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Finally, some Title IX sanity.

Discussion in 'Sports and News' started by micropolitan guy, Oct 5, 2006.

  1. joe king

    joe king Active Member

    I don't know enough about the JMU situation. Perhaps it's a bad example. But that doesn't mean it doesn't happen often. And if there is a budget shortfall and cuts have to be made, men's sports are always at the front of the line. It's why UCLA no longer has men's swimming or gymnastics, why SMU has no men's track team and why Providence has no baseball team, even though all were strong, nationally ranked programs. At UCLA, two women's teams (water polo and soccer) were added at the same time the men's programs were cut, leaving little doubt gender equity played a leading role in the move.
     
  2. outofplace

    outofplace Well-Known Member

     
  3. micropolitan guy

    micropolitan guy Well-Known Member

    Nope, I'm not at all cynical. Far from it. But please pay attention to what happens at JMU, and I'll bet dollars to donuts I'm right. It's happened elsewhere, most recently at Bucknell or Lehigh, I believe.

    It's difficult to be in compliance with a law that is written one way, and enforced another. Proportionality is expressly prohibited, yet it's used as the prime mode of measuring compliance. The other two prongs of compliance are meaningless because it always comes back to proportionality.

    Thirty years ago (around the time you were born, I'm guessing) there were very few college women's athletic teams. Now there are thousands. As has been stated in this thread, women's participation and funding in college athletics has exploded, increased by thousands of percent. Scholarships abound. I'd say Title IX is working, and it's a great thing.

    In the meantime, men's participation has flatlined, and hundreds of programs have been eliminated. Many of these programs were fully endowed, or could have been endowed because there were plenty of people ready to raise the money (Fresno State wrestling/soccer, for example) to fund them. But they were still eliminated, so budgets weren't always the reason. It all comes back to proportionality, because that's a measureable.

    You say the law is fine. I'l be interested in your opinion if you have male children who grow up wanting to be wrestlers, or runners, or throwers, or swimmers, or gymnasts, and you discover these sports are no longer sponsored by your state university.

    There has to be a compromise here. Starman's makes the most sense.
     
  4. buckweaver

    buckweaver Active Member

    From cynical to condescending. That wasn't necessary. ::)

    But yes, there has to be a compromise here. Starman's makes sense -- but only, I think, if the NCAA goes all the way in separating football (not men's basketball, however. That shouldn't be separate, IMO.) Schools are betrothed to the idea that "student-athletes" participate in football when it is all too clear that football players, and football teams, are treated differently than any other element at the school.

    It is football that forces ADs to ask rowing coaches to recruit 50 girls to a team. They like to scapegoat Title IX, but it is football-as-big-business that forces the balance so out-of-whack, not the law. I repeat: The law is fine. It is the way the schools operate that must change -- and football is the elephant in the room that nobody wants to change.
     
  5. Inky_Wretch

    Inky_Wretch Well-Known Member

    Exactly.

    Screwed up your athletic department budget and need to make cuts? Blame it on Title IX.
     
  6. micropolitan guy

    micropolitan guy Well-Known Member

    Not being condescending at all, and I'm truly sorry you took it that way. I'm not a condescending type of person.

    But from your posts, I'm guessing you're in your late 20s. That means you first became aware of college sports in the late 1980s, when Title IX was already in full motion and the landscape was already changing dramatically for those of us who went to high school and college in the late 1960s-early 1970s, when women's sports were non-existent.

    To those my age, the change has been remarkable because women's sports came from nothing. To someone in their 20s, women's sports have always been that way.

    Those my age remember when everyone had men's track, wrestling, baseball, tennis and swimming teams. To those in their 20s, many of those programs had already been eliminated in the first round of cutbacks in the 1980s.

    I'd agree there, to a point. But what are you going to do, eliminate the most popular sport in the country from college athletics? Eliminate the one program that basically subsidizes every other sport at the I-A level, and is the sport that most alums connect to their university through after they're gone?
     
  7. Inky_Wretch

    Inky_Wretch Well-Known Member

    From a GAO report...

     
  8. Cadet

    Cadet Guest

    I'm not complaining about those who disagree. In fact, I think our whole discussion here has been intelligent and civil, which has been great.

    And MG, I wasn't calling you a mysogynist or naive. To clarify my feelings, I think the writer of the T-D piece was naive about the law and specific phrases he used smacked of mysogeny. My guess is I'd have the same reaction to this writer addressing any topic where gender is a primary issue, and possibly even those where it isn't.

    Because initially the proportionality prong was incorrectly earmarked as the only "safe harbor" for compliance. The OCR has issued clarifications stating this is not the case, but it hasn't seemed to sink in. And if the window dressing situaiton were true, why would the Bush Administration bother issuing a clarification specifically addressing the interest prong?

    Part of the problem has been enforcing the law to begin with, but that's a whole 'nother issue. That goes back, again, to schools using Title IX as a scapegoat. It's not like these schools have undergone an OCR review to determine compliance and are now cutting programs as the result of that. If anything, the schools are trying to seem as if they are being proactive by coming into compliance when, in fact, they're using the law as a smoke screen.

    And I agree that proof of a met interest would be substantial for compliance and, in turn, football wouldn't need to make an exclusionary argument. However, problems come with proving met interest. That is a very complex issue that takes a great deal of effort on the part of athletic administrations. I won't detail what the correct approach should be, but the incorrect approach would be to use the e-mail surveys as the Bush Administration highlighted in its 2005 clarification.

    Perfect on paper, perhaps. But the issue is an institutional one, not just an athletic department one, and needs to be addressed by the institution as a whole instead of splintering off groups.

    There is a reason that athletic departments, which were formerly split in the AIAW era, have joined together in the 26 years since the NCAA incorporated the AIAW. Budgetary. It’s all about the money.

    You will find proponents of having separate athletic departments, not for Title IX reasons, but because they believe that women’s teams should be led by female coaches under the guidance of female administrators. They believe that taking away all that female leadership – relegating those roles into just the usually-ineffective SWA position – has hurt women’s programs in the long run.

    Also, I don't think it's appropriate to look at this in a context of men's sports vs. women's sports. I think the better vantage point is "revenue" sports vs. "non-revenue" sports. Should men's swimming be protected by the "male athletic department" just because football players happen to be male and therefore can (theoretically) bring in the money to support the male swimmers? How does that solve a gender discrimination issue?

    At most schools the dividing line is the one between Olympic sports and football. Not just on paper, but in the mentality of the administrations, support staffs and coaches. The men's swim coach is going to feel more of a kinship to the women's swim coach than the football coach.

    And yes, I have picked on football in these responses. I believe that men's basketball is to a point where women's basketball is an equal counterpart in terms of revenue, expenses, program expectations and the like. Not at every school, obviously, but enough to balance out across the board.

    Ha! Though I will say they do have a historical institutional sexism, simply because JMU started out as a normal school for women only. Men weren't admitted until 1948. :)
     
  9. Cadet

    Cadet Guest

    This is a chicken-or-egg issue. Women's programs don't have the endowments because they have no alumni (or a smaller alumni base relative to men's programs). The don't have alumni because they didn't have programs. Universities are starting to see and will see a huge explosion in female athletic alumni support in the next generation.
     
  10. micropolitan guy

    micropolitan guy Well-Known Member

    And women couldn't go to UVa until the late 1960s, or to VMI until recently. The whole commonwealth is going to hell in a handbasket, if you ask me, the latest manifestation being god-dammed GMU making the Final Four. ;)
     
  11. PopeDirkBenedict

    PopeDirkBenedict Active Member

    Ladies and gentlemen, Senator Macacawitz!
     
  12. Justin_Rice

    Justin_Rice Well-Known Member

    Blatent self promotion time ....


    Here's the first in a two-parter on Title IX compliance at Virginia high schools. Basically almost no one is in compliance ... until OCR comes along and forces them to.


    http://news.fredericksburg.com/newsdesk/2013/07/06/do-schools-play-fair-with-girls-sports/
     
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