Adding a sport just to recruit men- Fine, but Title IX compliance is too expensive?

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Adding a sport just to recruit men- Fine, but Title IX compliance is too expensive?

posted by Women's Sports Blog
Monday, November 2, 2009 at 11:39am PST

An irreverent look at the news, issues, and personalities of women's sports from a feminist perspective.

Small, selective liberal arts colleges have been whining for years about their gender imbalance. Turns out that young women have, shockingly, bought the message that they can do anything and that includes becoming extremely successful candidates for college. Yet after years of exclusion and missed opportunities for women, the natural correction of some schools running, say, 60-40 women to men is being treated like the threat of the century. The problem? Well, oddly enough that imbalance makes it harder to recruit more men. Don't worry, you're not the only one to whom that reasoning seems circular. The second issue disappears if the first issue isn't considered a national emergency. There's no real threat that these schools will go all-female, after all. Plus there are still universities that skew the other way (and there's always Deep Springs, Wabash, Hampton-Sydney, etc, to keep the old order safe). Now that the federal government's civil rights wing is back to doing its actual job rather than investigating enemies of the Republican party, it's looking into the various ways the admissions process at certain schools discriminates against women. The aspect that's interesting for WSB's purposes is that one of the ways some of the colleges involved have considered recruiting more men is adding more men's sports teams. But since pesky Title IX isn't going anywhere that would mean adding more women's sports teams as well, dammit, which is just so costly. Never mind that the cost actually comes from a morally shaky ploy to further a morally shaky end, and the Title IX requirement is just a way to make it slightly less sketchy by forcing schools to think about the consequences of their actions. No, we must blame Title IX for the world's ills. How unusual.

View Original Post at ftlouie.typepad.com/womensports

Filed Under:
SportsPLUS, College, Discrimination/Title IX, Student-Athlete

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