Boston University drops wrestling as varsity sport

After the of 2013-14 season, Boston University will no longer support a varsity wrestling team. Wrestling has been a varsity sport at the university for just under 50 years. Officials within the athletics department said that the decision was made for several reasons including BU's imminent conference move to the Patriot League which does not have wrestling and the team's mediocre performance in the past decade+. To remedy the latter, a lot more money would have to be put into the program including into facilities, something the department says is not feasible. They immediately ruled out the possibility of fundraising as a possibility to save the team. It seems the decision has been made.
The good news is that the articles I have read have not invoked Title IX as a "the law made me do it" excuse. And BU eliminated football in the late 1990s so we know they aren't shuffling the money over to that program.
But that hasn't stopped critics from participating in the Title IX blame game. A quick look at Twitter:
Some named Justin S tweeted "Wrestling programs get cut so girls can take lots of cute uniform pics in the lockerroom before games" with the TitleIX hashtag. This was right after he tweeted that "football and wrestling have literally destroyed my body." Hmm...
Jason Bryant, a sportswriter in Minnesota, tweeted that that was another case of Title IX forcing a school to cut a sport and that it was the addition of men's lacrosse that forced the school to cut wrestling--because it couldn't keep both.
Well it certainly has a numbers problem. Men comprise, as of the 2012 EADA reporting, just a smidge under 40 percent of the undergraduate population. The same data show that there is a 7.7 percent disparity between the percentage of female undergraduates and the percentage of female student-athletes. That is equivalent to 52 opportunities. So they have to keep the number of male student-athletes in check or add a woman's sport--or increase the number of men in their undergraduate population. Adding men's lacrosse made the school vulnerable. If a woman's club team, for example, came forward and asked for elevation to varsity status the school might have trouble denying them that opportunity given that their numbers are off and that the last women's team they added was in 2005.
If BU had all the money in the world, maybe wrestling would have been retained and two more women's sports added. But maybe they are simply trying to maintain a highly successful athletics program in which all their sports are regionally popular and given what they need to succeed.

Amherst College responds

Students have been, it seems, emboldened by the national press their college has received over the climate on the Amherst College campus. They held a rally last Friday outside a Board of Trustees meeting. And the college is responding--publicly.
President Martin gave an interview to New England Public Radio yesterday morning. I was quite impressed by her statements. She gave a lot of credit to the students of Amherst College who have already been working on this issue. She referred to them as experts. She has hired an outside consultant to examine the policies around sexual assault and misconduct. She is bringing in outside counselors to the counseling center to specifically serve students who have been victims of sexual assault.
I was somewhat surprised by this. While I think it is a positive move, I am not quite sure why a college campus doesn't already have multiple staff members in their counseling center who are capable of working with students who experience sexual assault. This might be part of the issue around "climate," which the interviewer asked Martin about.
Policies can change, staff members can change--but how do you change a climate?
Friends and I had this discussion just last night in reference both to Amherst College and a recent article about the Boston University men's hockey team, which dismissed two players last season because of sexual assault allegations. An internal report found a "culture of entitlement" on the team which lead to the these assaults and was allowed to flourish because of lack of supervision or discipline by the coaching staff and university administration. BU has put several policies and practices in place in an attempt to change the culture.
But altering a culture, especially when it is so engrained, is difficult. According to the Globe article linked in the above paragraph, appealing to people's sense of right and wrong does not work. You have to tell them everyone else is doing it--whatever the it is. So in the case of a climate which fosters the sexual assault of women, do we tell people "hey, everyone else is NOT raping women--you shouldn't either"?

Sexual Harassment Roundup

A number of judicial decisions involving Title IX's application to sexual harassment have been issued in the last several weeks.

• The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, reversing a lower district court, held that a plaintiff had presented sufficient evidence to survive summary judgment, and could pursue her claim that a municipal police academy is liable for the hostile environment she experienced as a cadet. This record included numerous instances of ostracism by her fellow cadets, sexualizing comments about women generally, and criticism and humiliation that negatively affected her education and performance on a handgun proficiency test, for which she was ultimately expelled. The record also contained references to numerous complaints that the plaintiffs and other academy instructors to the academy supervisor, which never resulted in any effort to protect the plaintiff or correct the offending cadets. This was actually a Title VII case, but is likely to be cited by Title IX plaintiffs as well, especially for the point that academic failures cannot be the basis for taking adverse action against a student when those failures were influenced by a hostile classroom environment. Mosby-Grant v. City of Hagerstown, 2010 WL 5151617 (4th Cir. Dec. 20, 2010).
  

• A federal district court in California granted the University of the Pacific's motion for summary judgment, and dismissed a student-athlete's claim that the university was liable under Title IX for an assault against her by three members of the men's basketball team. According to the court, the plaintiff did not present evidence that university officials had notice that the male athletes posted a threat to the plaintiff, as none knew that one of the assailants had been involved in a prior incident of assault, and another assailant's reputation as a "womanizer" was not enough to link him to prior incidents of assault. Nor did the University respond with deliberate indifference. Officials contacted the police immediately after the plaintiff's assault, conducted an investigation and convened judicial proceedings that expelled one of the students and suspended the other two. Doe v. University of the Pacific, 2010 WL 5135360 (E.D. Cal., Dec. 8, 2010).
  

• A school district in Washington is not liable for a female students' sexual abuse and harassment of her male peer, a fellow 10th grader who suffers from autism. The federal court dismissed the plaintiff's Title IX case after determining there was no evidence that school officials knew he was being abused. Even though one teacher apparently encountered the two students in a sexually suggestive position -- the female student sitting on top of the male student victim, "pretending to rape him" through their clothes -- the court determined that this could have appeared to the teacher as behavior that, while inappropriate for school grounds, was consensual rather than harassment or abuse. Though the court was careful to avoid gender stereotypes about boys' invulnerability to sexual abuse by girls, it did point out that because of the girl's small size made it more reasonable for the teacher to interpret what he saw as consensual. J.B. ex rel. Bell v. Mead School District No. 354, 2010 WL 5173164 (E.D. Wash., Dec. 10, 2010).

• A plaintiff's Title IX claim against a Pennsylvania school district survived a motion to dismiss; the court recognized that the plaintiffs' complaint sufficiently alleged that school officials had notice that a teacher and coach was sexually abusing or harassing their daughter, a student, yet took no steps to preclude Hetrick from having further contact with K.E., nor did it notify either the police or the plaintiffs about the allegations. Having survived the motion to dismiss, the case can now proceed to discovery, where the plaintiffs can gather evidence to prove their allegations. Douglass v. Brookville Area Sch. Dist., 2010 WL 5313448 (W.D. Pa., Dec. 20, 2010).

• A graduate student in social work sued both her university as well as her internship site, a municipal senior center, for sexual harassment by one of the center's clients. When the plaintiff informed the supervisor, she was advised to treat the client's behavior, which included physically, hugging her, touching her breasts and rear end, as a learning experience and an opportunity to demonstrate her commitment to social work. The federal court in Massachusetts sustained the plaintiff's constitutional claims against her on-site supervisor, as well as the Title IX claims against Boston University. The judge sustained the plaintiff's Title IX claim because she alleged that her faculty supervisors knew she was being harassed at her placement and failed to address it with the on-site supervisor or move her to a different internship site. Rinsky v. Boston Univ., 2010 WL 5437289 (D. Mass. Dec. 23, 2010).
  

• A "prank" in which a teacher and an aide pretended to cut a sixth-grade boy's long hair, and then teased the student by calling him a female name in front of both sixth grade classes, could result in the school district's liability under Title IX. A federal court in Ohio rejected the district's motion to dismiss because the plaintiff, the student's mother, alleged that her son reported the incident to school officials, who took no corrective action and forced him to return to the offending teachers' class. Anoai v. Mildford Exempted School District, 2011 WL 53164 (S.D. Ohio, Jan. 6, 2011).