Link Banana

Alissa Quart does an admirable job tackling the difficult issue of transmen (and others who don’t identify as female) fit in at traditional women’s colleges.

Many trans students feel themselves to be excluded or isolated at women’s schools and at coed colleges. Some talk of being razzed or insulted by fellow students. And even within a college’s gender-nonconforming population, students are often divided among those who define themselves as men but don’t transition medically, those who do and those who prefer not to define themselves as either male or female.

These difficulties are a natural part of being a minority that is still fighting for acceptance. But trans students’ problems can also be institutional. The presence of trans students at women’s colleges can’t help raising the question of whether — or to what degree — these colleges can serve students who no longer see themselves as women.

I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s staggering to see the figures up close.

“It’s a huge difference,” said Sandy Baum, an economist at Skidmore College. “You don’t have to go very far down the food chain before you get to institutions that feel real constraints about how they spend money. Princeton can do what they want to do, but not many schools can.”

Skidmore, in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., is not exactly poor; its endowment reached $287 million last year. But the growth alone in Harvard’s endowment last year was $5.7 billion — a sum bigger than all but 14 other universities’ total endowments.