Title IX ruling stands (Read the transcripts)
Board of Visitors rejects plea to postpone cuts
By Matthew Stoss, senior writer
Posted on January 16, 2007

Surrounded by athletes, parents, alumni and media, Student Advisory Council President Jennifer Chapman pleaded for the Board of Visitors to delay the Title IX cuts of last September until 2010.

After a closed session meeting of the BOV, Board member Joseph Damico, reading from a prepared statement, announced the Sept. 29 decision, which called for the elimination of 10 sports, will not be reversed.

“We thought at least there would be an outcome where they would’ve decided to look at it more and given us a little more time, or at least re-examined the decision to see if there are other options, but the fights not over,” said Chapman, a senior and captain of the women’s track team. “These athletes still want to be here, they’re not going to be here because they were told ‘no’ once.”

Since the initial decision was made to cut men’s and women’s archery, fencing and gymnastics, men’s cross country, indoor track, outdoor track, swimming and wrestling, the Save Our Sports campaign sought to save the programs by imploring the BOV to become Title IX-compliant another way.

As laid out in the 1972 law meant to promote equal opportunities for underrepresented sexes, there are three ways in which to be compliant. The first is to have the gender ratio of student-athletes be proportionate to the gender ratio of the student body. The second is to increase participation in sports in order to reflect student gender ratios, and the third is to survey the students in order to match their interests.

President Linwood Rose said prong one of this “three-prong test” was still the best option for JMU and the ongoing dispute was the result of misinterpretation.

“Well it’s not that [another option] doesn’t make sense,” Rose said. “It’s that it doesn’t provide an answer for us because we do not have a continuing history of adding female opportunity and that continuing history is what’s required.

“Unfortunately, the law doesn’t recognize — or at least its interpretation doesn’t recognize that we had so many female sports early in our history, and Title IX was basically applied to institutions which were predominantly male, and we had to create male opportunity.”

JMU currently supports 27 intercollegiate sports — the seventh highest in the nation, which will be pared down to 17 starting July 1. This high number made the increased participation option difficult.

After Friday’s decision, Chapman said the next step would be to pursue a lawsuit, the time frame for which is a couple of months. The next scheduled BOV meeting is April.

“I think before we went the way of not going legal, and now I think it’s going to have to go legal,” she said.

After the BOV’s decision Friday, athletes and parents continued to be incensed by JMU’s  handling of the situation.

Tari Van Winkle, whose son Stirling is a sophomore on the men’s gymnastics team, said she couldn’t get a hold of Rose nor athletic director Jeff Bourne after Sept. 29, and was forced to physically come to JMU from Tallahassee, Fla., to get answers. When she asked to address the BOV at its next meeting, she was turned down. However, at Friday morning’s athletics committee meeting, she was allowed to speak at the last minute.

“I asked [Bourne] if I could address in the Board of Visitors in November and he said, ‘no,’ so I didn’t prepare anything,” she said. “So I just did it from my heart.”

The student representative to the junior BOV Stacy Fuller was also excluded from the final decision for legal reasons, as individual members and the Board as a whole can be sued. Since the BOV is comprised of appointees by the governor, members are offered a certain amount of state protection, Fuller said. The student representative is elected by the student body and thus is not afforded the same protection, which would have put the student representative under considerable scrutiny and the decision to exclude Fuller was a paternal move, she said.

“I was surprised there wasn’t more talk in the community about the possibility or the potential of this happening,” said Fuller, who said she felt underutilized by the S.O.S. campaign. “I wish that more communication would have gone between us. I think a lot of it was a case of I wasn’t telling them what they wanted to hear, and so they would look to other sources.”

Those other sources included the federal Office of Civil Rights, which was in consultation with S.O.S., the BOV and the College Sports Council. James Snyder Sr., whose son James is a freshman on the men’s track team, said he wasn’t shocked by the decision or the way it was handled.

“It was cold and callous, the way it was presented to the athletes,” Snyder said. “It was the timing of it. With all the things that led up to today, it doesn’t surprise me.

“And to have a prepared speech before Jenn Chapman even had her speech given. I don’t think the director had time to type that up and get it presented in the time they had. I think it was a foregone conclusion that it was going to happen.”

Said Rose of Chapman’s presentation: “I was extremely proud of Jennifer Chapman. And as Mr. Damico said, there are some continuing misinterpretations and misunderstandings what compliance really means, but I don’t think any new evidence or direction was presented to us that would cause the Board that would take a different position.”

Complete Transcripts
Chapman's address to the BOV - Download: [.pdf] [.doc]
BOV response - Download: [.pdf] [.doc]