Unwrittengriz said:
You are missing the point. Right now UM needs to add 2 women's sports, that is at our current level of men's schollies for football. FBS schools offer around 30 more scholarships for football, which means UM will have to add not only the 2 women's sports we need now but also make up for those 20 additional football scholarships.
As is usually the case when discussing legal issues, I think people here are greatly oversimplifying Title IX (as are the media and the Lehigh blogger). I don't claim to be a Title IX expert, but some very quick research tells me that it's a much more complicated issue than people here are giving it credit for.
To summarize, there are three ways that an institution can comply with Title IX:
In 1979, the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare under Jimmy Carter's administration issued a policy interpretation for Title IX, including what has become known as the "three-prong test" of an institution's compliance.[14][15]
Prong one - Providing athletic participation opportunities that are substantially proportionate to the student enrollment, OR
Prong two - Demonstrate a continual expansion of athletic opportunities for the underrepresented sex, OR
Prong three - Full and effective accommodation of the interest and ability of underrepresented sex.
Note the disjunctive "OR" between the three prongs. To be in compliance, an institution does not have to do all three; it only has to do one.
According to O'Day's email, our current enrollment is 54% female. Using that figure, one way we might be able to comply with Title IX would be to offer 54% of our athletic schollies to women (Prong One). Another way would be to demonstrate that our current scholarship level, although disproportionate, nonetheless fully accommodates the interest and ability of the underrepresented sex (Prong Three).
Accordingly, depending on what our numbers are and what UM's research has shown, it is possible that we need to add two women's sports at our current level (because our current level is disproportionate, and because there is female interest in further sports), but that adding 23 more football scholarships would not require us to add additional female scholarships beyond those two additional sports (because UM's research has shown that, by adding two women's sports, we would be fully accommodating female interest and ability in athletics).
Again, I don't claim to know what UM's actual numbers and research have shown; I'm just trying to illustrate that the issue is a bit more complicated than you're making it, and that O'Day's position is conceivably logical.
