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It’s the Title IX time of year again

track.jpgOver at Sports Illustrated, the great Frank Deford has a very interesting piece about Title IX. This is legislation that was passed back during the Nixon Administration, and its intent was basically to provide for equal opportunities for women in schools, although it’s most well-known for opening up women’s sports at colleges. As Deford puts it:

Basically, Title IX says schools must offer athletic programs in proportion with their gender population.

But Deford says that three decades later, while Title IX does provide for female sports, it’s at the expense of male sports programs. And as the percentage of college students begins to skew towards more women than men, there’s a troubling imbalance that has been created (“this creates the strange situation where James Madison [University] will have a women’s track team, but not a men’s”). And there is now a circular Ouroboros-type effect in play, which is only going to make things worse:

Moreover, because so many American boys devote themselves to sports, starting in grade school, working toward an athletic scholarship, neglecting classroom work, the problem can only increase. That is to say, because more boys concentrate on sports, more girls do better academically, so more women get into college and so there are fewer men’s teams with fewer positions for the boys devoting themselves to sports. Hence, even more girls qualify for college, thus fewer men’s sports and so on and on until eventually only a handful of Renaissance men will be populating the few remaining male sports teams.

Deford outlines his proposed solutions, and one is to have Congress basically exempt football from consideration, both because there is no female-version of the sport, and because it is so much more expensive than every other college sport. But I’d take him one step further - why not get rid of the requirement that the programs have to be in proportion with the gender population? Instead, just say that football is excluded and for all other sports there must be an equal number of male and female programs. And perhaps certain sports should also be specifically named such that, if the school offers that sport, it must offer it on both sides.

For example, you could include basketball, baseball/softball, lacrosse and track and field - if a school has a team in any of these sports, it must have a team for both genders. But for the non-listed sports (such as crew, volleyball, polo, or whatever), the school is free to have teams only of one gender, as long as there is some other team for the other gender, so the numbers balance out.

Seems like a relatively simple setup which would address all of the things raised in Deford’s column. And as an aside, I’m not sure I agree with Deford’s proposal to kill all athletic scholarships except for football and basketball. Yes, there is an inherent inequity in giving money to athletes and not to artists. But why not try to push the schools to offer more scholarships on the art side instead? Maybe a similar requirement that, excluding football and basketball, there has to be a one-to-one ratio between sports scholarships and arts scholarships. The individual scholarships may wind up being of a lesser value, in order to avoid prohibitive costs, but I think the end result would be more valuable to the school and society in the long run.

| Comments (4)


Comments

Excluding football and basketball for scholarships? Why should those sports be special? There are tons of scholarships tailor-made for that star football or basketball player, just so they will go to a given college (my favorite was the scholarship made for "fullbacks graduating from X High School who also play trombone"- that sure is a general scholarship, yessir). Who cares if they have to get intensive tutoring to pass every single class! Maybe if there wasn't the option that a guy could get into whatever school he wanted as long as he could play football, guys might be forced to pay more attention to their schoolwork. As long as colleges are willing to shell out money to anyone that will win their games, regardless of their academic qualifications, there will be a subset of guys that aren't going to bother with grades.

Hear, hear Phaeolus.

I also find the SI author's logic problematic in that he assumes that all men focus on sports and therefore we are on a slippery slope to no men in college. I'm on a college campus everyday and there are lots of guys there who are not playing sports (and lots of women to, btw).

Plus, football is the culprit for much over spending of athletic budgets. Take away a few overnights (at home)in a hotel and you fund a full golf team for men or women. Most football teams do not generate money. The schools where it does tend to have many sports for both men and women. It's how you choose to spend the dollars. If Div. III programs can fully fund every sport so can Div. I's.

I was actually thinking further about this, and I realized something else. Those colleges with money-making football teams tend to have lots of other sports, as you mentioned, baumer. That's because the football cashflow is lumped in with the rest of the athletic deparment, so they have to share the profits with the other sports. I wonder what would happen if football were excluded from that? Something tells me those schools wouldn't have quite the diversity of athletics they do now. Plus, if football were allowed to return all its profits to just football, it would really separate out the haves and the have-nots. Now that's somewhat mitigated by the profit-sharing going on.