Going Dutch: several U.S. colleges offer gay studies, but only one sends its students to Amsterdam for the course work. (Education).

As millions of students head back to colleges across the country this month, officials at some of their schools will be debating the merits of adding gay studies programs to their curriculums. Administrators at the University of North Carolina, for example, announced at the end of July that they were considering the addition of a sexuality studies program at the Chapel Hill school. Advocates of the program say its institution would help foster better understanding and acceptance of gay people on the Southern campus.

And while the proposed program at UNC and those already in place at schools such as Duke University, the University of Michigan, and the University of California, Berkeley, are certainly groundbreaking, there is a gay studies program at a comparatively small Vermont school that should really have officials at these bigger colleges taking notice.

Based in Brattleboro, Vt., the School for International Training has been offering Sexuality, Gender, and Identity to students for close to a decade. For the semester-long study-abroad program, students are sent to Amsterdam, where they are introduced to the city's vibrant gay and lesbian communities and, in some cases, live with gay host families. The program costs about $13,700 per student, and students receive 16 undergraduate credits that are accepted at most U.S. universities, says Rebecca Hovey, dean of SIT's study-abroad program.

For the first several years, attendance hovered around 6-8 students a semester, but in 1998 participation suddenly doubled, Hovey says. Seventeen students are participating in the fall 2002 semester. "I think part of the reason for [the program's jump in popularity] is because more American undergraduate colleges are addressing GLBT concerns," she says. "Gay and lesbian studies is emerging as an academic field of study the way women's studies and ethnic studies did in the 1970s."

Though a graduate school domestically, SIT offers a number of study-abroad programs for undergraduates, including Modernization and Social Change in Jordan and Women and Democratization in the Balkans, but the sexuality program is among the school's most popular.

It's also among the school's most academically challenging programs. In addition to an independent study project (topics include male prostitution, domestic-partnership laws, and how religious and sexual identities relate to each other), students also must complete a field-study seminar in addition to the program's main seminar, which includes trips to London and Berlin to compare other European attitudes toward gender and sexuality with the Dutch perspective. Trips to a sex-reassignment clinic and to the Sachsenhausen or Ravensbruck concentration camps to learn about the Nazi persecution of gays and lesbians are some of the other excursions.

When the program was first conceptualized, the Netherlands seemed like the natural choice. "The Netherlands is in such a unique situation," says Peg Alden, who is the founding academic director of ...