This week I’m linking to some of my favorite blog posts from this year, and especially ones that drew some vigorous, and even heated, discussion. As you’ll see, most of them pertain to women’s sports but there are some other subjects I’ll revisit here.

The first installment is my post from April 27 entitled “The real elephant of Title IX compliance.” I wrote it at the start of a series of gender equity stories in The New York Times that reflects so much of what I consider wrong-headed thinking on this topic.

Far too often, the mainstream media world I’ve inhabited most of my career has been terrified to address Title IX and gender equity from anything but the perspective of women’s sports activists, attorneys, academics and others who’ve made this their life’s work.

This post — and do read the comments — also triggered a longer project on women’s sports that I posted in June and that I will be revisiting this week as well.

This is the seventh in a series entitled “Women’s Sports Without Illusions” that critically examines the nearly four decades of the women’s sports movement, including Title IX, cultural and social developments, the growth of professional and international women’s sports and current challenges and issues.

All posts in this series can be found here.

Yesterday I mapped out a few ideas on how Title IX compliance might be changed to reflect the progress of women’s college athletics today, mindful that none of these will probably go anywhere. Instead of boosting participation numbers to match proportionality, I argue that issues over funding, facilities and related matters be made the focal point of new sports regulations.

Today I’ll explain why what we have now is what we’re stuck with, probably for at least another 30 years.

Has this all been a waste of time, then? I don’t think so. The public’s view of what Title IX is has been defined by just one narrow band of interest groups that nonetheless dominates, in large part because there’s not much in the way of any alternative being presented.

Why the 3-part test won’t go

It’s politics. The Women’s Sports Foundation and National Women’s Law Center have made Title IX their highest priority, and it shows. Ever since the mid-1990s, with the Cohen vs. Brown decision and a policy clarification that made proportionality the de facto standard for sports compliance, the Title IX establishment has scored victory after victory, in courts of law and public opinion.

Rather uncritical mainstream media coverage hasn’t hurt with the latter, even though some reporters do a good job explaining the concerns of those advocating on behalf of displaced male athletes. But critics like the College Sports Council have struggled to get any kind of sustained traction for their views, outside of “he said, she said” stories purporting to demonstrate “balance” on a hot topic. And they simply don’t have the law on their side, as it is being interpreted by the federal courts. At times, the CSC can sound as shrill as the women’s groups it opposes, and that’s saying something. We have two entrenched positions that are ironclad. This will not spur meaningful change.

There’s also no willpower in Washington to change any of this. Title IX has become something of a third-rail issue, and frankly, it wasn’t a terribly high priority in Congress even before the current economic crisis. Bush’s education secretary didn’t act on his own Title IX commission’s recommendations, some of which tried to stake out at least a few new ideas worth pondering. They’ve been shelved, probably permanently.

It’s legal. There’s quite a bit of case law and legal precedent for maintaining the status quo. A new set of regulations would take years to craft into a workable set of options for colleges to follow, as guided by the courts. The Supreme Court declined to take up Cohen v. Brown in 1997 because there had been no disagreement at two lower court levels. There has been little since about anything significant regarding the 3-part test.

Football and proportionality

Because the 3-part test is here to stay, here’s another vexing issue that has been around for years: Should football be counted in the proportionality equation?

I’ve long said no — and so have others — because football is a different animal, both in having no female equivalent and with the specialized nature of the sport prompting large rosters. I say this realizing that this suggestion now is basically a non-starter.

Here’s a little history lesson: Two years after Title IX was passed, there was an effort in Congress to exempt revenue-producing sports. However, the Tower Amendment failed, leading to legislation that created the sports regulations we have now, including the 3-part test. I don’t see how any renewed effort to take football out of Title IX compliance will fly.

And given the current problems in college football, it’s implausible that any position to keep that sport away from the gender equity fray can be taken seriously. Even if it makes sense. If you make it a men vs. women thing, which the women’s advocates will do, it will be very easy to pinpoint where the more troubling issues lie.

Currently the Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly I-A) scholarship limit is 85; it used to be 120 before Title IX compliance began in earnest. I’ve thought for a while about cutting the number, perhaps to 70, and then taking football out of the picture.

But I hate the idea of more men being turned away. Even if you agree that football is bloated, there are real human beings who did nothing to hold back women athletes but who are paying the price for what happened before they were born.

I also loathe roster management, although keeping down costs is a persistent issue in football. Here’s another doozy from Ball State, which spent $88,000 to lodge football players before home games. The NCAA could put some teeth in curtailing this, but it hasn’t for years. Serious college football reform efforts would need to include much more than any impact on women’s sports, but those are about as likely to take place as scotching the 3-part test.

Title IX advocates insist there’s still a lot of fat remaining that needs to be cut. Especially below the BCS level schools do lose money on football, sometimes a lot of money.

The political reality is the women’s advocates won’t budge in having football tied to proportionality, and they’d raise holy hell if anybody tried to cut it out. Without football in the mix, most schools would comply with Title IX, and men’s and women’s non-revenue teams might get more proper attention.

These changes alone still won’t yield the money that would conceivably be redistributed to the women’s side. And scaling back football, even to a modest degree, has never encouraged a young woman to try out for a team.

Some other suggestions for reform

Sportswriter Beau Dure doesn’t think that football “should be given a pass.” But he suggests adding a fourth prong of compliance for schools that already provide a healthy roster of sports for women:

“If you’ve got fully funded women’s basketball, field hockey, golf, lacrosse, soccer, softball, tennis and volleyball, do you really have to add women’s-only rowing and equestrian just for equity’s sake? Or cut a men’s program for fear of following Brown as a loser in court?

“If I have a bias in all this, it’s as a fan of soccer and Olympic sports. They’re threatened — across the board. Women’s basketball has grown by leaps and bounds — at Duke, I attended games that drew a couple hundred fans; today, they draw several thousand. Great. Let’s invest elsewhere.”

What an amazingly sane idea.

Little room for optimism

However, the last thing the powerful women’s interests groups want is for colleges to actually reach compliance; it would endanger their advocacy. Besides, there’s fertile new ground for litigation at the scholastic level, and the National Women’s Law Center’s most recent publicity stunt is a declaration of these intentions. Hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of high school districts across the country face lawsuits and some very painful prospects at a time when many of them are laying off teachers, gutting academic programs and closing schoools.

More disturbingly, so-called Title IX legal experts are getting all dreamy about the future of the law, interpreting the current status as only just the beginning of where they want to go next. Says former NWLC attorney Deborah Brake in her recent book on Title IX:

“Degendering sports is an important part of securing sex equality in sports.”

Protect your privates, fellas. Here we go again. More on that later in the week.

Coming Wednesday: Do girls and women really need sports? Yes, this is another heretical question I’m asking here. But you may not be aware of the soul-crushing reasons women’s advocates have cited to virtually beg females to get in the game.

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Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.

Quite a bit has transpired since I wrote here last week about the growing clamor over Title IX and the proportionality debate that isn’t new, but has taken on a fresh dimension:

• First of all, in a column that slams the graft and corruption of college football, George Vecsey of The New York Times on Saturday piled on the “football is the enemy of Title IX” meme, and this was rather unfortunate:

“Let’s ask the question: What causes this insatiable need for female (or ersatz female) names and numbers? It stems from the gigantic elephant leaving proof of its presence smack in the middle of most college campuses: King Football.”

• Missing from Vecsey’s analysis — and he’s a columnist I’ve long admired — is any mention of the fact that “King Football,” men’s basketball and their ultra-rich television contracts pay the freight for the most successful women’s athletics programs. For those who doubt this, check out the nifty little deal revealed Tuesday between the soon-to-be Pac 12 Conference, ESPN and Fox.

It’s for 12 years and is worth an estimated $3 billion, the richest ever for a college sports conference. Like previous media packages involving the ACC, SEC and Big 12, women’s and men’s non-revenue sports will benefit from the increased exposure. As I wrote recently, the wildly successful Big Ten Network is combining handsome profits with a commitment to devote half its programming to women’s sports. Football is the benefactor, not the enemy.

SEC football behemoth LSU recently hired away Nikki Caldwell from UCLA to coach its women’s basketball team, and will be paying her a minimum of $700,000 a year. Not bad for someone with only three years of head coaching experience in a sport that loses millions. But unlike activists and journalists, Caldwell lives in the real (perhaps surreal) world of college athletics and like many in her position understands the need to make the alumni and booster club rounds with her football and men’s basketball counterparts.

• Former Women’s Sports Foundation CEO Donna Lopiano continues her decades-long lament to stop “this damn arms race in football and men’s basketball.” It is true that the money some coaches make and the expenses these sports roll up are increasingly breathtaking. But so are the sums being spent on women’s basketball, and coaching salaries in particular, although she does not acknowledge this, nor how they are being financed.

What’s driving this argument is the activists’ longstanding animus for football, which might be as insatiable as the appetite of fans for more televised college football. It is the arms race in non-revenue sports — for both men and women — that ought to be a greater concern.

• The Times on Monday detailed the University of Delaware’s recent decision to cut its men’s track and cross-country team as a pre-emptive measure against any possible Title IX violations in the future. Now that’s a relatively new twist to an old, sad story. But with women the majority of the undergraduate students at Delaware and many other schools, the male athletes’ claims of discrimination as the “underrepresented” gender bear watching.

• However, the real pain that too many young men have been feeling in the name of “leveling the playing field” falls on deaf ears within the Title IX establishment. Judging from an account inside the echo chamber of this week’s NCAA gender equity confab, the status quo was firmly upheld. Furthermore, invitees were treated to “a brilliant keynote address” on policies dealing with sexual abuse by coaches and calls to eliminate sexist and homophobic language in sports.

Good luck with that last one.

• Welch Suggs, a former reporter for The Chronicle of Higher Education whom I met on the Title IX “beat” and who has written a very good book on this subject, is challenging me to come up with a “serious, dispassionate review of Title IX regulations.” Well, although I do have certain point of view I think I’ve done some of that here, and I will expand on this soon.

As Suggs notes, I’m not the only woman who feels the way I do, as noted journalist Hanna Rosin commented on this topic last week at Slate. Her perspective comes from delving into gender-related issues that are far larger than sports: How women, with their superior numbers in higher education, could dominate the post-industrial economy, and what that might mean for American society. She also wrote a compelling piece last year about Baylor All-American Brittney Griner and “the feminine dilemma of women’s basketball.”

• I appreciate the kind words from a number of people who read last week’s post, including sports business analyst Kristi Dosh, who’s begun a new blog, the Business of College Sports that I highly recommend. She’s been laying out a very methodical — dispassionate? — examination of how revenue sports are becoming increasingly necessary. I look forward to following what she uncovers. Fascinating stuff.

• A few other recent suggestions — none of them new — have sprung forth from various media quarters on solving the riddle of proportionality: Remove football from the head count. Add cheerleading to the head count.

I used to think these were good ideas, too, but what they don’t do is take proportionality out of the equation altogether. They merely perpetuate the numbers game — the head count — and that’s the main problem.

• The other two tests for Title IX sports compliance are just as unworkable. Some college athletic administrators are saying the same thing to the Title IX establishment, which, not surprisingly, seems surprised to hear this.

Toward the end of Tuesday’s story in The New York Times detailing how some schools “fudge” female participation numbers to reach Title IX compliance, former Syracuse athletics director Jake Crouthamel uttered a sentence that has long reflected the sentiments of women’s sports advocates:

“Football is the elephant in the whole thing. That’s the monster.”

He was stating the frustrations that many of his peers have felt in trying to adhere to the law because of the numbers of athletes required for football, which has no female equivalent.

Here we go again.

We’re rehashing some of the pitched rhetoric that has marked Title IX battles for the better part of 40 years. If not for football, this line of thinking goes, perhaps we wouldn’t be seeing some of the startling realities that Times reporter Katie Thomas uncovered about the results of some dubious bean-counting that schools submit to the federal government:

– Male practice players in women’s basketball count as women. Of the 32 participants counted last season for recent NCAA champion Texas A & M, 14 were men.

– Fifteen of the 34 members listed on the Cornell women’s fencing team roster are men.

– More than half of the 71 women listed on the South Florida cross country roster in 2009 didn’t run a race in that year. Some said they didn’t know they were on the team.

– Some female athletes are “underqualified,” with little or no experience in the sport for which they are listed as participants.

– Tight roster limits have been placed on some men’s teams to prevent male participation numbers from “skewing” attempts at reacing gender balance.

And so on and so on.

Some of these practices are not new revelations, especially the last two.

And interestingly, they don’t appear to run counter to federal regulations or NCAA objectives. The NCAA, for example, has actively encouraged roster management (especially in football) as a tool for reaching Title IX compliance.

In the most stunning admission in the story, Thomas reports that deputy assistant education secretary David Bergeron thinks “men should be counted on women’s teams if they receive coaching and practice with women.”

What Thomas didn’t do was examine the premise of the first test of Title IX compliance, known as proportionality, which has had the de facto force of the law since the mid-1990s and which has had athletics directors scrambling ever since. It’s also been the biggest bone of contention by forces advocating on behalf of male athletes who’ve lost their teams when schools make cuts for gender equity purposes.

Neither did Thomas address the subject of interest, which women’s sports advocates loathe and which has become something of a third rail not to touch. The party line is that women are just as interested in men in participating in sports, but they’ve been unfairly held back. That might have been true in the past, but the examples shown in Thomas’ reporting illustrate a desperate attempt by colleges to play Title IX’s numbers game any way they can. If they had been able to find an ample supply of interested female athletes to fill roster sports, isn’t it fair to assume they would have done that? Especially with the constant threats of lawsuits hanging over their heads?

These are questions that beg for answers, but they were not asked here.

Instead, Thomas interviewed the usual suspects in stories like this: Women’s Sports Foundation mouthpiece Nancy Hogshead-Makar; Russlynn Ali, the current head of the U.S. Education Department’s Office of Civil Rights in an administration friendly to the Title IX establishment; and an indignant university president, in this case Donna Shalala of Miami, Fla.

Hogshead-Makar called these practices a “fraud.” Shalala, a former Clinton cabinet member who ought to have bigger concerns with a new AD, football coach and men’s basketball coach, took the time to accuse schools of “end-running Title IX for a long time.”

Even the Times headline was loaded, suggesting that schools are “relying on deception.”

Except that they’re doing nothing that could land them in court, or run afoul of federal regulators. At least not yet.

Do these “roster management” techniques follow the spirit of Title IX?

Absolutely not.

But neither does the proportionality test, which was treated like a ghost in this story. Thomas later answered some reader mail online, but again passed on the opportunity to address either that or the interest topic, which was foremost on the minds of many commenters on her story.

Wednesday’s unsigned Times editorial was also predictable, accusing schools of playing “cynical games” but remarkably uncritical of the warped logic of proportionality that created the conditions for these actions. There’s an assumption here that women naturally will rush to fill the percentage of sports slots to match the undergraduate enrollment at their schools if only discrimination were ended. This assumption is not to be challenged.

I will suggest here that it is interest, and not football, that is the real elephant when it comes to Title IX compliance.

When I covered these issues for The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, I once interviewed the newly appointed coach of a newly created women’s rowing team at a major southern university. This was a sport that was added solely for the school in question to get its Title IX numbers right and not invite unwanted litigation. Now rowing is a legitimate and wonderful sport, and this campus was located near an ideal body of water to field this sport, so all of this made sense on the surface.

But when I asked this upbeat young female coach how she was planning to fill as many as 50 or so roster spots, she told me that one method included scouring the campus, looking for female students with long arms and legs.

I kid you not.

She wasn’t particular about demanding any previous rowing experience, or even a background in competitive sports, for that matter. She had to get numbers, and get them fast. Does this not fit the definition of “underqualified?”

My next questions, which I realize were a bit unfair to ask her, were as follows: So where is the interest level here? Where is the groundswell of female students demanding a rowing team? She really didn’t have any good answers, for she was hired only to recruit and coach the team, not provide the rationale.

This was in the late 1990s, and ever since any questions along these lines have come to be rhetorical. UConn women’s hoops coach Geno Auriemma — who’s becoming perhaps the sanest observer of women and sports that we have — was asked about all this by ESPN’s Hannah Storm on Tuesday. He too mentioned football, but also said this:

“Title IX is supposed to provide an opportunity. It’s not supposed to demand that you participate in that opportunity.”

Bingo. This was never the intent of Title IX, which was passed, ironically enough, to shatter artificial numerical limits placed on women in education.

The law must stay on the books and it must be enforced. There are still some serious problems with the proper funding and resourcing of existing women’s teams, as this recent series in the Ball State student newspaper demonstrates. This should be the greater emphasis of Title IX enforcement, not the further addition of sports for the sake of playing the numbers game.

But the 3-part test for Title IX sports compliance is broken, and needs to be fixed. We need a new set of regulations to reflect the status of female college athletes today, and not in the late 1970s, when the test was formulated and when I was in college. It is a very different world now, and a much better one.

Before we can do that, we must also have an honest discussion about women and their interest in competing in intercollegiate sports. The Times is rolling out more stories on Title IX compliance that I hope will seriously delve into this subject in ways the first installment of this series did not.