Thanks, Allison, for highlighting the unbelievable article in USA Today on Title IX and JMU.  What struck me most was just how dismissive Donna Lopiano is of everyone else’s explanations and opinions.  The JMU athletic director offers his rational for why the school felt compelled to make these cuts:



“We did not feel in a position to add” teams to satisfy the second or third tests, Bourne says, because JMU already had 28 teams –13 men’s and 15 women’s. Few schools sponsor that many outside of Ohio State and Stanford (which have budgets that dwarf JMU’s) and the Ivy League (which offers no athletic scholarships).


“We looked at the three prongs of Title IX, and we were not in compliance under any,” Bourne says. “We had no defense and we felt the most prudent action was to devise a plan that would put us in compliance with the first prong.”


Lopiano dismisses this explanation though — she obviously has a much better idea of what motivated the decision than those who were actually involved in making it.  Just like she knows that a female student athlete who wants Title IX reform is “brainwashed.”  I’d call her dismissal of student athlete, Jennifer Chapman, flat out sexist, but I suppose since she is just as condesending to the male athletic director, so she is really an equal opportunity know it all. 


It is a very telling look at the hubris of the self-proclaimed gender police at organizations like WSF.