Title IX and other issues

My buddy Bitner posted an intersting food for thought about Title IX's impact on the academic athletic environment. I thought he handled it pretty tastefully. It's hard to be a guy and comment on such issues without coming off as a misogynist, but he handled it well. The upshot of his question was whether the aims of Title IX have been met in a way that does justice to all parties. Here's his post:

http://bitnersthoughts.blogspot.com/2008/08/gender-equality.html

I initially was going to comment, but it mutated into an essay that I put out now for your feedback.

It's always a tough call to determine at what point the cure has become more damaging than the disease. I think you'll find a lot of similar rhetoric with discussions of Affirmative Action generally.

As I read Bitner's thoughts I do sympathize with low-revenue sports who've lost their status with some universities due to Title IX. I can't for the life of me, however, figure out how you'd be able to sustain the needed level of women's athletics to provide the types of opportunities that Title IX shoots for without making cuts somewhere.

An interesting analysis might be whether the proliferation of women's athletics that Title IX enabled has in any way diluted the talent level within women's athletics generally. I'm not even sure how you'd quantify that, but maybe the increased availability of scholarships and the like has in some way had that effect much like expansion has diluted the NBA and MLB.

If that where the case, then maybe there could be justification for scaling back Title IX's administration. In defense of academic athletics generally, the theoretical justification has traditionally been that the development of the human body is an aim of a true university no less than the development of "academic" pursuits. Whenever universities feel that any program is no longer perfoming at a level consistent with their institutional aims, they don't hesitate to scale back funding and resources for those programs or eliminate them entirely, no matter what level of dismay that creates amongst that program's supporters.

You hate to reduce it to a purely economic analysis, and I think most people would argue that certain public policy goals can properly fly in the face of economic reasoning when those aims are important enough for society to pay for. Liberals in particular rely on this rhetoric all the time even while conservatives argue the opposite.

I, too, am curious about what your thoughts and Bitner's readers come up with.