You're right, and Sommers is right, and feminism is out of it's mind.

But when the title of the blog post said "ruin college sports," I imagined for a moment that it said "end college sports," and that might be the best possible thing that could happen to intellectual (and merely academic) America.

Easterbrook, while righteous, is almost a little too sunny about this... (But note his early comments suggesting that football coaches are carrying too much of the duty as exemplars of [freeze-dried] masculinity in our culture.)

And then read this:

“Why,” asked Bryce Jordan, the president emeritus of Penn State, “should a university be an advertising medium for your industry?”

Vaccaro did not blink. “They shouldn’t, sir,” he replied. “You sold your souls, and you’re going to continue selling them. You can be very moral and righteous in asking me that question, sir,” Vaccaro added with irrepressible good cheer, “but there’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our money. You’re going to take it. I can only offer it.”

William Friday, a former president of North Carolina’s university system, still winces at the memory. “Boy, the silence that fell in that room,” he recalled recently. “I never will forget it.” Friday, who founded and co-chaired two of the three Knight Foundation sports initiatives over the past 20 years, called Vaccaro “the worst of all” the witnesses ever to come before the panel.

You don't have to admire tenure, or prissy & incurious intellectuals, or naive campus feminists in order to hate college sports.

That hatred can thrive within you in an organic, natural, self-sustaining way.

If the powers that be would recognize cheerleading (which, over the last 20 years has morphed into kamikaze flying gymnastics) as a sport at the high school level, high schools' Title IX problems would just about evaporate. But feminists don't like cheerleading and cheerleaders, so they howl about it. They'd rather attempt to get girls into sports they don't like, and which nobody wants to watch, then give in and recognize a sport with a dedicated following. Penn and Teller did a very good episode of Bullshit! about this.

I think the NCAA, like college tuition, and college attendance in general is about ready to implode.

No sane person would put their child through the 16 hour a day schedule required by most division I athletic programs, if they had any alternative.

(Yes I had a child who was in one of those). My husband's sister also gave up her full ride athletic scholarship to the University of Minnesota because she had no life, and no time to actually go to college.

It isn't fun anymore.

Title X cost most colleges all their minor sports programs in order to feed women's sports and the big money makers, football and basketball.

Interesting stuff like a lot of minor Olympic sports are just about dead at the college level. It has made out culture much poorer, and more banal.

It is also hurting our competitiveness at the Olympics in those same minor sports.

Applying Title IX outside of sports has been discussed (Google 'title ix stem'). For example, the American Association of University Women wrote, in June 2012, an article headlined "Title IX is about STEM Too." The goal of such efforts is to force Engineering, Physics, and Chemistry departments to equalize the number of male and female majors. I think this would, in effect, allow female interest in these majors to set a limit on the number of "male seats" in these majors. If only 25 female students elect to major in Electrical Engineering, then only 25 males will be allowed to do so. I am guessing that Engineering departments will be laying off faculty members under this scenario.

Interestingly, nobody suggests that Title IX be applied to Nursing, Elementary Education, Psychology, or Biology, or any other field in which females are the majority of the majors. To me, this indicates that the motivating force is not fairness or equality. Rather, the goal is to advance females, pure and simple.

If we are to apply Title IX quotas - and that's what they are - to the academy, let's do it wholesale not piecemeal, so everyone can enjoy the "benefits."

Rather, the goal is to advance females, pure and simple.

Modern feminism, in its pure and unadulterated form.

Feminism exists to Get Stuff For Women. Once it merged with Marxism, they tacked on a modifier: By Taking It From Men.

I think this is more an athletic director issue than title IX. I applaud what Title IX represents - I believe without it we wouldn't have gymnastics, softball, and women's tennis at a competitive level. But the problem here is that you've got an AD who does not distribute adequately from the paying sports to be able to fund the non-paying sports. If you want those lesser-known sports to thrive, you must come up with the ingenuity to make that happen. My hometown has a sports auction for everyone but football (they have plenty of money on their own) which raises tens of thousands - and we are a TINY town. LSU, who is an absolute stellar example of how the football program gives millions back to the other athletic programs, doesn't stop there but has the big music festival in Baton Rouge to drum up more money for the athletic programs. And because of all this, the programs flourish. I just think if you were good at your job and were decent in marketing, then we wouldn't be crying about being forced to give more money to women's programs than men's.

Wow, Crid. Damn good.

I can't help but get the impression that sports matter more than academics these days in ALL communities in the U.S. - even the richest ones! What sort of message is THAT sending to young Americans?

It makes me very glad my mother firmly focused me in other directions. Maybe that made her un-American?

BTW, I've suspected, more than once, that people in eastern Massachusets are as sports-obsessed as they are because they're secretly ashamed of their area's being the home of both Harvard and M.I.T. - not to mention many other colleges. If so, that's just pathetic.

colleges that wish to shield themselves from potential Title IX lawsuits must ensure that their pool of athletes mirrors the student body in terms of sex.

Then why did all those sports collapse at a time when men outnumbered women on college campuses?

Wait wait wait..

If women are now outnumbering men on college campus, why is a regulation like this even necassary?

And, how can the campus rape stats be as high as they are?

Surely, there's a mistake.

> Damn good.

Which, Easterbrook or the Atlantic? (Or both?)

Easterbrook is a hero nowadays. He's a ferociously articulate guy.

"I applaud what Title IX represents - I believe without it we wouldn't have gymnastics, softball, and women's tennis at a competitive level."

I don't buy this. Current coverage seems to mirror support.

Guys watch TV.

Want your sport to succeed, make it something men will watch. I have the remote.

Why do you think Anna Kournikova is a millionaire?

The desire to extend title IX to STEM says it all. Title IX has never been about equality. It has always been about controlling and limiting men.

I meant this part:
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But when the title of the blog post said "ruin college sports," I imagined for a moment that it said "end college sports," and that might be the best possible thing that could happen to intellectual (and merely academic) America.
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BTW, I don't understand what you meant to do in the "link" in "too sunny." It only gives me multiple, irrelevant(?) items to choose from.

>I don't buy this. Current coverage seems to mirror support.

Ahh, because it's been here 40 years. You're seeing the positive effects of it. To take us back a little bit:

http://espn.go.com/espnw/w-in-action/nine-for-ix/article/8960070/nine-ix-essay-executive-producer-robin-roberts

How about making American Universities more like Universities, and less like summer camp? You know, a place for scholarship and research?

I grew up in Eastern MA and school sports were not a big deal at all, in High School, College or Grad School.

Well, maybe I should make a distinction between students involved in school sports and the fans of professional sports. It's hard to imagine the latter wouldn't affect the former, though. Especially in the last 20 years or so. (Rumor has it that before TV became so widespread in the 1960s, sports didn't have quite the insane fan base that they do now - especially among college-educated types.)