University of Oklahoma -
for instance, or gourmet coffee shops before a latte started to cost a latte.
And, by now, the intermittent early-morning re-runs of Saved by the Bell: The College Years have served as a sobering reminder of what one good idea can turn into if it hangs around too long.
When the Bush Administration's Commission on Opportunities in Athletics refused to reform the proportionality prong of Title IX earlier this year, one more thing was officially added to the list of good things gone bad.
Simply put, Title IX of the 1972 Educational Amendments says that federally
funded education programs and activities shouldn't discriminate based on sex. Period.
And at a time when women were among some of the front-runners in a race toward full civil rights in the United States, Title IX made sense.
Two years after Title IX was signed into law, however, that great idea began its slow descent into absurdity.
Title IX was designed to ban sex discrimination. Now it is used to do precisely what it was intended to stop.
Under the Office of Civil Rights' 1979 policy interpretation, the only method of Title IX compliance that does not scream gender discrimination lawsuit is to match up the athletic department's gender proportionality with school enrollment.
If their percentages match up, then schools are good to go.
And that's where the good idea officially goes bad.
In order to keep their hands clean under a bureaucracy hijacked by special interests, schools really only have two options. They can either add women's teams or cut men's teams in order to achieve this proportionality.
And in a culture in which men consistently come out for sports in greater numbers than women, the option of choice has repeatedly been to tell the men to pack up their bags and go home.
What would happen if we just started cutting women from education activities such as band, theater, cheerleading, etc., in order to achieve gender proportionality?
How ridiculous would that be? Yet the same thing has been happening in the sports arena since 1979.
The national media is finally starting to pick up on the insanity of Title IX proportionality as men's sports are being eliminated, non-scholarship walk-ons are being kicked off teams and long-standing athletic traditions are fighting for survival.
But with the confirmation of a policy that legally discriminates, the future is looking dim for many college athletes. 17
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Justin Dyer
