The Sporting Life:
The Public Professor’s
Saturday Sports Column
Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that a number of colleges are fudging their numbers. Lying about the SAT scores of incoming freshmen? Inflating student Grade Point Averages? Falsifying graduation rates?
No. Nothing that academic. Rather, they’re finding ways to make it look as if their school has more female athletes than they actually do. They’re juicing the books on sports, playing games about playing games. Methods of deception include:
Counting female students who have been invited to practice with a women’s team but are not good enough to compete, never do, and sometimes don’t even practice.
Listing female students as athletes when they aren’t; sometimes these students don’t even know they are official members of a school team.
Counting male students who practice with the team. Yes, male students are being counted as female student athletes.
Why all the funny business? It’s so that schools can comply with the 1972 law known as Title IX, which is 
actually an addendum to the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the monumental bill that began the dismantling of Jim Crow segregation.
Schools that receive federal funds (which is almost all of them) cannot discriminate based on gender. It’s that simple. So female students cannot be excluded from school programs just because they’re women. For example, there cannot be a geology course for male students only. In the case of gender specific activities such as sports, schools must provide equivalent opportunities for female students.
This does not mean a school always has to have the exact same number of female student athletes as male athletes, or offer the exact same number of scholarships to female athletes as to male athletes, though such figures would obviously keep a school in compliance with Title IX. Rather, the bill recognizes the fluid nature of a school, where most students are gone after four years or fewer.
In order to comply, a school simply must find a way to show that it is merely working toward the goal of equal opportunity. In the world of college sports, this means that institutions have three ways they can show compliance:
If the school’s population of female athletes is in proportion to overall female student population (You don’t need much if there aren’t many female students).
If the school can establish that it has a history of expanding athletic opportunities for women. (Not there yet? Just show that you’re getting better.)
If the school can demonstrate that it is meeting the athletic interests and abilities of its female students. (For chrissakes, just come up with something that looks good.)
Doesn’t sound very hard, does it? It’s not. So why would a school dummy up its numbers then? The answer is 
simple. Because the school is chronically not in compliance. Because the school is habitually not offering comparable opportunities for female students. Because the school’s non-compliance is in fact systemic in structure and endemic to its culture.
In practical terms, the primary force driving such systemic non-compliance is big time college football. At some schools, many millions of dollars are at stake because football drives alumni donations, television revenue, and university commercial branding efforts. And it also skews the numbers. Team rosters average over 110 players, which, for the record, is more than twice the size of an NFL roster.
But here’s the bottom line. Administrators and officers at colleges and universities around the country are lying so that they can continue to break the law.
This kind of institutional malfeasance would be outrageous coming from a private corporation. It would be shocking coming from a non-profit. The fact that this kind of underhanded, unethical, and illegal behavior is regularly being perpetrated at institutions of higher learning is so detestable and unconscionable that it makes me embarrassed to call myself a university professor. But I am a university professor, and part of my job is to 
teach and to speak out. So let’s be clear.
Investigations should be conducted.
Lawsuits should be filed.
People should be suspended and/or fired.
And once again, we need to consider the idea that the big business of sports entertainment belongs in the private sector, not at non-profit schools. A for-profit, private-sector style business should not be run and operated at a non-profit school. Because so long as the two are intertwined, corruption and exploitation will be the standard.