of the school at the time.

With apologies to graduates of Virginia’s other bucolic colleges and universities, Sweet Briar is easily the most stunning school in the state.

In the distant past, Sweet Briar had a reputation for catering to privileged Southern girls who came to campus with their horses. In modern times, it transformed into a college that kept its equestrian traditions while offering engineering and biochemistry programs and sharply discounted tuition.

In spite of those efforts, the school’s board voted unanimously to make Sweet Briar the latest casualty among all-female schools. According to figures on the Women’s College Coalition website, there were 230 women’s colleges in 1960. Last year, there were 47.

Sadly, eight years later, there are fewer than 30 all-female colleges left.

This bold and beautiful private Virginia school is smartly standing up for girls at a time when female spaces are being invaded, women’s sports are being overtaken by males and members of the US Supreme Court can’t even define what is a woman.

In the midst of the madness, Sweet Briar took a stand for sanity.

If you have a college-bound daughter, take her to see the 3,000-acre campus, easily the most beautiful in Virginia.

If you have a son, give him a gander at one of the roughly 3,000 other four-year colleges that admit men. He’ll find a place. But it won’t be at Sweet Briar.