How Sweet Briar Came Back from Financial Ruin and Proved Women’s Colleges Are Still Relevant

Lisa Birnbach:

In what could be described as a huge breach of trust, on March 3, 2015, the president of the all-female Sweet Briar College, a 114-year-old mainstay of southern liberal-arts schools, announced that the college would be closing—for good—after graduation a few months later. Citing “insurmountable financial challenges,” he and his board voted to give up and bail out. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and other media covered it closely. The public (many of whom had been unaware that a place called Sweet Briar still—or ever—existed) assumed that a college for women in rural Virginia meant … what? Iced tea on a porch? D.A.R. meetings in a columned house? Had women’s colleges officially become archaic in this post-feminist, gender-fluid, college-debt-laden era