U.S. senator wants answers from NCAA's Mark Emmert on efforts to promote Title IX compliance
The ranking member of the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee announced Friday that he sent a letter to NCAA President Mark Emmert seeking answers about how the association promotes Title IX compliance among its member schools.
The letter from Roger Wicker, R-Miss., is likely to be the first in a series of efforts by politicians to bring attention to the 50th anniversary of the gender equity law, which falls on Thursday. Other members of Congress are scheduled to participate in a range of anniversary events next week.
In his letter, Wicker wrote that the NCAA “continuously oversees the implementation of” Title IX and that “the promotion of opportunities for female collegiate athletics is essential to compliance with Title IX."
The NCAA does not enforce Title IX. The U.S. Department of Education does, and the Commerce Committee has no oversight of the U.S. Department of Education.
The Commerce Committee does however, have oversight of sports. And for the past couple of years, it has been heavily involved in discussions and proposals about college sports issues, including athletes’ ability to make money from their name, image and likeness and athletes’ health and well-being.
Among the 10 questions Wicker posed in his letter to Emmert, whom he asked to respond in writing as soon as possible, were:
► "Are universities evaluated annually for compliance to Title IX? If yes, what is NCAA’s review schedule?"
► "What steps has the NCAA taken to bolster compliance within non-compliant institutions and to expand access and opportunities for women’s sports in compliant institutions?"
► "What penalties does the NCAA impose on non-compliant institutions?"
NCAA spokeswoman Michelle Hosick told USA TODAY that the organization received Wicker's letter but did not have an immediate comment.
Despite tremendous gains during the past five decades, many colleges and universities fall short of Title IX, leaving women struggling for equity, an ongoing series by USA TODAY has found.
The news organization focused on more than 100 schools in the Football Bowl Subdivision — the highest level in the NCAA’s Division I — and examined athletic and spending data to reveal:
► Significant disparities in spending on travel, equipment and recruiting for similar men’s and women’s teams. For every dollar schools spent on men, the investigation found, they spent just 71 cents on women in those categories.
► Widespread use of roster manipulation that constitutes abuse of accepted rules concerning equitable opportunities to play sports that schools use to comply with the letter of the law while violating its spirit. Altogether, the FBS schools added more than 3,600 additional participation “opportunities” for female athletes without adding a single new women’s team.
► The vast majority of schools are not offering athletic opportunities to women proportionate to their enrollment, which is the surest of the three ways that schools’ athletic programs can show compliance with Title IX under the Education Department’s three-part test. It found that 110 schools would need to add a total of 11,501 female roster spots to close the participation gap. That’s an average of 104 per school.
More: Read the full investigative series
Despite the NCAA's lack of enforcement over Title IX, the organization required Division I schools to go through a certification process that included an assessment of gender equity and where schools found shortcomings, to create a plan to address them. But it lasted only from 1993 until 2011.
An investigation by The Kansas City Star in 1997 found that NCAA certified those plans even though many would not have brought member schools in compliance with Title IX. The newspaper found some schools didn’t bother to follow the plans, anyway.
The NCAA suspended the program in 2011 and has not brought it back.
Contributing: Rachel Axon
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: College sports: Senator wants answers from NCAA on Title IX compliance
