Athletics

Team sports help students build healthy habits and provide valuable lessons in collaboration and sportsmanship. Yet, at their worst, they can corrupt or degrade universities’ missions. The following articles suggest ways to preserve the benefits of university athletics while reducing the academic, financial, and social costs of big-time college sports.


Winston-Salem State tries the Hail Mary pass

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.


Education Dept. ‘further clarifies’ Title IX enforcement

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.”



Federal commission urges changes to Title IX enforcement

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.


The Trouble with Title IX

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.


Of Title IX and 30 years of bureaucratic miasma

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.”


N.C. State to issue bonds for conference center, hotel, and golf course project

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.




Is UNC-CH’s Budget As Trim As Possible?

Dean Smith, Bill Guthridge, Pat Sullivan, Phil Ford, and Dave Hanners. All of them are former coaches for men’s basketball at UNC-CH. Yet every one of them is currently on UNC-CH’s payroll.