NORTHAMPTON — Last Friday, Smith College senior Olivia Petty and two friends made plans to fly a kite near campus, a much-needed break after an unusually intense finals week.
It began with the news that the Trump administration would investigate the historically women’s college over its decade-old policy of admitting transgender women, and ended with Smith students and alumni pressuring college leaders to stand up and fight for trans students.
If the probe finds that Smith’s policy violates Title IX, the law prohibiting sex discrimination in education programs that receive federal assistance, “the Trump administration could attempt to revoke federal funds,” said Shiwali Patel, senior director of education justice at the National Women’s Law Center. Such a punishment would be unlawful since Title IX “clearly states that admissions for private undergraduate institutions are exempt,” Patel said.
“The law hasn’t stopped the Trump administration, but the courts can,” Patel added, “and Smith should fight back.”
Soon after the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights announced the investigation May 4, Smith released a statement saying the school is “fully committed to its institutional values, including compliance with civil rights laws.”
However, the ambiguous response left some students with more questions.
The Trump administration “doesn’t seem to have the same idea of what ‘civil rights’ mean as what we have been taught and what we what we believe,” said Petty, who is the outgoing editor in chief of the student newspaper, The Sophian. “A lot of students were calling for more information and more communication directly from the college.”
Soon, petitions started to circulate among Smith stakeholders, including demands that the college use its $2.7 billion endowment and other assets to defend its policy against the Trump administration, and protect the rights of its transgender students no matter the cost.
“If the administration claims we ‘cannot afford’ to take this stand, they are hiding behind a myth,” wrote one alum, Beck Worrell. “We are not a struggling college forced to sell out its values to keep the lights on. We have the absolute financial freedom to function as a fiercely independent institution.”
Smith had no further comment on Monday.
However, on Tuesday, the college’s Office of Alumnae Relations and Development notified alumni about the investigation by email. “We stand behind our admissions policy and the rights of all members of our community," the message read, noting that the school is “navigating this incredibly nuanced situation with care,” and that the President’s Discretionary Fund is “the most direct, actionable way to stand with Smith.”
The college held a private community meeting Friday by Zoom. At the time, administrators shared that the investigation stemmed from an external source, not an internal complaint, Petty said while sitting with two friends, Addie Bowen and Grace Bullied, in the Calvin Coolidge Presidential Library and Museum at Forbes Library.
“The people who [brought] this complaint, they do not live or study or eat or sleep at Smith,” Petty said. “We do, and we love it here, and we love our trans classmates so much, and they’re not going anywhere.”
Last June, the conservative nonprofit Defending Education filed the complaint with the Department of Education.
Sarah Parshall Perry, the group’s vice president, recently told the Globe she has not visited Smith and that she learned about its policy around the time the school awarded an honorary degree to Admiral Rachel L. Levine, a transgender woman and former Biden official.
Perry said she “immediately wanted to see” whether or not Smith was “still indeed a women’s only institution, or whether or not it was basically lip service, so I did a little digging.”
In a press release, the Department of Education said that allowing students who were born male into women’s spaces “raises serious concerns about privacy, fairness, and compliance under federal law,” while posing a threat to maintaining “a student body that makes possible a particular form of sorority and camaraderie.”
That’s bogus, said Smith senior Francis Ward. “I worked incredibly hard to get to Smith — so did all of the trans women who go here."
Ward added that many students go to Smith for “very similar reasons,” including the desire to have a space away from cisgender men (who identify as male, in accordance with their assigned sex at birth).
“Trans women face transphobia on top of misogyny,” Ward said.
In May 2015, Smith updated its admissions policy to include transgender women, joining a wave of other women’s colleges that made similar changes.
“No matter how this goes, it will shine a painful spotlight on trans women at Smith,” said Lorelei Erisis, a transgender woman who is assistant director of admission at the graduate-level Smith College School for Social Work, but spoke to the Globe as a Northampton resident.
“What I would love to see from the college, and the city, is nothing short of full-throated, unequivocal support for trans women at Smith and for trans people generally,” she said. “This isn’t the time where half measures can be taken.”
Patel, of the National Women’s Law Center, noted that “how the Trump administration responds and also how Smith responds will send a message to other women’s colleges. They’re paying attention.”
This isn’t the first time Smith has been faced with a decision involving its transgender students, Petty noted. Last year the college complied with the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s updated policy that limits competition in women’s sports to student-athletes assigned female at birth.
“Everyone was incredibly upset about it,” Petty said.
“They didn’t just update a policy; they bent the knee,” as Worrell’s recent petition put it. “They showed us they are willing to play a game where the rules are designed to exclude us.”
When Smith alum Zoe Gould heard about the federal probe, she had “a very emotional response” and decided to launch her own petition.
Gould, who graduated last year, addressed her petition to the college’s board of trustees because “Smith is motivated by money,” and leaders need to hear that “they have a base of people . . . who essentially say, ‘We will financially support you if you choose to fight the Trump administration instead of settling with them.’“
Last week, Petty said she believed the Smith administration would stand by its policy, while Bowen, who is a house president on campus, was less sure.
“Even if I’m not sure I have complete faith in the Smith administration, I have a lot of faith in the community around the Smith administration,” Bowen said. “Seeing the way people have rallied around supporting transgender students . . . I have a lot of faith in the Smith administration to listen to how loud that community would be.”
Bullied, a senior, said that as a teacher’s aide at the Campus School of Smith College, she’s particularly concerned that children “who are exploring their pronouns and figuring out their identity . . . still feel safe and comfortable navigating that.”
The friends acknowledged the sensitivity of the situation and said they understood concerns about commenting publicly.
Still, the mayor of Northampton, Gina-Louise Sciarra, a Smith alumna, could issue a statement “pledging, like, we as the city of Northampton stand behind you and we’re committed to keeping Smith students and our residents safe,” Petty said, because “we are residents of Northampton.”
Bowen wants to see the Smith administration “stick to their guns as much as they can.”
”I want incoming students to know that being with women who have a wide range of life experiences is a central part of going to Smith College,” Bowen said.
Petty seconded that idea. “The definition of ‘woman’ is evolving,” she said, “and we are studying it, and we are experiencing it.”
Brooke Hauser can be reached at brooke.hauser@globe.com. Follow her @brookehauser.