More on Yesterday’s Announcement on the Model Survey
Here in Washington, it’s the day after the Obama Administration announced a change in the way schools can use the model survey toprove compliance with Title IX. Needless to say, while the folks at CSC were disappointed with the decision and believe that it’s an incredible step backward, we’re not any less committed to the fight for true equity in college athletics.
In the meantime, I wanted to share with you a couple of more clips where the CSC was featured. As we’ve noted from time to time, there are a number of news organizations — CNN and ABC News I’m looking right at you — who act as if there’s no other side to the story when it comes to Title IX. At the Washington Post, Mark Viera took some time to talk to CSC Chairman Eric Pearson and actually quote him — unlike, let’s say, Katie Thomas at the New York Times.
Which reminds me — here at the CSC, we talk to Katie Thomas all the time, but we’ll be damned if we can ever remember an instance where she bothered to quote us in her newspaper. Feel free to draw your own conclusions, but one wonders what it must be like to give the other side a fair shake at a newspaper that produces editorials like this one.
That wasn’t the case at the Christian Science Monitor, where Amanda Paulson took some time to shed some additional light on where Title IX reform advocates are coming from:
Still, some critics of Tuesday’s decision say that the model survey was a useful way to gauge interest. They suggest that offering it as part of course registration, instead of by e-mail, might have dealt with the no-response issue.In addition, they worry that the new rule will push more schools to use proportionality as the best defense against a lawsuit.“What it boils down to is flexibility,” says Eric Pearson, chairman of the College Sports Council, who says he sees proportional compliance as little more than a quota system. In particular, he cites historically black colleges – where women often outnumber men 2 to 1 – as having a hard time with proportionality. And he worries about the lack of recourse that men have when their sports are cut, as was the case with the men’s wrestling team at Delaware State University two years ago. (The women’s equestrian team, eliminated at the same time, was restored following a lawsuit, but the wrestling team stayed on the chopping block.)
They say a picture tells a thousand words, so let me share one with you right now. Remember that Delaware State is an historically black college. Here’s a picture of the equestrian team: