The Rapid City Journal published a two part piece on Title IX, the federal law that requires "gender equity" in athletics in scholastic settings. You can read the two parts here and here. For background on the law, and its abuses, I suggest Jessica Gavora's Tilting the Playing Field.
Frank Deford, perhaps the most respected sports writer extant, calls for a reevaluation of Title IX. Deford briefly, and Gavora in depth, illustrates the promise and the peril of Title IX. There are three ways to comply with the law. The first "prong" of compliance says that a school may comply if the number of women participating in athletics is "in proportion" to the number of women in the school. The second prong says a school is in compliance if it is making progress toward greater representation of women (for example by adding sports). The last prong allows schools to claim compliance if the number of women participating in athletics mirrors the desires of women in the student population, usually documented through survey information.
The problem is that the focus of the lawyers and of the Department of Education's Office on Civil Rights, particularly under the Clinton administration, have been primarily on "prong one" as the only prong that proves compliance. As Deford points out, the problem is that we live in a new generation. Most schools have more women than men now (indeed, across the nation, almost 60% of all college attendees are women). Thus, especially given large number of men required to field a football team, proportionality is difficult to achieve without cutting men's sports. Compliance is now met all too often not by adding women's opportunities, but by reducing the opportunities for men.
Those who believe "prong one" is the only just way to comply with the sound notion that we should not discriminate in scholastic athletics based on sex work on a fiction, namely the fiction that athletics is equally important to males and females and that, barring discrimination, men/boys and women/girls would have the exact same interest in athletics. One has to be blinded by ideology to believe that. Deford has some suggestions for retooling the law, one good (count football differently) and one a little silly (note to Frank Deford, some piano players do get scholarships), but it is clear that some reevaluation of how we approach this issue is in order.
As usual when I touch on something that might involve South Dakota higher education, I note that the views stated here are my own, not those of my employer.
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