Reflections

College Athletics: Does Equality Mean

Doing Things the Way Men Do?
Revisiting the Presentation to the Annual Meeting of the National
Association of Women Deans and Counselors in 1986. -- Summer, 2017.

Back in a time now all too much for us

Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there's a story in a book about it

Preparing a small introduction for this talk, which I gave at an annual meeting of a
national organization, the National Association of Women Deans and Counselors in
(I think) 1986, proved to be a challenging experience.1

As you'll see from the original material itself, I took some pains to let my audience
know what I intended and hoped to do. But, in trying to reconstruct what was going
on in my mind and in the world at the time I thought giving this talk was worth
doing, I was reminded of Robert Frosts great poem, Directive, the opening lines
from same quoted above. The 30 years that have passed since I was originally
thinking about this and now seem to be both as long as a millennium ago and as
recently as just yesterday.

Today, debate about Title IX in its application to colleges is centered on responsible

1I have only my text prepared for delivery. As I never sought to publish the
material, I did not formally make citations. Many of the quotations and references
have had to be forensically uncovered; some may be just lost.
prevention and the management of claims of claims about sexual assault. The most
recent news reveals the current US governments decision to pursue these matters
less aggressively, perhaps as a dimension of the administrations overall
commitment to reducing Federal oversight, generally.

At the time I did this talk virtually the only matter on which Title IX was a really
contested issue was equity in intercollegiate athletics.

So much has changed with respect to what was latent and emerging at the time I
gave this talk.

And then there are ironies: My talk was delivered in the afterglow of the
disappearance of the NAIAW, the national organization dedicated to women's
athletics and the absorption of its interests (though no merger, if I remember
correctly) into the NCAA. My plea was that the organization to which I gave the talk,
NAWAC, might take up the cause of interrogating whose values and standards
should be the ones used to judge equity.

But, the very organization to which I gave the talk ceased to exist just four years
later when it was merged into a larger organization, the National Association of
Student Personnel Administrators.2

Lots of womens colleges and organizations seem to have experienced a similar

osmosis, or even threatened necrosis, in the last three decades.

I do not pretend to know very much about how much of the original missions of
these two organizations, or the colleges that have ceased to exist, has survived,
flourished or even possibly overtaken the culture of the organizations into which
they were folded.

I do know that the focus on women (qua women, and as leaders), as an interest
group having particular assets, needs, contributions to make, grievances to
prosecute, etc. seems to have been subordinated to the other nouns (and thus
purposes) present in the titles of the organizations in which these old, women-
centered ones have now been morphed.

What seems to have not changed very much is the need to consider the main point
of what I was trying to get at in 1986. That is this: Equality and equity have to be
somehow materialized and measured against some standard (equal to what, equal
in what way). The question is what should that standard be? (And, in a subsidiary
way, who should determine that standard and how?)

2And speaking of poetry, just ask yourself if Robert Frost could have permitted
himself to write of student personnel administrators when he could have written
women deans and counselors.
Where the standard is really about gender itself, what norms within gender get
treated as the standard against which the measure of equality will be taken?

What was triumphant in the decision on the part of the owner of the Lambda Rising
bookstore to close his gay and lesbian focused bookstore was his claim that by now
all bookstores had gay and lesbian sections, whereas when he first opened his shop
almost no other bookstore, and surely not the mainstream ones, had LGBTQ
materials.

Similarly, I suppose, today there's no need for a separate organization looking out
for womens interests because now there is a section or a little corner of a larger
world in which one can find this particularity (the Radcliffe Center at Harvard,
comes to mindthe loss perhaps less visible because now a women is Harvards
president, as unlikely as it might be that President Faust would put herself forward
as representing in any comprehensive way a gender and its particular history and
historiography, psychology, or sociology).

This assimilation accommodation would seem to have been effectuated in the case
in organizations that have women's caucuses or special efforts to attend to gender
as part of the larger question, but what is the larger question?

What I was trying to get at is the larger question, not of women as an interest
group whose interests need to be respected and thus work their ways into the life
of the larger organization, but as representingeven provisionally, perhaps
because of their prior disadvantaged political statusa set of values, experiences,
hopes, and aspirations that were markedly DIFFERENT than those of the
organization into which these interests have now been folded.

The dispute (if I can use that word) that interested me was over over the values
that were being subordinated or elevated when women were not absorbed, versus
the values that were being subordinated or elevated when women were being
absorbed into the larger organizational structure.

This seems to me to still be the key question to think about: to examine, to study, to
report on, to become the focus of a larger analysis and critique.

Indeed, without having the courage to go into it here, having thought a little bit
about what I was trying to do in 1986, I am wondering if the debate about consent
with respect to sexual encounters under the current Title IX umbrella covering
sexual assault, is itself, in its almost all-consuming obsession a juridical, contractual,
and transactional notion of human sexual relations, putting women at a very specific
disadvantage. Why? To the extent that women, in what may be the now out-moded
an even quaint ideal of an ethic of care, may desire to not harm or hurt someone's
feelings (in this case, a sexual partners), puts the woman at a specific disadvantage
in a situation that is otherwise or in a post facto way denominated as otherwise have
been a simple market exchange. (I say this in the same context that asking a person
whose culture entails a strict observance of hierarchy and respect for elders, might
be at a specific disadvantage in a pedagogical situation in which she is expected to
challenge, in a Socratic way, her teacher.)

Feelings do tend to enter what is, after the fact, treated as a contract-making market
exchange.

As I made clear in the 1986 talk, I don't believe these values (caring, respect, and
orientations towards ethics or feelings) are necessarily gender-bound by any stretch
of the imagination.

I do think that the values against which they often get measured, however, are very
identified with male dominance.

So, where does this leave us?

I present this old talka talk that, if I recall correctly, I was encouraged and invited
to give by Margaret Bonz, a colleague from Dartmouth whom I met in connection
with some work that we were doing with a group of New England schools on alcohol
policy. It was very kind of Margaret to invite me to do this, and as I re-read the 14
pages of a talk, I was left wondering what the audience actually made of it. Perhaps
the fact that I have no specific memory of the their reaction protects me from
recalling the reception it did receive!

What I do recall is the basic charge that, if this was a speech to anybody, it was a
speech to the choir. Now I tend to believe that preaching to the choir is something
preachers need to do from time to time, especially if want to have a choir to
continue its ministry in service of the church.

But I think the fact that I gave this talk at a national meeting to people that I didnt
know while I was so unsuccessful in prosecuting this kind of idea at my own
university is remarkable. Perhaps it is indicative of just how problematic raising the
issue of whose standards should we be using to measure equality and how elusive
such a such an analysis was, given the power of the entity we were raising the
question against.

After all, I was the Title IX coordinator at Rutgers when I gave this talk and I was
aware of the limitations of our efforts to achieve equality.

It was the great Nancy Mitchell, a colleague at Rutgers, who helped me understand
AIAW's ideology (and core values) and to see how if it (they) had been followed and
been used as the standard for assessing equality, how different the results could
have been. 3

3I note that in the very kind memorial one can find on Nancy from a Rutgers
originated site, she is listed as the faculty representative to NCAA, an almost
Of course, what we now know is that the big-time athletic establishment would have
prevailed in any event, irony of ironies, because it could have argued (and, with Title
IXs help, did argue) that the womens way was illegally depriving women of
opportunity. But, was the mens way creating a Leviathan that served no colleges
interest?

That question would never get examined because the powers of the measuring
stick we decided to use were so great.

But if we had preserved a yardstick marked the womens way we might be in a

position to thwart the obvious non-truth telling that all the NCAA babble about
scholar athletes represents. Moreover, having that measuring stick would have
been salutary to reducing some of the excesses that we have witnessed at
universities all over the country. Such a measure could support a critique to be
contended with by smart people and policymakers.

And, in my view, in losing that alternate measure, we have lost something we really
need.

On a late-Fall morning last year, I recall being stopped to make way for a motorcade
of New Jersey State Police cars, not to mention other imposing looking vehicles and
coach buses, leaving the Hyatt Regency Hotel in the town where I spend a lot of
time. I was curious about this, wondering what sort of political event, VIP occasion,
or visiting rock group was somehow worthy of being escorted by state police
somewhere.

So I asked someone. I was told that this was the routine every week that there was a
home football game. These were our (not the away teams) football players and
their associated retinue being chauffeured from a luxury hotel where they had spent
the prior night to being driven to the stadium where they were going to perform
later that day.

Thinking about this parade and re-reading my paper made me realize that whatever
farm I thought I was describing that used to be a farm, or the road that used to be
a road, or the town that used to be a town, that I thought I had in mind in my
paper might really had become, as Frost later tells us, a belilaced cellar hole, closing
as a dent in dough.

The town that I (and the AIAW) had in mind is a place that is now unrecognizable. It
does not seem to me possible now to return in a step-wise way from a circumstance
in which a young person is principally a student and secondarily an athletic

Marcuse-ian absorption of her identity into the very entity that she served, but that
swallowed the organization, AIAW, in which she fund her true values and beliefs
about how sports and colleges should be connected with one another.
performer for institution from where that same young person, having been confined
the night before in a local hotel and not his own bed, is now being escorted by state
police car to routine home game.

This distancethough measured in tenths of milesrepresents a much longer

journey than that imagined by a former Rutgers president, in his 1960 address, How
to Frame an Athletic Policy, that I quote in my talk.

This change has certainly been long in coming, but the magnitude of the shift was
brought forward to me in a very profound way when I read an interview with a
college athlete, a football player, who had been replaced from some prior position,
and who said that he thought that this action was perfectly fine, because it was
something that he thought his fan base would understand.

From scholar-athlete to performer with a fan basethats a big leap, a chasm

maybe one not remotely broachable with the analysis I offered in 1986.

Nevertheless, I offer my old talk not only as a quaint historical artifact, but in the
hope that it still contains key questions and modest suggestions that thoughtful
people might find useful in analyzing the current situation and planning for the
future.

Its true that it does seem that indeed the cellar holes might be closing, or have
closed, like dents in dough, but I remain optimistic that we do still have
opportunities to build new structures and maybe the chance even to excavate old
ones.

If my little Dead Sea scroll can help, that will add value to the original effort.

WDBurns
June 27, 2017