Week 9 and
Week 10 [Guest Lecture]
II. The Title IX Revolution
III. Competition and Equity
Introduction
Since the earliest days of college sports, colleges and universities have sought out
athletically talented students from class, ethnic, or social groups not normally
admitted to their institutions. In some periods such students came from immigrant
communities of Irish or European origin, often economically disadvantaged.
More recently, colleges recruit black students from America's inner
cities or small towns to participate in elite college sports.
In many cases these practices offered these individuals an opportunity
for upward mobility, but in others it represented a form of exploitation. The
controversies over standards for recruitment and athletic subsidies,
and academic eligibility and graduation rates, while often expressed in
terms of competitive fairness, usually also have a
subtext related to student-athlete race and class, and sometimes gender.
In America, intercollegiate sports often captures and highlights critical social
and cultural concerns prevalent in the larger society. Sports is a relatively
unambiguous enterprise, with specific people doing
specific things in regulated environments, and the ambiguities surrounding
issues of race, class, and gender in the larger society become sharpened and
simplified in college sports. In this context, Americans tend to highlight
issues related to race and gender while avoiding conversations related to
class. Nonetheless, most of the sports-related issues connected to
race also have a strong socio-economic component related to class.
Two of our readings serve as background for this discussion, setting a
frame of reference against which to measure change. The Savage et al.,
report from 1929 has two chapters of particular relevance here.
Howard J. Savage, et al., "Athletic Participation and its Results,"
American College Athletics (New York: Carnegie Foundation
for the Advancement of Teaching, 1929) has a section on
"Conditions of Participation in Intercollegiate Athletics" where
the authors discuss student sports activities
including intercollegiate athletics and considers the relative academic success
of students with different levels of participation. The second chapter of
interest,
Howard
J. Savage, et al.. "The Recruiting and Subsidizing of Athletes,"
American College Athletics (New York: Carnegie Foundation
for the Advancement of Teaching, 1929), looks at
the range of practices found among universities and
colleges in attracting and then paying at least the expenses for students who
compete in intercollegiate athletics.
Even at this early stage in the development of college athletics, institutions recruited
and subsidized student-athletes. The first chapter describes the
relationship of intramural and intercollegiate athletics and attempts to
identify levels of participation in both as well as determine why students choose
to participate. It also looks at the academic sucess of student-athletes.
Similar to data on today's situation, Savage, et al., find that student-athletes in general
earn about the same grades and graduate at about the same rate as non-athletes.
However, in today's college sports enterprise the average academic results of
student-athletes, while matching the general student population, misrepresents
the wide range of academic performance by participants in the different.
Basketball for example has dramatically lower graduation rates
today than non-revenue sports such as tennis.
In the second chapter, the report notes that many of the student-athletes in the
1920s were individuals who by virtue of their economic circumstances at least,
and perhaps their social circumstances as well, would not have been able to
pursue higher education. However, institutions nonetheless recruited and
subsidized these students to participat in both campus life and athletics.
This chapter illustrates the lack of uniformity of rules
related to eligibility, recruitment, and payment
of student-athletes, the relative weakness of the NCAA in this area, and the
importance of regional athletic conferences in setting standards. A prior
reading,
David Riesman and Reuel Denney,
"Football in America: A Study in Culture Diffusion,"
American Quarterly (3:4, 1951) offers a more
explicit discussion of the class and ethnic distinctions that separated
recruited football players from the regular student body in these early years.
I. Race and College Sports
Just about everyone who has lived through the last generations of American
history understands the transformation of college and professional sports that
opened up athletics to a wide range of talent. From a primarily white or
white ethnic enterprise, almost all sports have come to be
multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and even international although even today, some sports remain
predominantly white while others have become majority African-American.
The process of this fascinating transformation requires us to look at the pressures
that persuade white-controlled and
dominated sports enterprises to recruit and include black athletes.
We also need to consider the circumstances that cause young black men and women to
participate in college sports, not only at historically black colleges and
universities, but also in the last generations at predominantly white
institutions.
Rufus E. Clement,
"Racial Integration in the Field of Sports," Next Steps in Racial Desegregation in Education,
Journal of Negro Education (23:3, 1954) provides a helpful review of the evolution of
African-American participation in American sports up to the middle of the
twentieth century, and in passing highlights one of the critical elements in
changing the attitudes of white coaches and fans. For all of the problems
attendant on the highly competitive nature of intercollegiate sports, the cult
of winning places a very high value on talent. As some colleges in the
North and Midwest began to recruit highly talented black players, their
competitors in other parts of the country had to recognize that they could no
longer ignore the talent pool of non-white athletes. Over time, the
single-minded pursuit of talent opened a wide range of opportunities for black
athletes in all of America's colleges and universities.
The categories we use to describe these changes
in the social, economic, and ethnic composition of athletic teams and programs
often imply a precision that does not actually exist. The terms "black," which
we use to describe African-Americans, "whites," for those of Western European
descent, "Hispanic," for those of Western Hemisphere origin, or
"Native American," for those of American pre-colombian origin, have
relatively little scientific value. Instead,
these terms describe classifications imposed on various subgroups by virtue of
history, exploitation, opportunity, politics, or economic advantage and codified
into various statutes and regulations by government action. While we all
use terms such as black, African-American, Hispanic, or white, these reflect less
some scientifically valid genetic classification and more a socio-historical
category. Nonetheless powerful in providing or denying opportunities, the
categories speak less to inherent physical characteristic than they do to the
structure of class and opportunity throughout our history and
reflected in today's society and economy.
Although the expansion of opportunities for all ethnic groups to participate in
intercollegiate sports and gain access to all levels of American higher
education is an important advance, many observers worried about the relationship between
sports success and life achievement. The tension between athletics and the
student-athlete's future aspirations and success appears in
Luther B. Otto and Duane F. Alwin,
"Athletics, Aspirations, and Attainments,"
Sociology of Education (50:2, 1977)
and a strong critique of the sports emphasis in African-American
communities appears in
John C. Gaston,
"The Destruction of the Young Black Male: The Impact of Popular Culture and Organized Sports,"
Journal of Black Studies (16:4, 1986).
A statistical study of the careers of student-athletes
compared to other students appears in
Clifford Adelman,
Light and Shadows on College Athletes: College Transcripts and Labor Market History
(Washington, D.C.: US Department of Education, GPO, 1990).
Of particular interest is an assessment of the balance
between the good and destructive elements in participation in
college athletics that appears in
John N. Singer,
"Benefits and Detriments of African American Male Athletes' Participation in a Big-Time College Football Program,"
International Review for the Sociology of Sport (2008).
Even though African American student-athletes have a significant role in major
college football programs, negative stereotypes nonetheless continue to prevail. An interesting
reflection of these ingrained prejudices is in
Eugenio Mercurio and Vincent F. Filak,
"Roughing the Passer: The Framing of Black and White Quarterbacks Prior to the NFL Draft,"
Howard Journal of Communications (2010).
Although the integration of teams in all parts of the country,
especially in football and basketball, took
place rather quickly after the 1950s, the expansion of opportunities in coaching
remains significantly limited as the summary data in
"African Americans in College Sports: Black Teams with White Coaches,"
The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, (30, 2000-2001)
illustrates. Progress is slow in this area as the subsequent articles on
this issue demonstrate,
Jacob C. Day and Steve McDonald,
"Not so Fast, My Friend: Social Capital and the Race Disparity in Promotions among College Football Coaches,"
Sociological Spectrum (2010) and
Libby Sander,
"In Recent Hiring Spree, Black Coaches Win Big--but Still Fall Short,"
Chronical Higher Education, January 29, 2010.
The issues of ethnic discrimination and changing attitudes towards racial
stereotyping also affected the symbols of college sports. Team mascots and
emblems came under close scrutiny as observers found many athletic symbols offensive or
symbolic of values no longer acceptable to many people in American society.
Whether the battles in the South over the use of symbols based on the
Confederate flag or the frequent usage of Native American tribal names for sports
teams, these issues highlighted the changes in American values that took place
in the second half of the twentieth century.
Three articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education touch on these
controversies.
Charles Fruehling Springwood and C. Richard King,
"'Playing Indian': Why Native American Mascots Must End,"
The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 9, 2001 state
the case for the elimination of Native-American mascots and nicknames.
Lindsay Bosslett,
"NCAA Treads Warily in North Dakota [Native American Mascot],"
The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 21, 2002 and
Eric Wills,
"Pride or Prejudice? Some Colleges Back away from Using American Indian Names and Mascots for Athletics Teams, While Others Defend Them,"
Chronicle of Higher Education, June 3, 2005 describe the actions and
controversies associated with this issue, and
C. Richard King,
"Borrowing Power. Racial Metaphors and Pseudo-Indian Mascots,"
The New Centennial Review (4.1,2004)
analyzes the purpose
and function of these mascots for sports teams.
Resolution of the mascot issue turned on the question of whether Native American
people in the institution's region approved or disapproved of teams using symbols based
on tribal traditions. See
the following two items for an update on the issue. The first
takes a legal view of the conflict between controlling symbolic expression
and the first amendment
Joseph J. Hemmer, Jr.,
"Exploitation of American Indian Symbols: A First Amendment Analysis,"
American Indian Quarterly (2008). The second
recounts the end of one of the longest running disputes in this controversy
Joe Barrett,
"University Loses Sioux Mascot War,"
Wall Street Journal, April 4, 2010.
In the discussion of race, the issue of class is fundamental, for while
there are many poor people of all ethnic groups in America, the subgroup of poor
student-athletes has a high proportion of black student-athletes. The
interesting comparison here is that in the early years of the twentieth-century,
as reported in the Savage et al., items we have read, recruited student-athletes
also frequently came from poor backgrounds and required subsidies to attend
elite institutions or indeed any college. They paid their way through
college with their participation in football or other sports.
Today, the same process takes place, but with a focus on
African-American as well as other economically
disadvantaged but athletically talented individuals. As a result, college
sports became a focus for the larger American conversation about race, class,
poverty, and educational opportunities.
II. The Title IX Revolution
Women have always competed in athletics, but before
the watershed regulations that applied Title IX of the Higher Education Act to
college sports, women played a minor part in
intercollegiate programs. The required reading mentioned above,
Howard J. Savage, et al.,
"Athletic Participation and its Results,"
American College Athletics (New York: Carnegie Foundation
for the Advancement of Teaching, 1929)
includes a description of the active but restricted role of women in
intercollegiate sports by the late 1920s.
The notion that women only discovered athletic competition after Title IX is of
course inaccurate as women have always been participants in sports, whether
track and field and other Olympic events, tennis, field hockey, or other
competitions whenever the opportunity arose. Certainly the men who
controlled and managed the college sports enterprise did not see women's sports
as important, and often the same social, political, and economic
structures that restricted women's access to other fields applied to sports.
Nonetheless, the existence of active women's
competitions in a variety of sports supported the growth of
the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW).
This group emerged in 1971 from the development of
women's collegiate programs in the 1950s and 1960s, and it provided a
structure for competition and standardized rules for women. The NCAA, however, showed
little interest in women's sports until the late 1970s. Eventually,
with the continued rise of interest in women's
sports, the clear popularity and profitability of the women's basketball
tournament, and the requirements of the Title IX Amendment of the Higher
Education Act in 1972, the NCAA began to sponsor championships for women.
By 1982 with the advent of the Division I NCAA Women's Basketball Tournament,
the AIAW lost control of women's sports to the NCAA.
While many lament the demise of the AIAW, the transition to
the NCAA represented the emergence of women's
sports as a major enterprise within intercollegiate athletics. A short
encyclopedia review of these milestones is available
online
along with other links to related topics. The Wall Street
Journal has followed this issue carefully, and the following article along with
its accompanying table provide an excellent review as of the
summer of 2005,
Karen Blumenthal,
"Title IX's Next Hurdle. Three Decades After Its Passage, Rule That Leveled Field for Girls Faces Test From Administration,"
The Wall Street Journal, July 6, 2005 see also
the accompanying
table. An
specially useful review of university response to the requirements for
supporting for women's intercollegiate athletics is in
John R. Thelin,
"Good Sports? Historical Perspective on the Political Economy of Intercollegiate Athletics in the Era of Title IX, 1972-1997,"
The Journal of Higher Education (71:4, 2000) whose
article clearly demonstrates the strong opposition of university leaders,
athletic interests, and the NCAA to the expansion of opportunity for women.
The fight over equity for women in intercollegiate athletics is by no means
over, and the controversy highlights many important features of the
intercollegiate sports world. The first of these, which we have emphasized
before, is that sports simplifies complicated issues because everything is
counted and measured. We can always see how many women and men
receive scholarships for sports, we can see how many women and men play on a
team, and we can see how many games they played. We can count the number of seats in the
stadium, the number of days of practice, the number of assistant coaches in each
sport, and the salaries and bonuses of the coaches. We can see if the
university provides a pep band for men's and women's basketball games, whether the
media guides for men and women are equivalent, and whether the travel arrangements
for men and women match. Change of this kind always creates bitter controversy,
and while popular support for the Title IX revolution remains quite strong,
significant anti-Title IX sentiment exists. For a good sampling of this opinion
see the website of a group called the
American Sports Council.
Primarily driven by wrestling supporters, a men's sport often eliminated in
colleges adding women's sports, it has a wide range of editorials, articles, and
press releases outlining the case against Title IX.
Some of these issues appear in the specific incidents, such as the celebrated case
of the woman who tried out for the football team at Duke (see
Welch Suggs,
"Duke U. Discriminated Against Female Football Player, Jury Finds,"
The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 13, 2000 and
Lindsay Bosslett,
"Rejecting Punitive Damages in Title IX Cases, Appeals Court Overturns $2-Million Award to Female Kicker,"
The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 19, 2002.
The tremendous pressure from the requirements of Title IX moved even the NCAA to
make equity in athletics, by which it means ethnic balance and gender equity, a
principal element in its first round of certifications. The two sections
in the Florida and Princeton reports illustrate the attention university
athletic programs gave to these issues:
"Commitment to Equity"
(University of Florida: NCAA Self-Study, Certification
1998) and
"Commitment to Equity"
(Princeton University: NCAA Self-Study, Certification 1997-98). The revised
certification process that eliminated the financial section, continued and
reinforced the elements of equity in athletic certification as is reflected
in the materials on the NCAA website under
"Board Directs Alternative Approach to Division I Certification".
III. Competition and Equity
In the discussion of race, class, and gender, we often approach the issues as
if the principal drivers of the conversation were the values associated with
equal opportunity that are part of the American dream, albeit as yet
unfulfilled. For intercollegiate athletics and for sports in general,
these issues have a different context. The primary concern of all
intercollegiate athletics is winning. Consideration of equity and fairness
for racial, ethnic, and gender balance in sports appear mostly through
the lens of competitiveness.
In the case of race and class, the choice to recruit and play black
student-athletes, or to recruit and play poor white athletes at elite white
colleges, reflects a competitive decision about the opportunity to win.
Coaches and boosters do not usually seek to create more inclusive and equitable
opportunities for all people when they seek out talent in previously excluded groups.
Athletic recruitment pursues very specific talents of particular student-athletes
whose social, ethnic, and economic characteristics might well make them
absent those talent, considerably less
acceptable to major supporters of college sports. The pursuit of talent encourages
people to make exceptions to normal discriminatory practices in order to acquire the
athletic skills that enhance their team's opportunity to win.
In the case of gender, the opposition to expanding opportunities for women comes
not as much from strong principles about appropriate gender roles but more
from the fear that
supporting equivalent women's sports will reduce the resources available to
support winning men's programs. This is not an equity argument, but a
winning argument, although only a winning argument for men.
However, once forced to support high
quality women's sports, university athletic programs usually pursue winning in
those programs with the same singlemindedness and the same focus as they do
for the men. The logic of sports is that once you are in the game, you
really want to win. As a result, women's programs begin to seek talented recruits
among previously excluded groups of black and poor women, among international
students, and wherever else talent appeared.
Indeed, the recruitment of international students offers another example of the
importance of acquiring talent to win. Although American universities have
long accepted international students to enrich the cultural context and enhance
the ability of domestic students to deal with a global marketplace, college
recruiters scour the international playing fields to identify talent that will
improve their winning percentages. The issues this raises appear in the
report by a major law firm discussing the compliance and regulatory issues
associated with international student athletes,
"International Student-Athlete Issues,"
Holland and Knight, LLP, Sports Law Letter and by the Book
Compliance Alert, April 27, 2001 and The Chronicle of Higher Education
writes about the ambivalence of the NCAA and its members towards the
contribution of international student-athletes to the competitiveness of
American college sports programs in
Dana Mulhauser,
"NCAA Cracks Down on Foreign Athletes, While Urging Members to Relax Rules,"
The Chronicle of Higher Education, November 12, 2001.
The source of international participants changes with changes in international
trade and opportunity as is clear in
Joel Millman,
"These Days, Everybody's All-American Just May Be a Haitian,"
Wall Street Journal, December 4, 2009.
Issues of race, class, and gender appear in other ways. We know that
women's sports, given the opportunity and the resources, become as competitive
and as driven by winning as their male counterparts. Women's basketball
teams choose to practice against men to simulate the toughest possible
competition,
Welch Suggs,
"For Top Women's Basketball Players, the Ideal Practice Includes Men,"
The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 23, 2001.
Although women in sports such as tennis, golf, and skiing,
have professional career opportunities, and
women in track and field, swimming, and other sports have Olympic
competition possibilities, the big money team sports like basketball only recently
have begun to offer sufficient incentive to be career possibilities. As the article by
Amy Merrick,
"Stepping Stone. Pro Basketball Isn't Necessarily the Ultimate Goal for Most Women College Players. But It May Be a Good Way to Get Where They Want to Go,"
The Wall Street Journal, March 14, 2005
shows, this conversation no longer involves only men.
An interesting take on the issue of gender in a sports played intensely and
effectively by men and women is in
Thomas McLaughlin,
"'Man to Man': Basketball, Movement, and the Practice of Masculinity,"
The South Atlantic Quarterly,(103:1, 2004).
Also see the perspective in
Dylan A. T. Miner,
"Provocations on Sneakers: The Multiple Significations of Athletic Shoes, Sport, Race, and Masculinity,"
The New Centennial Review (2009).
As is the case with men's college sports and high school participation,
the boom in women's sports as a result of Title IX enforcement
prompted a scholarly study of the impact of this participation
on women, in
Betsey Stevenson,
"Beyond the Classroom: Using Title IX to Measure the Return to High School Sports,"
The Review of Economics and Statistics (2010).
Echoing the issues of how the media report on African American college
athletes, studies of media related to women's sports are equally revealing
of stereotypical attitudes as is evident in
Steph MacKay and Christine Dallaire,
"Campus Newspaper Coverage of Varsity Sports: Getting Closer to Equitable and Sports-related Representations of Female Athletes?"
International Review for the Sociology of Sport (2009).
Perhaps also of interest are
the impacts of gender equity on traditional women's participatory
roles in college sports, in particular cheer leading, as is shown
in
Laura Grindstaff and Emily West,
"Hands on Hips, Smiles on Lips! Gender, Race, and the Performance of Spirit in Cheerleading,"
Text and Performance Quarterly (2010).
For both men and women the competition to recruit the best players, and for the
athletes the opportunity to be seen as being among the best
players, dominates much of the activity
of high school students with outstanding athletic talent. We will talk more
about the complex networks of support that feed college sports programs in the
section on Sports in Society, but an few examples of the recruiting process help
give context to this conversation. For all student-athletes, black or
white, male or female, recruitment is about the institutions finding the great
players and about the great players making themselves known to the institutions.
An article in the New York Times highlights the difference between what the
high-potential men's basketball high school student-athlete seeks and
what the college coach seeks during the recruiting process,
Bill Finley,
"College Basketball Preview: Coaches Aim to Recruit for Today, Players Have Eyes on Tomorrow,"
New York Times, November 30, 2003 and
Welch Suggs,
"The Recruits,"
The Chronicle of Higher Education, October 3, 2003
talks about the aspirations of high school women's soccer athletes.
Other consequences of Title IX are less easily resolved. Before Title IX,
most coaches of women's teams were women, but after Title IX, with an influx of
money to support high level competition, many male coaches took over women's
teams, often because they came with significant experience in the men's version of
the sport.
R. Vivian Acosta and Linda Jean Carpenter,
Women in Intercollegiate Sport: A Longitudinal, National Study. Twenty Seven Year Update, 1977-2004
(National Association for Girls and Women, 2004)
offers data on
this phenomenon along with a comprehensive report on the changes in
opportunities for women over the 27-year period. A recent update on the Title IX process
is in
Katie Thomas. "Long Fights for Sports Equity, Even With a Law," New York Times, July 28, 2011.
Much commentary turns on
the issue of the realignment of college sports programs with the phasing out of
many smaller audience sports. While these changes have often been blamed on the
cost of meeting Title IX, the article by
John R. Thelin,
"Good Sports? Historical Perspective on the Political Economy of Intercollegiate Athletics in the Era of Title IX, 1972-1997,"
The Journal of Higher Education (71:4, 2000)
cited above and the more recent review in The Chronicle of Higher Education by
Welch Suggs,
"Cutting the Field,"
The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 6, 2003 demonstrate that
the changes capture cost pressures in football as as well responding to the need to meet
the requirements of Title IX.
Reflecting the strong interest in issues of race, class, and gender, the NCAA
included a special section in its certification reviews of intercollegiate
athletic programs. Continuing our examples of university reports from the first
round of certifications, the Equity sections for Princeton and Florida make
interesting reading.
"Commitment to Equity"
(Princeton University: NCAA Self-Study, Certification 1997-98) and
"Commitment to Equity"
(University of Florida: NCAA Self-Study, Certification 1998).
The NCAA and its institutions, bound tightly to the continuing national conversation about
race, class, and gender, provide an exceptional amount of data about the distribution of
student-athletes by race and gender as well as information about the coaching and administrative
professionals on the same dimensions. These data offer an opportunity to evaluate the
causes of dramatic differences in the distribution of student-athletes by race within gender
categories by sport. When we compare these distributions to those of other countries
where the same sports have high visibility, we can conclude that these distributions
do not likely conform to any racial characteristics, but instead respond to the structures
of opportunity, discrimination, and class, often in the United States as elsewhere, mediated
by structures of race and socio-economic circumstance. See the following for the data:
1981-82 -- 2008-09 NCAA Sports Sponsorship and Participation Rates Report (2010),
Race and Gender Demographics: NCAA Member Conferences' Personnel Report -- 2008-09 (2010),
Race and Gender Demographics: Member Institutions' Personnel Report -- 2008-09 (2010) (2010),
and
Student-Athlete Ethnicity Report -- 1999-2000; 2008-09 (2010).
Throughout this complex topic, the key element of competition continues to
provide the true North of intercollegiate athletics. While much rhetoric
speaks to the highly controversial national agenda around race, class, and gender, the
reflection of this argument within intercollegiate sports always intersects with
the fundamental, permanent value of winning.
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