Author: Joshua Thompson
Over at ESPN.com, Gregg Easterbrook, has this excellent piece on the latest ridiculous Title IX ruling. Here's a snippet:
Imagine telling marchers on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Ala., in 1965 that by 2010, "civil rights" would be privileged college kids complaining about sports schedules, while federal judges would say that a grandly named Office for Civil Rights should dictate which teams get to use a college gym.
There is no "civil right" to be on a volleyball team! If you hope to continue to play women's volleyball in college, it's up to you to transfer to a college that offers the sport rather than run to the courthouse demanding special favoritism. In turn, Quinnipiac University's athletic department budget-allocation decisions have no place in a federal court, particularly when the college already offers significantly more women's sports teams than men's. A 95-page court ruling on a college volleyball budget sounds like a Monty Python sketch -- because Title IX itself has become a Monty Python sketch.
Go further into the judge's decision and find that both plaintiffs and defendants fielded dueling "expert" witnesses testifying on who counts as a "participant" in women's track and field. The plaintiff's expert witness makes part of her living testifying in Title IX lawsuits. It's a sign of legalism run amok when lawyers and consultants get fees for arguing over whether college students should receive school-sponsored volleyball outfits. The decision includes a good 20 pages of hair-splitting arguments regarding exactly how many members the school's various teams have -- and in the case of field hockey, whether Title IX would be satisfied if there were 24, 22.2 or 22.7 women on the Quinnipiac team. If Quinnipiac, or any college, had hundreds of men in organized sports but hardly any women, that would be discrimination. This legal case, however, concerns such ultratrivia as whether Quinnipiac's "roster management system" should have listed 31 boys on the men's baseball team when the NCAA average is 33.3! Get this junk-science lawsuit out of the courts!
You can read the rest here.
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