A Place on the Team: The Triumph and Tragedy of Title IX By Welch Suggs

Ave atque vale

2006-12-29T13:02:00.000-05:00

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!

2006-07-26T09:41:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-24T16:19:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-24T16:11:00.000-04:00

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

2006-07-14T09:30:00.000-04:00

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!

2005-12-03T10:20:00.000-05:00

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?

2005-11-29T09:03:00.000-05:00

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

2005-11-27T14:20:00.000-05:00

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.

This is only a test...

2005-11-15T09:04:00.000-05:00

The NCAA has a new blog up. I'm trying to see if the trackback function works if I link to a particular post.
Right now the site is mostly propaganda with a little news-analysis from the NCAA's youngest staffers. I have to say that of the 150+ NCAA staffers I've met over the years, I've had problems with less than a handful. The organization somehow manages to get the most thoughtful, diligent, and hardworking people to agree to come to Indianapolis and spend most of their days being bureaucrats and bad guys. Occasionally they get to be policymakers and celebrants, so that must make the job worth it.
This love fest doesn't mean I don't enjoy criticizing them. Many of them speak powerpoint much better than English. But to a person, NCAA staffers are the most professional you'll ever find. Take it from a former Beltway insider.

Scientific data: Who needs it?

2005-11-09T13:52:00.000-05:00

An education blogger weighs in on the dissonance between the Ed Department's love of data (see: No Child Left Behind) and the Title IX clarification.

Boston women

2005-11-03T12:19:00.000-05:00

Wow, it's been way too long since I updated this. The short version of the hiatus: I left The Chronicle of Higher Education back in June, became associate director of the Knight Foundation Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics and went back to school for a Ph.D. in higher education policy at the University of Georgia. Someday I'll get out of sports altogether, but I'm still in the game. So to speak.
I've been a runner and a student of running since junior high, when I used to sit in the library poring over copies of Track and Field News for hours. I still run, at least when I'm not injured, and keep up with sites like letsrun.com and fast-women.com.
The author of the latter, Alison Wade, mentioned off-handedly on her blog that "It is widely acknowledged that the women's Boston qualifying standards are easier than the men's. Even with this being the case, Boston still ends up with a larger men's field. Until there are more women running and the sport becomes more competitive, this will likely continue to be the case." She goes on to say that the Olympic Trials qualifying standards in the marathon are weaker for women than for men.
I disagreed, prompting a discussion and an additional thought from Alison. So far, 18 comments have been posted on her blog, so other people must find this question as interesting as Alison and I do.
In that discussion, the consensus seems to be that yes, the Boston standard (3 hours, 40 minutes for women aged 18-34, 3:10 for men in the same age group) is in fact easier for women, and that it is purposefully set to control field sizes (i.e., to attract more women). But nobody presents any evidence (statistical for the first claim, interviews with Boston folks for the second) to back up either point.
I just don't think you can say "3:10 is tougher for men than 3:40 is for women." It just doesn't make any sense, because the way sports are set up, particularly in this country, boys compete against boys and girls against girls from a fairly early age, from puberty if not earlier. In most individual sports like running, we give out prizes separately for male and female contestants. With my running posse in DC, which consisted mostly of women, I could beat them handily in races but they usually took home prizes for winning the race or their age group. Was this fair? Of course. That's the way sport is set up.
Alison is certainly correct that there are a lot more guys than women out there keeping up with the sport, training and competing to achieve standards they set for themselves. That is changing, though: in some big races, like the Chicago Marathon and some races around Washington, women are starting to outnumber men.
But I still don't think that matters. You train for the goal or the standard set in front of you. The woman beside you is training for a separate goal, even in a sport like running where the clock and the place is all that matters. Who am I to tell her that she didn't work to achieve her goal as I did to achieve mine?
Finally, my personal bias is that if you've run for a long time (i.e. through high school and college) then either standard is pretty easy. If you came to running later in life, then qualifying for Boston is the mark that you've arrived as a runner. A good friend struggled for years to get her 3:45 (which qualified her for the 35-39 age group).
Runners obsess with the need to compare ourselves to others and find ways to "beat" them. If we don't beat somebody, then we console ourselves by winning our age group, or by telling ourselves we trained harder than the person, or we use one of a thousand reasons to claim that the result wasn't fair. Most of us have learned not to use these excuses in public, but we'll convince ourselves of it in private.
So I'm not telling you what mine is.

Supreme Court won't put Title IX in play

2005-06-07T09:05:00.000-04:00

Nobody should be surprised that the U.S. Supreme Court decided not to consider a lawsuit brought by wrestlers over Title IX. The court has never heard the merits of a Title IX case involving sports, and this case was more rhetoric than real law. The College Sports Council had sued the Education Department over the three-part test, claiming that the law was an unfair quota. No court has taken this argument seriously, except for one district court in California.
I think this clears the docket for Title IX-athletics cases, at least at the appellate level and above. But I'm quite sure the wrestlers will come up with another challenge. Or they'll wait to see what happens with the new Title IX interpretation issued in March.

Teenage girls and steroids

2005-06-06T10:04:00.001-04:00

The NYTimes had a full section on women's health on Sunday, including an odd story about girls using steroids in junior high and high school. Only it really wasn't--they couldn't find any girls who were shooting up to interview. I have to confess that this hasn't stopped me from writing about performance-enhancing drugs either, but when I've written stories it was about college football players. Honestly, I have a much easier time believing that football players are doping up than junior-high girls running track. But perhaps I'm naive.

Also, yet another women-aren't-interested-in-sports screed...

Teenage girls and steroids

2005-06-06T10:04:00.000-04:00

Danica Patrick. Blah blah blickety blah.

2005-06-01T11:00:00.000-04:00

Danica Patrick, your SI covergirl and Indy 500 4th placer deserves all the plaudits and attention she can get. She's a hell of a driver.
But guess what? Just like Katie Brownell (remember her? see below if you don't), Patrick is another talented athlete who happens to be among the few who can compete at the top level of their sports. We'll keep seeing these folks touted as girls who can keep up with the boys until we see them as athletes who can compete with the best in their respective leagues.
What is much more interesting is when we see all women as potential athletes allowed to compete in the leagues that best suit their talents, whether it's single-sex, coed, or virtually all male. (By the way, there's no reason women shouldn't be competitive in auto or horse racing; in fact, they may have an advantage due to lighter bodyweight.)
I think that's happening, but still only in pockets. I can't find a link, but the Washington Post had a cute story last fall about a 9-year-old girl playing on the offensive line on a PeeWee football team.
Why not?

Women and self-image

2005-05-31T17:31:00.000-04:00

Interesting meditation on women and body image in the Title IX era by one Hugo Schwyzer, who appears to be an academic and a fellow runner. If this isn't taking him too far out of context, he worries about two groups of women: those in sports in which light weight is a premium and those who feel pressured to be fit in an age where female fitness is prized. Both, he says, are prime candidates for developing body-image issues and eating disorders.

Bloggers discover Title IX

2005-05-27T09:16:00.000-04:00

Having discovered Technorati, I've been able to note when Title IX pops up in the blogosphere. For a typical wrestler's point of view, check out Bassguy 101. And lefties (also here are starting to discover the Ed Department's March change, detailed farther down on my blog as well.

Interesting links

2005-05-25T17:33:00.000-04:00

I'm starting to catch on to this whole blogging thing. (First, it's funny how self-referential most of it is; people linking back and forth and having debates with one another. Just mess around with Blogebrity for a bit.)
Anyway, thanks to Sour Duck, which I discovered via Technorati, I found a nice piece on Texas A&M's website. Over the past few years a number of colleges have had celebrations of women and women's history focusing on the passage of Title IX in 1972. Some, including Bowling Green State, have made a point of honoring women athletes from the pre-Title IX era and awarding them letters. Cool stuff.

We Must Protect Our Utes

2005-05-23T07:06:00.000-04:00

Last week the University of Utah announced it was dropping men's track and cross-country teams to save money. Per the school, Title IX obligations were *not* a reason. Chris Hill, Utah's AD, had this to say:
"The timing of this decision may seem unusual since we are in compliance with gender equity, but after a careful review of our athletics program, we felt a change was needed for our overall well being."
Predictably, folks are still convinced that this is all about the law. But, as Chris points out in the news release, Utah really hasn't supported its men's track team for years. It's a shame, because Salt Lake is a great place to train if you're a distance runner, and given the success of BYU and the University of Colorado, Utah has the natural resources to have a killer track and cross-country program. But the school doesn't have a track, and Chris evidently sees it as too expensive to get the track program to where it would need to be to be competitive. So the move makes sense. Speaking as a runner, it sucks, but it makes sense.

This is brilliant.

2005-05-20T15:43:00.000-04:00

Lights out

2005-05-20T13:20:00.000-04:00

The usual tactic for Title IX bashers is to find the most absurd action a school or school board has taken and use it to declare that Title IX is a terrible law. A perfect example popped last month in Minnesota: A school board says it can't turn on the lights at the high school baseball diamond because there are no lights on the school's softball diamond.
Title IX requires schools to treat male and female students equitably in terms of facilities and scheduling, among many other things. Comparisons between baseball and softball diamonds pop up frequently, given that the sports are analogous by almost any standard. Across the country, high school booster clubs build primo baseball stadiums on school property, while softball players trek to junky city facilities. Is this equitable treatment?
In this particular case, the school board had in fact upgraded the softball facilities, but for some reason it chose not to add lights. Thus, it believed (and apparently the Education Department's Office for Civil Rights affirmed) that it couldn't use the lights at the baseball stadium.
The story says the school board didn't have enough money to put lights on the softball field (or fields, plural; it sounds like more than one school is involved). Yet surely spring softball faces the same scheduling challenges as baseball, particularly in a place where spring doesn't arrive until June. Seems more like a matter of poor planning than an unfair law.

Girl Power!

2005-05-20T09:23:00.000-04:00

Fun story about an 11-year-old girl in upstate New York pitching a perfect game against boys. She even got her picture in the New York Times for it.
This at the same time folks are talking about the role of women in the military, particularly in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. I'm not going to comment on the latter, except to wonder why nobody's thought about whether women being ordered/coerced to humiliate detainees sexually constitutes sexual harassment. Given that, the military doesn't even do a good job of prosecuting rape charges against soldiers (according to the alternet story linked above and the drawn-out investigation at the U.S. Air Force Academy), sexual harassment must be down pretty far on the list.
But back to Katie Brownell, Girl Pitcher. Honestly, nobody should be surprised that an 11-year-old girl could be a pitcher (and hitter; she's got a .714 average) on par with the boys. At this age, girls are very strong relative to their weight, which is partially why so many Olympic gymnasts and swimmers are in their early teens.
And sports doesn't have to end with puberty. Here in Georgia, Portal High School's starting shortstop plays for both the softball team and the baseball team. That's just cool

Is College Sports a Business?

2005-05-06T11:21:00.000-04:00

We had a little debate on this yesterday on KFNS The Fan in St. Louis. Assume for the moment that we're talking about Division I-A college sports.
Are big-time athletic departments run like a business? Absolutely. They're often required to make enough money to cover costs, and their annual budgets run in the tens of millions of dollars. (Whether they turn a profit is another story altogether.) They employ vast staffs of professionals in a variety of fields--administration, financial management, fundraising, marketing, PR, etc. Not to mention coaches.
But these athletics departments are still nonprofits. That is, they're organized as not-for-profit organizations because they are part of a university. Their mission is to provide an educational service for the athletes on their teams. College athletes are not paid, mind you--they receive scholarships because schools believe it's important to reward students for outstanding athletic ability.
So jocks, particularly those in the revenue sports, are an unpaid labor force, and the entire NCAA and its system of college sports is built about keeping them there. Paying athletes based on the services they provide would bankrupt all but the richest athletic programs, and even those would have to cut way back.
This is why we have this massive propaganda machine dedicated to convincing us that college athletes are amateur students competing for the love of the sport. Now I'm not saying that's not true, even for many football and basketball players. But legally speaking, they are unpaid workers, and the system depends on them.
What provoked this rant? Well, if colleges are going to abide by the legal fiction that athletic departments, then they must abide by Title IX and make sure that they have enough female athletes and that those athletes are treated equitably. That's why I get crazy when people suggest that football be taken out of the Title IX equation, or complain about how Title IX shouldn't apply to sports, and so forth. It should, it does, and most athletic departments support it strongly. It's just fans, wrestlers, libertarians, and a handful of Republicans who see it differently.

A nice plug from the home office...

2005-05-02T15:35:00.000-04:00

A quick plug from this week's edition of The Chronicle Review:

Early in the 20th century, female coaches expressed an ideal: "A girl for every sport, and a sport for every girl." The triumph of Title IX shows how close we have come.

But "close" is not all the way. Women are a clear majority of students in higher education -- 7.5 million of the 13.2 million undergrads at American colleges. Women are underrepresented on sports teams, and most of their teams receive lower budgets, poorer facilities, and less attention than their male counterparts. Some argue that women are not as interested in sports as men and that the differences in participation reflect that. Regardless, women are still getting the short end of the stick when schools and colleges allocate resources.

Title IX has a yet darker side. In mandating that women athletes be treated the same as men, the law encouraged women's sports to develop in the hypercompetitive, highly commercialized model that evolved in men's sports over the past century and a half. Some teams ... play scores of games every year, cutting into schoolwork and other activities. In sports like cross-country and gymnastics, girls develop eating disorders after being encouraged to lose weight. Athletes specialize as early as their preteen years, so that only girls who have been competing in a sport since elementary school have a shot at making their high-school and college teams. ...

Athletic skill is becoming an important factor in college admissions, not just at sports powerhouses but also at small colleges. Americans see sports prowess as a proxy for other talents -- sportsmanship, fair play, leadership, teamwork, perseverance -- but the men's model of college sports does not always nurture those talents: The singular pursuit of winning rewards strength, speed, and skill, and not necessarily the more abstract goals of athletic participation.

-- Welch Suggs, senior editor for athletics at The Chronicle of Higher Education, in A Place on the Team: The Triumph and Tragedy of Title IX, published by Princeton University Press

The NCAA Fires Back

2005-04-29T09:24:00.000-04:00

The National Collegiate Athletic Association came out with a surprisingly strong statement last night against the Ed Department's new Title IX guidelines. The NCAA's Division I Board of Directors called on its schools to ignore the March guidelines on the three-part test and instead comply with the 1996 policy clarification, which the board (or, to be more accurate, NCAA president Myles Brand, general counsel Elsa Kircher Cole, and senior vice president Judy Sweet) deem to be stronger.