Add Title IX to an era of increasing female enrollment, shrinking budgets and enlarged football rosters and what do you get?
Why, creative bookkeeping, of course.
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UPDATE: Brian Cook gets medieval all over the NYT’s ass.
Get The Picture 
To quote my younger self in a letter to the editor of Athens’ Flagpole Magazine, when they were going on their (annual) rant about how football at Georgia should be cut down to the intramural level or something:
“Great idea! YOU go to the 50 yard line with a megaphone and YOU tell the boosters.”
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I know I’m far from the first person to bring this up, but there really does need to be some sort of adjustment factor for the fact that there is no women’s sport with a similar roster size as football. Football shouldn’t be looked at as the “elephant in the room”, as the article refers to it, it should be looked at as the “cash cow”. Without football, a lot of the women’s teams (and a lot of men’s teams too) couldn’t exist. I have two young daughters, and I want them to have opportunities should they pursue athletics, but I also don’t think a university should have to create a whole bunch of women’s programs just to offset 1 men’s program.
I know it’s not “fair” that college football is valued above the other sports….I’m sure the athletes in the other sports work just as hard and make just as many sacrifices, without getting anywhere near the perks. But we deal in reality, and in reality, what’s “fair” is a very small part what makes up our lives. Of course, the mentality in most academic settings is far from reality.
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And you wonder how our government could have gotten us into such a financial crisis. The fanatical, and naive, pursuit of creating “true equality”, regardless of how stupid a law is, has cost taxpayers trillions of dollars over the past 4+ decades. Title IX may be miniscule in it’s contribution to our debt, but money is rarely an object to idealists. I predict it will not cost us trillions going forward; we will be forced to act much smarter in the near future.
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We should lump in taxing corporations with true equality then. Many (GE for example) find loopholes. If we could just lower the corporate tax rate and enforce ‘true equality’ for all corporations, then that would be a start.
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Somehow I think you would not really be in favor of true equality in taxing, where the 51% of people who pay zero Federal Income taxes had to ante up. But I will play along, I am fully in favor of a flat tax for all…individuals and corporations. I will even throw in an exemption for the first $10K of individual income before applying the flat rate to give lower income folks an edge.
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“I will even throw in an exemption for the first $10K of individual income before applying the flat rate to give lower income folks an edge.”
As magnanimous as that offer is for the poor folk, that’s not what Jesus would do.
According to the Lawrence O’Donnell video about the words of the prophet Rush, Jesus was in favor of a progressive, not flat, tax rate
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If Federal Income Tax were the only tax paid by people, you might have a point.
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I have a point, whether you acknowledge it, or agree with it, or not. The discussion was equality, and progressive income tax rates are unequal by definition.
I fully recognize there are many other ways that people are taxed. It doesn’t matter the method of collection, there is a cost to operate any government. I live in a “no state income tax” area, it is no cheaper in the long run, but taxation is about as equal as it gets.
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The surplus revenue programs (male or female) should be viewed differently. Equality of athletic spots is a great goal to strive for, until you have to pay the bills.
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Or until you have to disband an existing men’s sport because you can’t get enough interest to fill a roster for a women’s sport.
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Football is the reason you can go watch the #3 ranked softball team for free.
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Also factored in: the fact that far, far fewer people would pay to see the #3 ranked softball team than will show up for free. Otherwise, football would be the reason that you could show up to watch the basketball team for free, too.
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Title IX defined: If you’re going to spend money to make money, you better spend money to lose money too.
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I fully understand that there is an economic component to this so don’t think I’m ignoring that part of the issue, but I’m about to get sanctimonious all the same. My wife ran track in the Big 12 and my sister played basketball in the Big South Conference so I’ve seen first hand the value of Title IX. Given that we’re talking about amateur athletics that take place among government subsidized institutions, the pure economic argument doesn’t hold a lot of water in my opinion. I think it’s the point of Title IX to grant these women an opportunity they might not otherwise have. I played collegiate sports as well and it was an experience I relish on an almost daily basis. I know that my wife and my sister feel just as strongly about their careers as I did about mine and I’m not sure why some people feel so strongly that they shouldn’t have had that chance. If you make some P&L argument in response, well that’s all well and good, but it’s a square peg in the round hole of amateurism and the general intent of the college experience. I’ll grant you that football is a sticky wicket, revenue wise, for those programs lucky enough to turn a profit, but it doesn’t hold much water when it comes to the vast majority of colleges and universities that don’t actually make money off of football. Leave the girls alone or at least give the guys who play unprofitable sports just as much grief.
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The guys who play those non-profitable sports are watching them cancelled on a regular basis at schools across the country. How much more grief do you think they should have?
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I’m not saying I relish the fact that some guys’ sports are getting the ax, but I also don’t understand why you think (or at least appear to think) that men’s sports are more deserving than women’s sports. Unless you believe that athletic budgets should be raised across the board to preserve men’s sports while granting women’s sports an equal place at the table, that is. Short of such a measure, it’s just favoritism for the guys regardless of profitability.
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Well, I’m just gonna tippy-toe out here to remark…….Huh?…..Sparrow already said it?…… He sure did and he spoke for my daughter as well. Nice measured realistic idealism at it’s misunderstood best. Thanks.
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