Title IX has claimed its latest victim: five men’s sports at Rutgers University.
A disturbing trend with Title IX enforcement (and, trust me, there is a lot to be disturbed by in Title IX enforcement) is that schools are making cuts over the summer (or very late in the school year). A regular InkWell reader points out that by doing this over the summer, students have a hard time resisting. It also means they won’t be able to transfer and that they also lose their scholarships.
In other Title IX news, John Tierney had a fabulous op-ed in the New York Times last week (read it here). Here’s a snippet:
When Title IX was enacted in 1972, women were a minority on college campuses, and it sounded reasonable to fight any discrimination against them. But now men are the underachieving minority on campus, as a series by The Times has been documenting. So why is it so important to cling to the myth behind Title IX: that women need sports as much as men do?
Yes, some women are dedicated athletes, and they should be encouraged with every opportunity. But a lot of others have better things to do, like study or work on other extracurricular activities that will be more useful to their careers. For decades, athletic directors have been creating women’s sports teams and dangling scholarships and hoping to match the men’s numbers, but they’ve learned that not even the Department of Education can eradicate gender differences.
Predictably, a lot of pro-quota interest groups went crying to the NYT and the paper printed four letters to the editor blasting Tierney. The Times failed to print a letter sent in by the coaches. Don’t worry, I’ve posted the letter over on NRO’s Phi Beta Cons (read it here).