Fresh off his latest National Review cover story depicting key problems plaguing the world of higher education, Steven Hayward writes for the Powerline blog about an interesting development from Virginia.

Along with the OU expulsions, the big story in higher education over the last week or so is the surprise announcement that Sweet Briar College will be closing its doors at the end of this academic year. Although the college as an endowment somewhere near $90 million, declining enrollment at the all-womens’ college has led the trustees to conclude that there is no future for a single-sex school out in rural Virginia. Sweet Briar’s fate is being heralded as a harbinger of the coming collapse of the “higher education bubble” (Glenn ReynoldsTM), especially small liberal arts colleges, which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.

But there is an amazing failure of imagination here—rooted in the institutional liberalism pervasive in higher ed—and a terrific opportunity for an educational entrepreneur.

One of the claims about why the college has no future is that its location is too remote from the attractions of urban civilization necessary for today’s students. Excuse me, but has anyone around Sweet Briar ever heard of Hillsdale College, which is much more remote than Sweet Briar, and yet thrives for the simple reason that it is self-consciously different (that is, conservative) from other liberal arts colleges.

So what if Sweet Briar had decided that instead of trying to compete head-to-head with Smith and Wellesley, they self-consciously set out to be the anti-Smith and anti-Wellesley? I have little doubt that a women’s college that advertised its deliberate rejection of the gender politics of “mainstream” womens’ educational institutions would have no shortage of applicants for admission.

This would have required an act of imagination on the part of Sweet Briar’s president, James F. Jones, Jr., and the trustees. But of course Jones is your typical mediocre liberal.