Ohio University Named in OCR Complaint

According to the Athens News, someone has filed a complaint with OCR alleging that Ohio University's decision to cut men's swimming and diving earlier this year violates Title IX. You may recall from our earlier posts on this issue that Ohio U cut four sports in January, including men's indoor and outdoor track and women's lacrosse along with the men's swimming and diving team.

I seriously doubt that OCR will launch a formal investigation into this claim. It is well-settled that while the agency deems cutting men's sports a disfavored practice, it does not violate Title IX to do so unless men were the underrepresented sex to start with -- which was not the case at Ohio. Moreover, the university claimed that money was the reason for the cuts. This rings true, since the university cut more participation opportunities than was required to achieve proportionality, and because the university did not try to satisfy the prong three, which it likely could have done without adding or cutting anything if it had administered OCR's model survey.

Since the decision to cut teams was about money, there's not much OCR can do. OCR has no jurisdiction to tell any school how much money they have to spend on sports. All OCR can do is ensure that the opportunities the school decides to offer are distributed fairly to male and female athletes.