Ave atque vale

My goal for 2007 is to get back on track with this and try to update it at least once a week. I might start including my running diary as well, but we'll see.

In the interim, I wanted to write a short remembrance of two college presidents who died this year well before their time--Kermit Hall of SUNY-Albany and Father Jim Loughran of St. Peter's College. I didn't know either one well, but got to go beyond generic interviews with both of them when I worked for The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Kermit was one of the most thoughtful people I ever met. From all I could tell, he was a capable administrator and leader. But he also remained a scholar even after moving to the dark side of administration, continuing to publish on the history of the Supreme Court and other topics. In terms of college sports, he was willing to criticize the current system ruled by the conferences and the NCAA, but he was no bombthrower. He and Scott Cowan of Tulane were the leaders of the effort to convince the Bowl Championship Series leaders to share the wealth with lower-profile colleges and conferences.

Few people know this, but Father Jim was a member of The Drake Group. He also was realistic about his ability to change the system of Division I sports, even within his own college. But he saw first-hand the politics and pressure that athletics brings to an institution through his tenure at Loyola Marymount, Brooklyn College of CUNY, and St. Peter's.

As I move into the academy and yea unto the valley of the shadow of administration, the message I carry from both these men is the combination of idealism and realism. You have to understand politics and be committed to incrementalism if you're going to survive at a college or a university. But you also have to leave your office, see your students and faculty as they grow and teach and learn, and recognize that your job is to help them achieve all of those things. It is not an easy balancing act, but Kermit and Father Jim seemed to do it better than most.

Skate or die, chicks!

Great story in the Times this morning about female skaters wanting air time during the X-Games. Ultimately, the whole action-sports enterprise has been created by ESPN trying to lure back kids who have left mainstream sports (playing and viewing) behind, and an ESPN guy in the story points out (quite reasonably) that his ultimate responsibility to his audience, and that audience is male teenagers.
Skating, though, is one of those sports where women might be able to compete against men at no physical disadvantage. Skating requires a lot of athleticism and core muscle strength, but not necessarily the speed or muscle density that, say, sprinting or playing basketball demands. I have a feeling that there's a 14-year-old female gymnast out there, tired of starving herself, who could make Shaun White cry.

Championships and female athletes

A shout-out to my former colleagues at The Chronicle of Higher Education, who published the magazine's annual look at gender equity today. This is the best resource for current information on Title IX and college sports out there, and Brad Wolverton and his pals picked up on a number of very interesting trend. Chief among them: women have about 25 percent fewer chances to compete for national titles than men, based on the number that get to participate in all kinds of postseason events--championship tournaments, bowl games, and the NIT, which the NCAA acquired last year to settle litigation.
The NCAA is not legally bound by Title IX, but the organization has endorsed gender equity consistently since the mid-90s. So this finding puts Myles Brand and co. in an interesting position. So does the recent retirement of vice-president Judy Sweet, who has been an out-front activist for Title IX in Indianapolis. Also, the position of assistant director of education services, the NCAA job that traditionally produces Title IX activism, is vacant at the moment. Hmm.

Memo to AD: Don't cut women's sports

You'd think athletics directors would have learned a few lawsuits back that if you have a major disparity between the representation of women on athletic teams and in the study body, you can't cut women's sports. You just can't. Period.
But instead, Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania had to learn the hard way. What makes this decision--to cut women's field hockey, lacrosse, and water polo--particularly boneheaded is that SRU's rival Indiana University of Pennsylvania was the defendant in one of the precedent-setting cases in Title IX litigation.

Renewing the fight over men and women in higher education

This week, The New York Times has reinvigorated the debate over Title IX, both in higher education (where women now represent a sizable majority of students) and more specifically in sports. A news story describes small liberal-arts colleges adding football teams to boost their male populations, while in an op-ed John Tierney calls on colleges to call off Title IX enforcement. His argument, in essence, is that we ought to leave sports to the boys, since they're under attack in so many other areas in education. His op-ed produced an onslaught of letters, including one from me.

Three issues are at work here. First, nobody has figured out why there are so many more women than men in American higher education, despite recent reports from the American Council on Education and the Education Sector. Despite what ACE says, this is not only an issue of African-American and Hispanic women flooding the higher education more than men from those groups, though that does appear to be the case. Most elite schools, including public universities, research institutions, and especially liberal-arts colleges are struggling to find men who can pay $40,000+ a year to attend. Remember the stir caused by the admissions dean at Kenyon College, who described her affirmative-action practices in a Times op-ed earlier this year?

Second, colleges of all shapes and sizes use sports in ways that do not lend themselves very well to complying with Title IX. At the big Division I-A schools, football and men's basketball teams bring in thousands of fans and miles of headlines (usually not millions of dollars, but that's a separate argument). At small liberal-arts colleges, admissions directors use sports to drive up enrollment, particularly of men--not just male athletes, but men who want to go to a school with a football team. This has been going on for at least a decade, but it takes the Times to make it a trend. I had a short conversation with Gerald Reynolds, then the assistant secretary of education for civil rights, three or four years ago wondering if colleges could use athletic programs to boost male enrollments and thus correct a gender issue in their overall student bodies. He was curious but noncommittal.

Third, the inescapable irony is that arguments about Title IX always have to do with men--the sex that has enjoyed advantages throughout Western history. Why do we look at the numbers of women in higher education as a crisis or a problem for boys? It's just amusing.

I knew it!

In what I think is going to be a trend, the Marathon of the Palm Beaches has more female than male entrants. (West Palm evidently was recently named the most vain city in America in terms of plastic surgery, according to Kevin Beck; whether there is a connection isn't clear.
Jeff Galloway told me awhile back about the first and second running booms--the first consisted of the serious guys (mostly, but not all, guys) who were inspired to go out and do great things by Frank Shorter and Bill Rodgers. The second, current, boom is about lifestyle runners--people who get the bug and love to race several times a month, run, get the gear, etc. but are not necessarily super-competitive. They run for the social life, not to kick your butt.
So given the conversation below about whether the men's standards are tougher than the women's, and the commonly-held belief that there are fewer "serious" female athletes than male athletes, are women responsible for the second, social running boom?

Is U. of Cincinnati dragging its feet on rowing?

A group of rowers at the University of Cincinnati has filed suit against the university alleging Title IX violations. This is a relatively common suit that will probably get more common: athletes are not suing schools that don't offer particular sports; they're alleging that the school is not treating a group of female athletes as well as they treat male athletes. In UC's case, the school has not built a promised boathouse and that athletes are not getting uniforms, trainers, and other benefits like other Bearcat squads.
This is a tough year for Cincinnati. They just fired a popular basketball coach, Bob Huggins, and are in their first year in the unwieldy Big East Conference. So it's unsurprising if they haven't made rowing--a sport usually added to provide a significant boost to the number of female athletes on varsity teams--a priority.
But this case is the classic example of the business vs. education problem in sports. From a financial standpoint, it makes no sense to spend $2 million on a boathouse for 60 women; UC only makes money from basketball, and to a limited extent football. But from an educational standpoint, colleges are required to treat female athletes as well as they treat men, thanks to Title IX. If the benefits provided to women athletes lag those of men, then the university has a problem. This is a good case to track.

Nice series

A newspaper in Kentucky has a lot of good information and good stats about Title IX in local high schools. Kentucky is the home of one of the more notable Title IX court cases, Horner v. KHSAA, in which a softball player established that the state discriminated against girls by offering slow-pitch, but not fast-pitch, softball.