Cornell mentioned in NYTimes Title IX article 4/25/11

Article is about schools padding their number of female athletes.

At Cornell, men who practice with the women's fencers count as female athletes under Title IX.

Cornell included 19 men among the women’s fencing, volleyball and basketball teams in the 2009-10 numbers reported to Bergeron’s office. Yet Cornell counted the five female coxswains for the men’s rowing team as female athletes.

Cornell and Texas A&M officials said they were simply following the rules, odd as they are. “We count who we’re supposed to count,” J. Andrew Noel Jr., Cornell’s athletic director, said.

[www.nytimes.com]

Rather BS article considering how the authors never cited the total numbers at any of the universities they were raking over the coals. I may not particularly like J. Andrew, but I think he runs a pretty tight ship. I'd hazard a guess that our athletic program is rather close to being in compliance.

Scersk '97
Rather BS article considering how the authors never cited the total numbers at any of the universities they were raking over the coals. I may not particularly like J. Andrew, but I think he runs a pretty tight ship. I'd hazard a guess that our athletic program is rather close to being in compliance.

We'd better be, considering that we men's fencers fell on our swords (no pun intended) over title IX back in '93... Grumble, grumble...

Without making any comment about the law itself and whether I think it is good or bad....
Laws that manipulate human behaviour in unnatural or uneconomic ways, always result in creative attempts to avoid them. Sometimes ridiculously creative attempts.
That just goes with the territory and is not at all surprising as a response. So then you need other laws to plug the creative loopholes and it goes on and on until we all drown.

Redscore
Without making any comment about the law itself and whether I think it is good or bad....
Laws that manipulate human behaviour in unnatural or uneconomic ways, always result in creative attempts to avoid them. Sometimes ridiculously creative attempts.
That just goes with the territory and is not at all surprising as a response. So then you need other laws to plug the creative loopholes and it goes on and on until we all drown.

Yeah! Just look at civil rights and how people found ways around the Constitution for over a hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamations! Fools might think that legislating equality before the law would work, but of course people will always find ways around such unnatural laws. That's why we'll never have a black President.

Legislating equality before the law is the right thing to do whether people try to get around it or not. Besides anyone with any economic sense knows that if you take 50% (female) or 12.5% (African Americans), or whatever percent of your population and exclude them from opportunitees, you simply throw away a huge piece of your valuable human resources and screw yourself. How many Einsteins etc. do you lose by never letting them see the light of day?
Swampy, I couldn't tell if you were coming or going, turning right or left, but if you were being a wise guy, screw you. If you were not, I apologize.

Redscore
Legislating equality before the law is the right thing to do whether people try to get around it or not. Besides anyone with any economic sense knows that if you take 50% (female) or 12.5% (African Americans), or whatever percent of your population and exclude them from opportunitees, you simply throw away a huge piece of your valuable human resources and screw yourself. How many Einsteins etc. do you lose by never letting them see the light of day?
Swampy, I couldn't tell if you were coming or going, turning right or left, but if you were being a wise guy, screw you. If you were not, I apologize.

Does sarcasm make me a wise guy?

I thought the part about never having a black President was a dead giveaway. Jeeesh!

Redscore, after writing the above I noticed that you wrote the original note about people getting around certain kinds of laws. So I want to elaborate on the point I tried to make with sarcasm.

The point is that, while racism is not gone by a long shot, people have in fact changed their behaviors and beliefs thanks to a long process of struggle and laws aimed at changing undesirable behaviors. My bigger point is that it is just wrong (and bad science) to think that human nature is some kind of fixed, pervasive thing that precludes the possibility of changing beliefs and practices in some intentional ways. Not everything can be changed, but a whole lot can.

As for the economic argument that resources are wasted when people are kept down, I agree with you. The same can be said about a system that regularly goes into recession or depression. Currently, for every job looking to hire someone, there are five people looking for work. Irrationality in itself is not sufficient to call into being legislation that would be an effective remedy. In part, this is because we may not know what an effective remedy is, and in part it's because legislative bodies rarely have the political will to make substantial change. So don't look for full-employment legislation anytime soon.

Then again, there's the Gary Becker kind of argument: people gain satisfaction by discriminating, so non-discrimination cannot be Pareto optimal. "Rational" discrimination would have the satisfied discriminators make side payments to compensate for the
losses due to discrimination.