Barnard College Opens Discussion About Transgender Admissions
NEW YORK (CBSNewYork) -- Barnard College has been focused on educating women since 1889. But now its Board of Trustees faces a profound question: Should the school accept transgender students?
Debora Spar, president of the undergraduate college at Columbia University, is posing the question to the Barnard community in a series of town hall meetings and online forums, as the board develops a formal admissions policy, WCBS 880's Monica Miller reported.
Spar wrote in a letter to the school community last week that gender identity is more complicated and ambiguous than was once commonly believed.
Barnard College Opens Discussion About Transgender Admissions
"As a result, many organizations -- from the U.S. military to the International Olympic Committee -- are grappling with the implications of unraveling gender distinctions that in an earlier time were considered absolute," Spar wrote. "For women's colleges, these questions are particularly profound. Because we are women's colleges, after all, dedicated both philosophically and legally to educating only women. Federal law permits us to discriminate in admissions on the basis of sex, and we do.
"With changes afoot all around, however, and a mission that requires us to 'address issues of gender in all of their complexity and urgency,' the time has come for us to examine how we, as a women's college, define 'women,' and how, consequently, we both admit and graduate students," Spar added.
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