Feds weigh allegations of gender inequity in University of Minnesota

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BleedGopher

BleedGopher

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per the STrib:

A 6-month-old federal gender discrimination investigation of University of Minnesota athletics sprang to life on school grounds this week, as U.S. Department of Education representatives combed the campus, interviewed Gophers coaches and measured square footage in locker rooms and offices.

They are here to examine whether Gophers athletics discriminates against women, a claim raised in a 2014 formal complaint to the Office of Civil Rights. Donors, former university employees and some women’s sports advocates echoed similar accusations to the Star Tribune, saying the athletics department has lost its focus on gender equity and is violating the spirit of Title IX, the 43-year-old law that bans sex discrimination in any federally supported school.

The anonymous complaint, recently obtained by the Star Tribune, said Gophers women’s sports have become an afterthought — a dozen teams with dwindling rosters receiving an inexcusably low percentage of spending. The issue reached a crescendo when university leaders drafted their ambitious $190 million plan to build new practice and training centers with a heavy focus on high-profile men’s teams.

University President Eric Kaler and Athletic Director Norwood Teague denied any bias and said the school has not wavered on fairness.

http://www.startribune.com/feds-weigh-allegations-of-gender-inequity-in-u-of-m-sports/306866861/

Go Gophers!!
 

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Go Gophers!!
 


I would like to file a bias suit. Why do I have to pay $50 for a men hockey game, but I can go to a women's game for $12. Men's hockey tickets keep going up, last year women's hockey season tickets went down %50. I get tired of these types of complaints. I go to women's hockey, softball, BB and volleyball a few times each year. Until last season, the softball field was better than the baseball field. Hockey has a nice arena, BB share the same facility. It's late and I am not going to rant on this any longer.
 

This is the kind of garbage that makes the left look bad.

C'mon, ladies.
 


The solution is to start women's fencing. Let the women build the fences.
 

Here's a thought, you get the finances towards your sport that you bring in. I.e. tickets and the like. If you bring in ZERO dollars, you get ZERO finances for your sport and you better start adding car washes to pay for it..
 

Gopher028 said:
Here's a thought, you get the finances towards your sport that you bring in. I.e. tickets and the like. If you bring in ZERO dollars, you get ZERO finances for your sport and you better start adding car washes to pay for it..
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Or washing windows at WalMart parking lots.
 

I've been wondering when this loony group of whiners was going to raise a stink since the facilities upgrade plan started. It's not about elevating women's athletics with them. The only thing that will please them is eliminating the AD entirely.
 



How do you stop donations to a public university for a "luxury" item? Get an article printed on page one above the fold at the state's biggest newspaper questioning if women or minorities are being treated fairly. Good luck getting corporate donations after that. Private people will be less likely to donate as well. They don't want their names published and then attacked in public for being anti-woman.

Damage has already been done boys. The longer this goes on the worse it will get. This could sink the ship.
 

Didn't we build a million dollar boat house for women's crew? Where were these whiners then? The women also have their own hockey facility, unlike most other schools, where were they then? There are many reasons why we haven't been to a Rose Bowl since 1962 and not all of them are coaching. The football team is getting too good and new facilities are in the mix....time to put this to a halt.
 

Yeah... I have my doubts that the UMN athletic dept is the nation's example of collegiate gender discrimination.
 

Have the study done comparing amount of spending vs amount of revenue, for each individual sport.....men's and women's both.

Is this complaint about the track team being displaced or something else? I haven't read the article yet.
 



TruthSeeker said:
How do you stop donations to a public university for a "luxury" item? Get an article printed on page one above the fold at the state's biggest newspaper questioning if women or minorities are being treated fairly. Good luck getting corporate donations after that. Private people will be less likely to donate as well. They don't want their names published and then attacked in public for being anti-woman.

Damage has already been done boys. The longer this goes on the worse it will get. This could sink the ship.
Click to expand...

Not sure f this sinks the ship but it does have the feel of becoming a huge problem. This gender discrimination investigation along with the regents pushing the vote on the funding plan until September just allows for something else to pop up that will delay the facilities project even longer.

I will be surprise if there is a groundbreaking ceremony this fall.
 

Pompous Elitist said:
This is the kind of garbage that makes the left look bad.

C'mon, ladies.
Click to expand...

An anonymous complaint gets filed. Of course that must mean it has the support of women and the left. Making garbage assumptions like that really looks bad.
 

IMO Some Girls sports are on the rise at the U of M. Girls Softball just put together the top two seasons in the last 30 years back to back after hiring a new coach a few years ago. Girls Hockey has probably the best facility in the nation for girls hockey and is the perennial favorite to be national champs.

Problem is that a bad women's program/coach can fly under the radar longer than in a revenue sport. IMO There have been some clunkers on the women's side that lingered too long in volleyball and basketball that have set those high profile programs back. Pretty sure they have consistently billed this as an athletic training complex. Not a Men's athletic training complex so it's shouldn't be against the spirit of title IX to improve facilities for all.
 

From the Strib article:

But Joel was a lot more for those [nonrevenue] sports … he was more on our side.”
Click to expand...

Says a lot.
 

This, right here, is WHY Teague has been so quiet about the fundraising.
I have some inside info that things have been moving really fast behind the scenes designwise for the new facilities. They want to be prepared to blitz the actual construction before these wacko nutjobs can get to the sources of the donations and essentially submarine the whole thing donor by donor.

It seems to me like there is a civil war between Maturi's bunch and the now modern AD. It further proves why Maturi was terrible at his job. He acted unlike any AD in major college sports empowering the non revenue sports above the revenue ones.
Now there is an unrealisitic expectation set.
Why was Maturi allowed to give all those non revenue coaches raises as he slipped out the door? To calm these exact people.

Oh and don't be fooled into thinking this has anything to do with track and field, or the lack of facilities. I'm a track guy, former HS coach. I love track.
The U outdoor track facilities are awful, and have been for a long time. The team should be excited they can practice at Hamline for a year or 2.

I think Teague knew this was coming. He knew this group was going to stoop to anonymous tips to the Star Tribune to kill the football project, this actually bodes well for the project overall. It shows the loonies are losing hope and are desperate.
Expect Teague and Kaler to be out front on this particular issue and the investigation to come up with improvements to be made, but certainly not any major indictments.
 


I am surprised they quoted Borton in this article without mentioning that she was fired by Teague, and thus, may have a different agenda. I am also surprised that the STrib didn't quote a single person who was willing to take a different position. Amelia presented an incredibly one-sided story here.

This is the type of mentality that could drive someone like Teague away.

Go Gophers!!
 

Since the complaint was anonymous, I'm thinking it was someone inside the athletic department that filed it.
 

BleedGopher said:
I am surprised they quoted Borton in this article without mentioning that she was fired by Teague, and thus, may have a different agenda. I am also surprised that the STrib didn't quote a single person who was willing to take a different position. Amelia presented an incredibly one-sided story here.

This is the type of mentality that could drive someone like Teague away.

Go Gophers!!
Click to expand...

Borton = clunker
 

BleedGopher said:
I am surprised they quoted Borton in this article without mentioning that she was fired by Teague, and thus, may have a different agenda. I am also surprised that the STrib didn't quote a single person who was willing to take a different position. Amelia presented an incredibly one-sided story here.

This is the type of mentality that could drive someone like Teague away.

Go Gophers!!
Click to expand...

I wish I could say I am surprised Bleed. The lack of objective reporting coming out of that paper has been few and far between. I hope Ole is right and this fuels donors who were on the fence into supporting the U against these baseless and entitlement mentality claims. We all know Joel was horrendous, and Borton has an ax to grind, but the lay person reading the paper doesn't, so when people like Amelia have the power to publish this drivel, she's no better than Fox News or MSNBC in how one sided their reports are. Is it too much to ask people to do their jobs now a days? /rant
 

Ole said:
This, right here, is WHY Teague has been so quiet about the fundraising.
I have some inside info that things have been moving really fast behind the scenes designwise for the new facilities. They want to be prepared to blitz the actual construction before these wacko nutjobs can get to the sources of the donations and essentially submarine the whole thing donor by donor.

It seems to me like there is a civil war between Maturi's bunch and the now modern AD. It further proves why Maturi was terrible at his job. He acted unlike any AD in major college sports empowering the non revenue sports above the revenue ones.
Now there is an unrealisitic expectation set.
Why was Maturi allowed to give all those non revenue coaches raises as he slipped out the door? To calm these exact people.

Oh and don't be fooled into thinking this has anything to do with track and field, or the lack of facilities. I'm a track guy, former HS coach. I love track.
The U outdoor track facilities are awful, and have been for a long time. The team should be excited they can practice at Hamline for a year or 2.

I think Teague knew this was coming. He knew this group was going to stoop to anonymous tips to the Star Tribune to kill the football project, this actually bodes well for the project overall. It shows the loonies are losing hope and are desperate.
Expect Teague and Kaler to be out front on this particular issue and the investigation to come up with improvements to be made, but certainly not any major indictments.
Click to expand...

There is not one claim in the above post that has a shred of truth or understanding about how college athletic departments work. Not one. Let me say it. Ole is clueless. The U is has a big problem and this is why:

Spending numbers submitted in 2013 by the university to the Department of Education show expenditures for football, men’s basketball and hockey taking huge leaps in Teague’s first year. Football’s “game-day” spending — which doesn’t factor recruiting costs and coach salaries — jumped 45.2 percent in one season. The spending gap between men’s and women’s hockey more than doubled. Men’s basketball got a 32 percent bump, while game-day spending on the women’s team went down 1.6 percent.

The largest group of Gophers’ female participants comes from track and field. Those athletes account for 227 participants, although many of them are counted three times by competing in indoor and outdoor track and cross-country. That counting is allowable and common, but the OCR will focus on whether it represents true opportunities for women, said Title IX attorney Nancy Hogshead-Makar.

While 501 female Gophers athletes are listed on Minnesota’s EADA filing, when male practice players are removed and each athlete is counted once, that number shrinks to 312 female student-athletes. That total is down 37.2 percent from 2005, when the Gophers reported a recent high of 497. Shrinking opportunities are high on the list of Minnesota’s “red flags,” according to national women’s sports advocate Donna Lopiano.

http://www.startribune.com/feds-weigh-allegations-of-gender-inequity-in-u-of-m-sports/306866861/

 


When the subject of Joel Maturi came up President Bruininks never failed to say how much he liked the way Maturi did his job. If you didn't like Joel then you didn't like his bosses who employed him and signed his performance reviews either.
 

This was bound to happen with the way Maturi ran the department and the way the U has hated on Football for 50 years. Culture change is many battles big and small and this is a big one. I have faith that Teague is a smart guy and knows how to turn this into a positive.
 

GopherinPhilly said:
This was bound to happen with the way Maturi ran the department and the way the U has hated on Football for 50 years. Culture change is many battles big and small and this is a big one. I have faith that Teague is a smart guy and knows how to turn this into a positive.
Click to expand...

There is absolutely no evidence to support what you believe about Teague. What we do know is that Kaler and the Board of Regents will have him on a very short leash from now on. His days at the U are numbered. It doesn't take a genius to understand that one thing Teague needed to do was keep Title IX complaints at the U off the front page of the Strib. Needless to say, he failed miserably at it.
 

UpnorthGo4 said:
When the subject of Joel Maturi came up President Bruininks never failed to say how much he liked the way Maturi did his job.
Click to expand...

Since both of those individuals are gone all that matters is what the current president thinks of the job the current AD is doing. It's clear some do not like the new direction and prefer the style of the previous regime.
 

UpnorthGo4 said:
There is not one claim in the above post that has a shred of truth or understanding about how college athletic departments work. Not one. Let me say it. Ole is clueless. The U is has a big problem and this is why:

Spending numbers submitted in 2013 by the university to the Department of Education show expenditures for football, men’s basketball and hockey taking huge leaps in Teague’s first year. Football’s “game-day” spending — which doesn’t factor recruiting costs and coach salaries — jumped 45.2 percent in one season. The spending gap between men’s and women’s hockey more than doubled. Men’s basketball got a 32 percent bump, while game-day spending on the women’s team went down 1.6 percent.

The largest group of Gophers’ female participants comes from track and field. Those athletes account for 227 participants, although many of them are counted three times by competing in indoor and outdoor track and cross-country. That counting is allowable and common, but the OCR will focus on whether it represents true opportunities for women, said Title IX attorney Nancy Hogshead-Makar.

While 501 female Gophers athletes are listed on Minnesota’s EADA filing, when male practice players are removed and each athlete is counted once, that number shrinks to 312 female student-athletes. That total is down 37.2 percent from 2005, when the Gophers reported a recent high of 497. Shrinking opportunities are high on the list of Minnesota’s “red flags,” according to national women’s sports advocate Donna Lopiano.

http://www.startribune.com/feds-weigh-allegations-of-gender-inequity-in-u-of-m-sports/306866861/
Click to expand...

So football spending and basketball spending went way up. Ok, it should have after years of minimizing under Joel.
Womens sports stayed the same essentially. We don't see the numbers, I'd be surprised if this is a large portion of the overall budgets for sports. We're talking gamedays which is what? Security and giveaways?

The track triple counting of athletes is what everyone in the country does, even in D3.
Frankly, the men supporting the women athletes being counted as females is dumb, they shouldn't be counted either way, but they certainly support the female programs so if they are to be counted at all it should be as women sports participants.
The opportunities angle is ridiculous, nothing has changed except the overall attitude in the AD from Joel's over the top support of minor sports to the big league attitude of Teague. It's pissing off people who wanted Joel's perpetual reign.
 

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