RALEIGH – Dr. Roger E. Meiners and David Horowitz will be among the speakers featured at the annual John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy Conference scheduled for Oct. 16 at the Jane S. McKimmon Center on the campus of North Carolina State University.
For many people, collegiate athletics contribute a huge portion of a college’s identity, even overshadowing the schools’ academic programs and research initiatives. College administrators see athletics as a way to reach out to possible donors, alumni, supporters, and prospective students. Little wonder that schools strive to field quality teams in order to win games, conference titles, bowl games, and national championships.
In football, the Hail-Mary pass is a last-second, desperation play that has a chance of winning or tying the game, but has a very low probability of success.
Colleges and universities try something like the Hail-Mary when they attempt to use success in athletics as a means of improving their academic reputations and finances. The idea is that winning at sports will transfer over to the institution as a whole, boosting applications and funding. Like the Hail-Mary pass, it’s unlikely to succeed, but college administrators keep trying.
Several months have passed since a federal commission urged changes to how the government enforces Title IX of the Education of Amendments. Several years have passed since the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights last issued a Clarification of OCR’s policies to determine compliance with the measure. On July 11, in a “Dear Colleague” letter, OCR issued what Gerald Reynolds, assistant secretary for civil rights, termed a “Further Clarification of Intercollegiate Athletics Policy Guidance Regarding Title IX Compliance.”
The latest court case brought about by the North Carolina Chapter of the Institute for Justice involves two cherished traditions in the state, freedom and sports. It also concerns a rapidly evolving form of journalism, online news media.
In late February a federal commission released its final report on recommendations on reforming the enforcement of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. Entitled “‘Open to All’: Title IX at Thirty,” the Secretary of Education’s Commission on Opportunity in Athletics praises the legislation for expanding athletic opportunities for women but criticizes how enforcement has led to the elimination of opportunities for men.
Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 purports to guarantee nondiscrimination in education. Nevertheless, it has been subject to a succession of bureaucratic “interpretations” that have practically twisted it into the legal trappings of a quota system. It may now be poised for reform.
Just from reading the preamble to Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, one would not suspect it was the preamble to 30 years’ of controversy, fights over interpretation, compliance tests, and the noxious slew of bureaucratic miasma that followed: “No person in the U.S. shall, on the basis of sex be excluded from participation in, or denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any educational program or activity receiving federal aid.”
North Carolina State University is soon going into the hotel business. Construction is slated to begin this year on the Centennial Campus Executive Conference Center and hotel, which would offer 250 rooms and 29,000 square feet of meeting space, to be complemented by a 18-hole championship golf course, all built on the university’s Centennial Campus.
The mascots of two North Carolina colleges may violate federal antidiscrimination laws, under the wording of a statement released in April by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.
