PS. Suppose a law were passed prohibiting Black students from participating in sports to a greater degree than White students do, but with certain exceptions. Would you not agree that this would be a racist law?
december: That’s why 3.4 men’s slots have been eliminated for every 1 women’s slot created. You can argue with my logic, but the results of Title IX speak for themselves.
But not the way you think they do. This is a prime example of the dangers of looking at a single statistic in isolation. Remember that I pointed out above that many Title IX lawsuits were brought in response to universities’ threatening to cut women’s teams, even though there were plenty of women who wanted to play on them (the list of cases is available through the link in my previous post). So in order to assess what Title IX has really done for women’s athletics, we’d need to consider not just the number of new team spots created, but the number of existing spots saved.
In fact, Title IX was based on envy against men.
:rolleyes: Dear, dear, how envious and petty of those silly girls to get upset at the fact that men’s sports teams got more funding than women’s, male athletes got scholarships while female ones didn’t, and men had more opportunities to play sports than women. Wouldn’t it just have been so much more ladylike for them to have said “Never mind, boys, we’re happy to go on being cheerleaders for your teams and to raise our own money for club teams if we want to play sports ourselves! We don’t care if we have to make do with old equipment and run-down facilities and inconvenient practice hours and shoestring budgets! We know that you guys are much more important than we are, because your games bring in spectator revenue and alumni support—and besides, otherwise people might think that we’re envious!” :rolleyes:
*It doesn’t require that women receive any mnimum amount of sports – only that men can’t get more. *
I’m starting to be kind of impressed by the number of times you can go on repeating this even after I have pointed out multiple times that it isn’t true. Yes, december, men can get more sports funding and sports opportunities than women under Title IX! As long as the needs and interests of the female sports participants are being adequately met, the school can spend its entire endowment on the men’s teams for all Title IX cares! Proportional support is one criterion for compliance, but it is not mandated as long as the needs and interests of the female sports participants are being adequately met. Honestly, december, what more will it take to explain this to you? Will it help if I sing it? (Iolanthe, are you listening?)
[sings]
A college that’s blessed with fields and courts
For all sorts of healthful and active sports
Must not let the men monopolize
The games that the women also prize:
If the number of men enrolled is B,
And the number of women is A, let’s say,
Their teams as well, by Rule of Three,
Should have the ratio B to A!
[Chorus:] Hurray, hurray! But we must say
That this is not the only way:
Sometimes we need, for true fair play,
A ratio greater than B to A!
A school that gives a larger share
To boys than girls may seem unfair,
But bear in mind that, as they say,
You can’t build Rome in just one day!
If for the future it intends
Through careful plans (and some fund-raising!)
To bring more balance to what it spends,
Why then, we think that’s just amazing!
[Chorus]
But if the women who want to play
Are fewer than we’d deduce from A,
We needn’t decree that men must go
In order to keep that ratio!
As long as those women have their chance
At adequate sports participation,
The number of men you may finance
Is not a sign of discrimination!
[Chorus:] Hurray, hurray! Yes, we must say
That there is more than one fair way,
As long as at the end of the day
They both get an equal chance to play!
Face it, december, the really significant issue here is not bureaucratic stupidity, not feminist indifference to men’s well-being, but simply the fact that most of today’s coeducational colleges—and their sports teams—used to be all-male or majority male. So when they started admitting large numbers of women, adding women’s teams and athletic facilities cost them extra money; and they didn’t want to alienate fans and/or alumni by taking that money out of the men’s teams’ budgets. So women’s athletics generally got much less money, and women’s opportunities and resources for sports were much smaller. That was patently unfair to the women, and the women quite naturally complained about it.
Nobody’s happy about overall numbers of male athletes being reduced. But if colleges aren’t willing to spend the additional money to keep all the men’s teams going while giving comparable and fair support to the women’s, what are the women supposed to do? Sit back and say, “Never mind, we’ll make do with disproportionately fewer opportunities and less support”? Like hell.
I really liked your song, Kimstu.
The words, they and colleges, which I highlighted, are incorrect and lead to erroneous thinking. The colleges are nothing like a single entity. There are thousands of institutions of higher learning, all competing for students. Women who want athletics would choose colleges that offer athletics. If there werern’t enought, collges would introduce athletics, as a way get more students and more desriable students.
I agree that Title XI had the effect of getting more atheltics for women. But, it would have happened anyhow, provided women wanted more athletics.
but december prior to Title IX, there simply weren’t many women’s sports offered at any US colleges.
so, apparently to you, the only way people could avoid being attacked by you as being ‘anti men’ was to continue the status quo which was patently unfair to women. (see data already presented).
the Women who were interested in sports, had little/no collegiate sponsored avenue to participate in them. Men who were interested had many available to them.
I asked you this before and you dodged it.
-
There is a finite amount of resources available to any College/U to provide for things such as sports.
-
Prior to Title IX, the lion’s share of those resources went to men’s sports. YOu claim that ‘women weren’t interested’, but that’s difficult to believe, since as soon as they were made available to women, women filled the spots.
-
Given #1, what would be the ‘equitable’ solution to you, that wouldn’t net the december charge of ‘being anti male’? The status quo was definately inequitable to women. There were no additional resources to be had. Any increase in womens’ sports spending had to come from somewhere.
Can you give some rationale for why men’s sports shouldn’t have been reduced in order to be able to offer some (and we know that even today, the spending is no where near 50/50) ‘equal protection/equal access under the law’?
Is there any justification for denying women these opportunities that you wish to have available to men? What would your ‘equitable and non anti male’ solution have been?
I will try to fully answer your questions, wring.
Title IX certainly changed the status quo, but there were many other ways by which the status quo could have been changed.
I went to a co-ed school, and women certainly had sports available, although, the men had more.
All resources are certainly finite. I do not know what other activities things such as sports is supposed to include. Extracurriculars? Classes? Most colleges have the resources to increase overall spending on sports, by taking money from other areas.
True (although men’s sports also contributed a substantial amount of those resources from spectator sports, while women contributed next to nothing.)
The has changed dramatically. E.g., women’s soccer and basketball are much bigger than they used to be.
As we have seen, resources weren’t simply transferred from men’s sports to women’s sports. Overall resources have been shifted away from sports. This is because Title IX is such a burden.
The Bill of Rights.
If some king or dictator must make a single rule that governs every school in America, then perhaps the rule should be equal spending per student, by various classes. Men/Women. Blacks/Whites. Nerds/Jocks. Blondes/Brunettes. Tall/Short. There are many dichotomies. It would be ridiculous and unworkable to equalize spending over all such splits.
I play tennis once a week. My wife seldom plays. Should there be a law equalizing spending in a family? Of course not.
My office has workout equipment available. Should there be a law preventing men from using the treadmill, unless women also choose to use it? If there were such a law, my company would just get rid of the workout equipment.
Only freedom.
If a single rule must govern every school, and sprots is important, why not require 4 years of sports for every college student? Title IX appeared to make sense. Unfortunately, it has had the unintended consequence of diminishing men’s sports 3.4 times as much as it increased women’s sports, so it has not worked properly. (This may have been an intended consequence, for some of the writers of Title IX, who may have been envious of men.)
I do not know what my solution would have been 30 years ago. My solution today would be to repeal Title IX. The culture shift has already occurred, so schools should now be set free, so that students, faculty and administrators can handle their own affairs.
P.S. My wife went to a women’s college, where all sports were available to women, so the Title IX problem m=never arose. It’s ironic that many supporters of Title IX have worked against single sex schools.
well. geez. If you’re attempting to suggest that the Bill of Rights is the reason that it was ok to offer way more sports to men than to women, I have no words.
I, OTOH, thought that ‘equal rights’ kind of thing would have found it inherently unsupportable that men should have resources made available to them but denied to women. Go figure.
I also obviously misunderstood your entire prior posts in this thread since you claimed (before) that ‘mens sports’ and ‘men’ suffered by the increase in spending on women’s sports. And yet here, you seem to indicate that the spending on women’s sports came from some other avenue. So, I’m curious how you bolster up the original claim that ‘men’ specifically are/were harmed vs. ‘to fund these women’s sports we’ve had to reduce spending in other areas from which all students benefited’.
-please reconcile.
thank you.
(by the way, the difference between your household’s choices vs. the U’s include: Your money vs. tax payer funds, plus, the issue for the U was not - despite your head in the sand approach- that women were not interested in certain activities and classes, but that they were denied the ability to participate. You simply cannot continue to alledge that the lack of participation was due to lack of interest when the resources themselves were not made available.)
A college should be free to offer less women’s sports… And you are free to attend some other college.
This is an impossible standard. What resources must be equalized by sex? Athletics? Engineering classes? Medical care? Obstetrical services? 
If we ask the government to produce gender equity in everything, the government will have to control everything.
The cite in the OP said that for every 1 women’s slot gained, 3.4 men’s slots were lost.
As to where the money “came from,” who can say? Money is fungible, so the question may not be that meaningful.
Some time ago I read a book called Profscam : Professors and the Demise of Higher Education by Charles J. Sykes. Sykes claims that universities waste huge amounts of money. One could make a case that the money saved by cutting back on sports has gone to non-productive professors and administrators.
Is it OK with you if federal law controls the allocation of money within the families of government workers, social security recipients, and those on welfare?
Prof. december went to Wellesley College where 100% of the athletics were available to women. A high school senior could find a school with lots of sport, if that’s what was important to her. However, looking back, I can think of hardly any girl in my HS graduating class who put a high priority on sports. OTOH the daughter of a friend chose Oberlin in part for softball.
again, you misunderstand december : federal law does not mandate/legislate/require/make/force equal participation but it does mandate/legislate/require/make/force equal opportunity.
If you cannot or will not see the difference, there is no point to this at all.
I opened this thread because the OP is good at providing train wrecks, and they can be fun to watch, ya know?
december, your only remaining argument is that stubborn “men’s programs lost 3.4 slots for every 1 women’s slot created.” Giving you the benefit of the doubt for the origin of that (rashly, given your history), you’ve claimed to have identified a cause of 1 of those 3.4 eliminated slots - or 29 percent, at most, of them. Yet you’re blaming the other 71 percent (minimum) of the “problem” on Title IX, too. But you’re willing to shrug that off as “money is fungible.” And remember, that is your own argument. And that doesn’t even address your own solipsism about assuming that your own experiences are typical, as a statistician certainly should understand.
This board is not a good place to present a dishonest argument, friend. If you’re doing it for fun, then shame on you.
wring and kimstu, I salute you for your fine efforts here. But even you have to admit the futility of trying to convince someone who isn’t honest enough with himself to admit he might be wrong. I truly think you’ve wasted enough time here.
december: *I really liked your song, Kimstu. *
Why thank you.
I agree that Title XI had the effect of getting more atheltics for women. But, it would have happened anyhow, provided women wanted more athletics. […] Title IX certainly changed the status quo, but there were many other ways by which the status quo could have been changed.
Perhaps. But this is the same standard hypothetical response of every “market-fundamentalist” opponent of government regulation in general: “well, even if the regulation did some good, it was still a bad idea, because the same result would have been produced without the regulation, and better.” To which, usually, the only meaningful reply is a shrug and a “Sez you”; because it really doesn’t constitute a convincing argument that the regulation was in fact unnecessary. Given the several notorious failures of the private sector to take action for the public good without some legal prodding from the government, in all sorts of areas from auto safety features to pollution control, I remain skeptical of such hypothetical claims.
Title IX appeared to make sense. Unfortunately, it has had the unintended consequence of diminishing men’s sports 3.4 times as much as it increased women’s sports, so it has not worked properly.
I don’t understand why you’re insisting that this is the fault of the legislation rather than the choices of the university administrators. Title IX requires only that male and female students have equal access to athletics opportunities, whether by means of making the opportunities proportional to enrollment levels, or merely working eventually to make opportunities proportional to enrollment levels, or making opportunities disproportionate to enrollment levels but proportionate to interest levels.
If, given that quite wide latitude for compliance, an institution is still not giving fair support to the women,* it can do one of two things:
- Allocate more money for women’s sports, or
- Allocate less money for men’s sports.
Title IX doesn’t mandate either one of these; it only insists that equal opportunities be provided for male and female athletes, and leaves the question of how to achieve that up to the university. So why blame Title IX because so many universities have chosen to take the cheaper route and cut men’s teams instead of increasing women’s?
Mind you, I am quite aware that most schools don’t have a lot of spare cash and they face a lot of hard choices when it comes to drawing up the budget. Still, I think they should be the ones to be held responsible for the choices they make. If you don’t like having men’s teams cut, blame the college administrators for being too cheap to spend adequate money on the women’s teams, or for giving so much of the men’s money to football that there’s none left for men’s swimming or volleyball. Or maybe blame the alumni or corporate donors for being too cheap to provide the school with the money it needs to provide fair athletics opportunities to everybody.
But don’t blame the government, or the female students, or feminists, simply for insisting that men and women should have equal opportunities to play sports. Personally, I’m about as feminist as they come, and I have a great deal of sympathy for male athletes whose colleges sacrifice them to budget cuts (whether for Title IX compliance or for any other reason).
But I don’t think it would be a better solution just to go on giving the men an unfair share of the resources and letting the women make do with the leftovers. The mandate is simple and reasonable: if you’re not funding men’s and women’s athletics fairly, then rework the budget till you are, either by giving more funding to the women or by giving less to the men.
That’s not “envy”, it’s simply a demand for justice. I have to say I think it’s pretty pathetic of Title IX opponents (and I’m looking right at George Will here) to respond to that plain straightforward reasoning with ad hominem accusations, sniveling that the mean old feminists and the mean old government are just doing this to pick on the boys 'cause they don’t like boys and they want to boss everybody. Bullshit, sez I.
*Some time ago I read a book called Profscam : Professors and the Demise of Higher Education by Charles J. Sykes. Sykes claims that universities waste huge amounts of money. One could make a case that the money saved by cutting back on sports has gone to non-productive professors and administrators. *
Hmmmmm. Just a few posts ago, you were assuring us that “[t]he typical university is run by a highly committed, highly intelligent group of people” who can be fully trusted to manage their institutions properly. Now you’re suggesting that these same people are “non-productive” “scammers” who can’t even be trusted not to “waste huge amounts of money.”
Elvis, I’m afraid you’re right. Oh well, at least I tried.
- Of course, men have made claims under Title IX too, as in Kelley v. University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign in 1993, but since women are most commonly the underrepresented ones I’ll leave this phrasing as it stands.
Yes, I acknowledge that in principle, Title IX does not require equality of participation, just equality of opportunity. Now, I ask you and Kimstu to acknowledge that equality of opportunity cannot be defined in any precise way. Take a school with dozens of men’s and women’s teams, with various costs and participation rates. There must be all sorts of calculations that would reach all sorts of different conclusions. Start reading all the sites listed here, and you’ll see what I mean. The uncertainty means that a school can never be certain whether they have complied with Title IX.
Well, I can’t prove a hypothetical. I agree that the government must deal with pollution, because the private sector has no incentive to reduce it. OTOH a university charging $100,000.00 for 4 years of education has 100,000 good reasons to give each student what she wants.
In any event, my assertion is that as of today, Title IX is doing more harm than good.
This is a great question, and it leads to my key objection. Title IX isn’t a zero sum game. Yes, it has moved resources from men’s sports to women’s sports, and that was appropriate. Howver, it also created additional costs and inefficiencies, which reduce the pie for everyone.
You ask, why blame Title IX, rather than the way schools have chosen to deal with it. To me, these are one and the same. Laws should be judged on their real world consequences. E.g., in theory, Prohibition made life better for everyone, but in the real world it didn’t work. You could blame those citizens who evaded the law, but the real-world fix was to end Prohibition.
Excellent point, Kimstu, [sub]he said, trying to remove the sword from his chest.[/sub] There are people like my wife who are highly committed, and others who waste money. Still, the people at a given school are obviously more interested in the welfare of their own students than some far-off government administrator, who doesn’t even know the students.
I am bring back this old thread because of what was said on yesterdays (Thursday) Crossfire.
At the start of this topic I make the statement:
“Look, conservatives just don’t like women participating in non traditional roles especially sports.”
December disagreed with my comment but I would like to report confirmation of
this attitude from the conservative champion Robert Novak who made the following comments:
So what would you rather have, women’s volleyball? or men’s basketball?, be honest.
Sports are a masculine activity, women would rather be cheerleaders.
Women are forced into sports by feminists.
This hostility from conservatives to women outside their traditional roles is the real reason for the current assault on title IX.
Why is public funding going towards sports programs in college anyways? If you want to play football or curling or whatever, why should a public institution subsidize you, male or female, in the first place? With tuition rising faster then inflation, I would be very interested in seeing how much paying for the next generation of (American) football players and basketball players is costing us.
Title IX is ignorant legislation; It misses the point. Public funds should be used for public education, not frigging baseball! Even the most poverty-stricken children in third world nations often can cobble together a soccer ball or a stick and a baseball; true sports do not require public funding.
Why have college athletics at all? I have always assumed that NCAA division 1 football, especially for the big name schools, must bring in a lot of money for the schools. That the football and basketball programs would pay for themselves in some way.
Is this not the case? (really, I don’t know!) If it’s not the case, what would be the rationale for having what amounts to an all-expenses paid training program for future pro-athletes?
Let me rephrase. Do Division 1 football and basketball, with their HUGE fan base, bring in signifigant money to the schools, or do they cost the schools money?
From this story 64% of Division I-A football programs make money and 13% of Division I-AA football programs make money. I can’t seem to find the report that the statistic is referencing, though.
**december: First of all, I don’t agree that there was so much gender discrimination when Title IX was enacted in 1972. Long before Title IX was ever conceived of, my wife got as good an education as I did in the early 1960’s. My older sister got an education equal to her husband’s in the late 1950’s. Sports were available to both my wife and sister, although neither of them had any interest. **
I think Title IX’s purpose was to address both the number of opportunities for participation in athletics and the quality of participation opportunities.
I played D1 basketball during the early 80s. The university I attended made men’s travel first rate in every way. Meanwhile we had meal budgets that were on the cheap side. We slept four to a room and went every where on 15 passenger vans. They flew and chartered a bus. They stayed in upscale hotels and slept two to a room. Many times we would “load-up and head-out” after games instead of renting rooms. This put us on the road during the dead of night, with fatigued drivers. Even though I am greatly appreciative of the opportunity I had (full scholarship), I am very pleased to know that kids today enjoy equal funding. The programs at D1 schools do a much better job of providing quality travel arrangements and other more important benefits. Thanks to Title IX, this is a great time for girl’s and women’s sports. I think the major benefit is not on the court. I think it is just great that 9 and 10 year old girls have some models that show strength, confidence, achievement, etc. When I was 9 and 10 it seemed that there were only cheerleader / Barbie types that were being the “role-model types”. Not that there is anything at all wrong with wanting to be like Barbie or a cheerleader. It is just really good for our youth to have strong role models that are having success in a variety of endeavors… on the court or in the courts, on and off the field. IMHO Title IX helped our society come to the idea that girls and women are highly competitive and capable of achieving their dreams. I think this is a great time to be a 15 year old girl. It seems that we have removed some of the typical, limiting expectations of females.
TRAIN WRECK… NOT.
I was reading this thread hoping that someone would raise this issue, and I see you have. Why should we have separate sports for men and women? Why is gender a more important distinction than ability?
Take basketball for example, a sport where the rules are more or less the same for both men and women. Imagine that college x has ten scholarships to offer for each team. 12 men try out for the team, and the top ten men get the available scholarships, and two men do not.
Across the gym the women do the same thing, and fill their 10 scholarships. What if the two men who didn’t make the team are better basketball players than, say number 5 & 6 on the women’s team? Why shouldn’t they get scholarships? Why not just give the 20 scholarships to the best 20 players and be done with it?
We don’t have college basketball leagues for only men under 6’ tall, or only men over 400lbs, or only blind men, or only deaf men. What is it about being a woman that is more important than being a short man, i.e. why is woman number 6 more entitled to a scholarship than man number 11? Is it simply because she is a woman? (Yes, I know plenty of short men play basketball, I was just using it as an example.)
RR: *Why not just give the 20 scholarships to the best 20 players and be done with it? *
Because the athletic qualities we define as “best” are significantly affected by sex-linked physical differences in attributes like height, weight, and upper-body strength. Men on average have a built-in biological performance advantage in this regard, so men on average are “better” at sports than women.
So if sports teams were unisex and selected only for the highest jumpers, fastest runners, strongest hitters, and so forth (probably with occasional exceptions for players with less raw power but exceptional “game smarts” or grace or accuracy in play), most teams in all sports would be almost exclusively male, with a few unusually strong or fast women here and there.
There’s nothing wrong with that, if the only goal of college sports is to pit the highest-performance players against one another to see who’s got the highest-performance players of all. But most colleges justify their investment in sports teams (and this addresses spooje’s and Brutus’s question too) on other grounds. They think it’s important to support sports teams (not just varsity, but intramural and club teams and a number of other play levels as well) to encourage good physical health, to teach discipline and teamwork, to foster community spirit and pride in the college, and a number of similar reasons.
If you think those justifications for college sports are valid (and there’s no reason why you have to), and you accept that they apply equally to male and female college students, then it’s hard to support a system that would have male students overwhelmingly dominating all sports at all levels of play, just because of their built-in biological advantage. So instead, most college sports (at least at the higher levels) are sex-segregated, and men and women don’t compete directly against each other.
(emphasis added)
But under your justification, why is our imaginary woman #6’s health, discipline and teamwork more important than man #11’s? You are still left with a situation where you are placing a value on someone’s gender which is to the detriment of others.
Now, I will agree with you that at the intramural level it makes perfect sense to match people with others of comparable skill. (At the school I went to for example there were three intramural tennis leagues, depending on skill) But here we are talking about scholarships, worth in some cases >$100,000, the only fair way to award those scholarships seems, to me, to award them to the most qualified people irrespective of gender.
Oh, and congrats on the 2000 posts!!