Last April, I got an email from a faculty member at Sweet Briar College, a small women’s college in rural Virginia. The college was preparing to choose its Common Read for the following academic year, she told me, and they were considering Mobility, my second novel. They wanted to know whether I would consider coming to the campus to speak to the students, all of whom would receive a copy of my book, and what fee I would charge to do so. For a writer of literary fiction, a genre that famously does not sell very well, it is a big deal for an institution to buy 500 copies of your book. I named a fee that was probably half of what it should have been, and I was thrilled when they agreed.
I am a chronic, constitutional procrastinator. A year after this exchange and a few hours before the red-eye that was supposed to take me from Portland to the east coast, I sat down to write my 45-minute keynote address. As I began stitching together my thoughts, I realized I should probably do some research about where I was going (this was a great way to procrastinate even further, and emblematic of the excruciating way I wrote the novel in the first place).
Mobility is a bildungsroman about a young woman who falls into a career in the oil industry, and I wanted to speak to the students about how this particular young woman related to her historical moment. I wanted to talk about the messages this young woman received about work and ambition, and how we make choices about our lives. But I also wanted to be sure I wasn’t projecting onto an audience that might actually have little in common with my protagonist. So I did a cursory google of Sweet Briar College and its student body.
Sweet Briar’s new President and Board of Directors had taken an unpublicized vote to change the admissions policy to explicitly exclude trans people
I have a friend who talks very seriously about following her gut, and this has sometimes exasperated me. What can a gut say. But the first page of search results registered directly in the gut. Within a few minutes I learned that last May, Sweet Briar’s new president and board of directors had taken an unpublicized vote to change the admissions policy to explicitly exclude trans people and nonbinary students. This new policy, which requires of an applicant “that her sex assigned at birth is female and that she consistently lives and identifies as a woman,” put Sweet Briar out of step with the vast majority of women’s colleges in the United States, most of which do not feel the need to ascribe an anatomical component to their admissions language.
When the new policy became public knowledge in August, there was an outcry. Current students who did not meet this criteria were told they would be able to stay at the college for the duration of their studies, but the policy was explicit that were they to apply now, they would not get in. Students and alumni organized; the faculty voted 48 to 4 to rescind the policy. A poll found as many as 38 percent of sophomores and a quarter of freshmen were considering leaving the school if the policy stayed in place. It became known that the board’s vote was not unanimous, although the nay votes were not publicized. One board member resigned.
The new president, Mary Pope Hutson, was a prolific fundraiser without an academic background who evidently felt that a policy of exclusion was the most pressing business of her new regime. She defended the policy on the grounds that it was necessary to honor the intent of founder Indiana Fletcher Williams, a daughter of the South who died in 1899 and donated her family plantation to become a school for young white women women (it sued to desegregate in 1966, overturning the founder’s language to do so). In December, the state’s right-wing attorney general gleefully upheld the decision. Hutson threatened dissenters with legal action.
I knew none of this. While the admissions policy had garnered some national attention, it had not made its way to my corner of the internet. But now I had this information, and I could not un-have it. I felt sick that the school had done this, and I felt a selfish sort of sick that this was now going to be my problem. I knew if I went, even to give some fiery speech about how shitty the policy was, I would have this feeling the whole time and maybe forever after that. I knew that if I didn’t go, it was going to create a Situation. But I listened to my gut, and I texted my writer friends, and I talked to my 10-year-old, and I had a difficult conversation with the organizer, and then I changed my flight (for complex family reasons I still had to get to the east coast that week). I stayed up late trying to write a letter that adequately conveyed my dismay.
I finished this letter and sent it off while waiting in the airport bar the next morning, vibrating with fatigue and adrenaline and drinking a mimosa that cost 18 dollars to forget the financial carnage of returning the honorarium and forgoing the travel reimbursement. I posted the letter on various social media accounts. Within an hour of taking off I had gotten an email from a stranger that just said “thank you.” Soon there was another one. I started getting Instagram follow requests from people who were obviously college students. Soon I learned that the students had been told via email that I was simply “unable to come.”
But someone had seen the letter and sent it around. Before the plane landed I had a huffy response from the president Mary Pope Hutson herself, who told me that by not coming I was committing a form of self-censorship, and that I had furthermore maligned the memory of their founder by ascribing her with racist attitudes (more on this later). Apparently she sent this letter to all of the students, and then I got even more emails, apologizing for the president’s rudeness with indignation and touching solicitude.
These students, past and present, responded in a way that was so fierce, so principled, so passionate, and so righteous, that it humbled me.
There is nothing special about my decision to cancel a visit. I was guided by the many artists who have modeled refusal in the last couple of years, particularly as it pertains the genocide underway in Gaza. Just a few weeks prior, my friend Manjula Martin had joined other writers in withdrawing from the PEN World Voices Festival over PEN America’s failure to mobilize around genocide and the murder of Palestinian journalists and writers. My friend Omar El Akkad had just published a book culminating with the possibilities of refusal. As he put it, “To walk away from this system is to speak the only language the system will ever understand.” Shortly before writing this I read a crystal-clear letter by the artist Nathalie Batraville, who refused to lend her credibility to Columbia University as they collaborate with the Trump administration to betray their students.
I’m writing about it here, though, because I want to tell you about the response that my refusal garnered from this small school in rural Virginia—a school that, with truly boundless respect to the Sweet Briar Vixens (holla holla!), my Virginian in-laws have told me was once considered a kind of finishing school for elite young ladies, and not a hotbed of activism. These students, past and present, responded in a way that was so fierce, so principled, so passionate, and so righteous, that it humbled me. It also confirmed without a shadow of a doubt that I had done the right thing, and gave me a sense of hope during what is so far possibly the worst American year of my lifetime.
My DMs were flooded with follow requests and messages of thanks. I had scores of emails. An alum venmoed me $100 to chip in toward the lost honorarium, and $5, and $20. (I appeared on a college meme account, a highlight of my middle age.) People poured forth gratitude and information. I learned that beloved Sweet Briar faculty and staff had been forced out of the school as a consequence of their dissent from this policy, that emails were being monitored, that language was policed, that faced with the unpopularity of their policy the administration’s primary tool was repression.
When I went on the local news, I expected that I would start to hear from trolls. (I got one, very lackluster.) But more support rolled in. I learned all kinds of things about the history of Sweet Briar. The irony is that these students fucking love this school. They are furious not only at the disrespect the policy shows to them and their classmates, but at the way it tarnishes the home and reputation of the Vixens.
I love these Sweet Briar students, who I never got the chance to meet. When I think about myself at their age, the only thing I can be proud of—and it’s a very low bar—is that I understood that the Iraq war was bad. (My dad was an early model for refusal in this regard, when he resigned from the US Foreign Service to protest the impending invasion.) Did I do anything about my convictions? No. Did I believe that I was a force for change in the world or had any obligation to my fellow humans? No. (In fact, the experience of knowing something was bad and seeing it happen anyway suspended me in a kind of moral aspic for the next several years.) Did I have an expansive view of identity, or a solid understanding of structural injustice? No. Did I do anything besides smoke cigs, binge drink Keystone Light, and hand in assignments very, very late? Not really, not very much. In fact, reflecting on the obliviousness of my early adulthood is partly what inspired the writing of Mobility, a novel about how easy it is to drift where the currents of capital take you, in a vessel constructed by your class. But these students at Sweet Briar are not like that. They are awake. They are steering the boat.
There is no way to play three-dimensional chess with bigots.
Their present situation reflects a broader dilemma in America: A large group of people feels one way, while a small group with a disproportionate amount of structural power tells them they are wrong to feel it. This is particularly true for college students around the country. Their Instagram feeds are full of eviscerated children, but their passionate protest—the real-world application of everything their liberal, humanistic education was supposed to impart—has made them criminal, first in the eyes of their school administrators, and now to their government. The tactics of the protest movements they read about in their textbooks comprise illegal acts. The day after I canceled my visit, a dean at Sweet Briar told the students that they could no longer display flags on campus, lest one of those flags be a trans flag. All chalk messages on the campus grounds must be positive.
There are pundits who are dining out on a theory that the Democrats handed the election to Donald Trump, and Elon Musk, and Nayib Bukele, because the Democrats insisted on caring about trans people (they didn’t), and that “gender ideology” is upsetting to most Americans, and that these Americans were thus forced to vote for some of the worst people of all time. This is morally bankrupt. There is no way to play three-dimensional chess with bigots. Had I followed Mary Pope Hutson’s fatuous hypothetical and come to campus to engage in “dialogue” about the intentions of a long-dead woman who may or may not have been more open-minded and less racist than her contemporaries, I would cede ground to the idea that someone’s humanity, today, is up for debate.
It’s also just stupid. What I heard from the students at Sweet Briar College was not hate, but love, and they are ascendant. When I sent President Hutson her check, I wrote another letter to tell her that her students are amazing. I feel so bad about the tenor of the country right now, but I feel so good about the Vixens. The kids are all right. It’s time for the adults to catch up.