Over 100 James Madison athletes, coaches,and parents — both male and female — were joined by a smattering of athletes from other schools today in front of the Department of Education at a rally to demand reform of Title IX. James Madison, you will recall, cut ten sports teams last month — seven for men and three for women — to comply with Title IX. The student-athletes were there — uncoached and unrehearsed — to demand that the law be changed. And as they spoke, you could feel the ground shift under the feminists who have ruled with Stalinist message discipline on college campuses for the past forty years.
The event was sponsored by the College Sports Council and the Independent Women’s Forum, but real force of the day was the student-athletes.
It was fascinating to see a bunch of kids who weren’t alive when the law was passed — who missed the passage of the law by more than a decade — describe in no uncertain terms how Title IX would be irrelevant to their lives if it weren’t for the fact that it is causing so much pain and loss in their sports. To a man and woman they stood up and said that Title IX may have been a good idea in the Seventies when it was passed, but now it is an anachronism, and a damaging on at that. They spoke painfully about how the opportunity to compete in collegiate athletics was over for them, but that they were worried about future generations of kids playing Olympic sports like track, swimming, wrestling and gymnastics — sports that are disappearing from college campuses because of the law. Unlike most athletes who’ve had their teams cut, who understandably care only about getting their sports back, these kids know the odds are against them. But they came to Washington anyway, even though some of their coaches, at the behest of the Women’s Sports Foundation, tried to deliberately schedule practice to conflict with the rally. Every American who believes in fairness and true equality owes the student-athletes of James Madison University a great debt of gratitude.
Such was their rage, the members of the James Madison men’s swim team skinned off for justice on Title IX.