Flashes of Panic

Two years ago, I dressed down a certain Washington Times sportswriter here for a column I thought was ill-considered and even worse researched. Turns out things aren’t getting any better at the Times.

Yesterday, Steve Nearman had a story in the Times about James Madison University’s decision to cut three women’s sports (archery, gymnastics and fencing) and seven men’s sports: archery, cross country, gymnastics, indoor track, outdoor track, swimming and wrestling.

He talked to nobody from JMU (which is 61 percent female and therefore having a hard time meeting the Title IX proportionality standard.) And he never mentions the word “football.” He makes it sound like Title IX is all about the persecution of men’s sports. Clearly Nearman did not read last month’s New York Times story and its link to an Inside Higher Ed story, which includes these lines:

Yet to some observers outside James Madison … the situation can be seen as part of a recent trend of scapegoating the federal law barring sex discrimination for athletic cuts made as much for financial and other reasons as for equity concerns.

“This was, for the most part, a business decision,” said Lamar Daniel, a Title IX compliance consultant and former U.S. Education Department official whom James Madison first hired in 1999. Daniel attributed the university’s decision to cut the teams to a desire to scale back its sports program—at 28 sports, one of the biggest in Division I—to a more manageable size and scope in the hope of making the teams it is keeping more competitive without spending more.

“This is about funding; this is about money,” he said. “It’s not about Title IX; Title IX is only a consideration in this matter in that you have to consider the impact of Title IX in any athletic decision.”

(Note: In the NYT article, the same consultant backpedaled, saying he’d overstated things, but the point remains that JMU made a financial decision, and Title IX merely shaped the way they made that decision.)

It’s true that men’s running and swimming are almost always the first to go (assuming the university in question no longer has a wrestling team; collegiate wrestling has been pretty much dead for decades and it’s a wonder gymnastics is still around.) But it’s not Title IX that’s killing them; it’s the lack of a women’s sport to balance the number of men carried on the roster of your average collegiate football team. Field hockey helps; so does crew if it’s varsity (rowing is an NCAA sport for women, but not for men.) But they don’t balance football. So university officials axe the four sports (XC, indoor, outdoor, swimming) which are most likely to contribute to the continuing health of their participants in the decades after graduation, and keep the one least likely.

Has anyone checked up on Swarthmore’s Title IX compliance? They cut their football team in the last decade. How about UVM (“Undefeated since 1974”)? How about Connecticut College, which never had one? What happens at James Madison in ten years, when male athletes aren’t going to JMU (why would they?) and the university’s gender ratio swings even more? What happens when they go after the men’s soccer team? The baseball team? The men’s basketball team?

Title IX is not killing men’s sports. Title IX is merely the anvil against which the country’s athletic departments are swinging the hammer of football. Everyone else gets pinched. Slanting articles against the law is easy to do: all you need is to be able to write an entire article about collegiate sports without bringing up football.

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