Last week, Scripps College celebrated the second annual National Women’s Colleges and Universities Day at its weekly Wednesday tea. In the wake of new Trump-era gender definitions and budget cuts targeting women’s research initiatives, many students and faculty members stressed the timely importance of celebrating women’s colleges.
National Women’s Colleges and Universities Day was first celebrated in 2025 after the Women’s College Coalition (WCC), an organization of around 30 women’s colleges and universities in the United States and Canada, lobbied Congress to recognize the contributions of women’s higher education institutions. Scripps remains one of the few women’s colleges and universities in the United States after many have become coeducational or closed in the last 70 years.
For the second year in a row, each college in the WCC agreed to host an event in honor of the day. Scripps’ Laspa Center for Leadership — which aims to promote inclusive gender equity through experiential learning and professional development — was responsible for organizing this year’s weekly tea at Seal Court. The event’s organizers rotate among different departments and organizations on campus, allowing community members to socialize over food and tea.
Celebrating Scripps as a historically women’s college and a gender inclusive space, Maldonado said, was incorporated into the existing tea event to encourage people from across the consortium to attend.
“Tea is a very well attended event — it has kind of a relaxed air to it, and it attracts people from all over [the 5Cs],” Maldonado said. “So it was the best way to engage with the most people in the middle of the day.”
Last week’s special tea event’s centerpiece was a poster where students could write about their experience at a historically women’s college. Students also played a game in which they rolled a die with the names of notable women’s college alums and guessed which institution they attended.
“Our interns identified many women leaders who had graduated from women’s colleges,” Laspa Director Gretchen Maldonado said. “We wanted something that could be fun to keep the environment light, but also honor our mission.”
Under the current Trump administration, women’s colleges have faced new challenges, including policy changes as well as directives that target transgender people, shift Title IX regulations and cut budgets for DEI initiatives. The administration has also made efforts to recognize sex as a binary — male and female — restricting sex-segregated spaces to biological sex. For historically women’s colleges that admit transgender and non-binary students, these actions create uncertainty about admissions policies, campus housing and eligibility for federal funding.
Amid these recent challenges, Laspa intern Geeta Karlcut SC ’26 noted the importance of acknowledging the struggles of women and gender-diverse people in education.
“In this political climate where a lot of things like race and gender are being very politicized, it’s so important to honor and acknowledge all the struggles that women and other gender diverse people have been going through,” Karlcut said. “[We need] to do our best to draw attention to it and highlight and celebrate the people that have made such big impacts in our communities.”
Alison Mertz SC ’28 said she is not overly concerned about Scripps being targeted, as it is a predominantly white institution.
“I feel like I’m a little concerned about women’s spaces being targeted,” Mertz said. “But considering that Scripps is a predominantly white space, I just don’t feel like [the Trump administration] is as likely to go after it, as opposed to other schools that are more diverse.”
Laspa intern Sadia Yasmin SC ’28, on the other hand, echoed Karlcut, saying that celebration could be a pathway to resistance and a continued fight to protect gender-diverse spaces in education.
“Celebrate [to] inspire others to take risks in their life, go [get an] education, make an impact and do something for the better,” Yasmin said.
Other colleges have recently felt the impact of budget cuts and policy changes. Last year, historically women’s colleges like Mount Holyoke College saw a series of abrupt grant terminations targeting women’s research initiatives deemed nonscientific, such as maternal health, gender equity and women’s leadership in STEM.
Last year, conservative legal group Defending Education filed a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights stating that Smith College’s policy to admit transgender women violated Title IX by allowing biological males to enter sex-specific programs and spaces.
Maldonado said colleges in the WCC are acting with caution, aiming to avoid political scrutiny without compromising student experience.
“I think that every WCC [member], including [Scripps], is paying very close attention to what’s being discussed and what’s being done,” Maldonado said. “We are being as careful as possible to continue our mission.”
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