Athletics to increase commitment to women's programs, add 3 sports

Doing so, Townsend explained, will increase funding for women's programs, making the proportion of total athletic funding spent on them reflect the percentage of females in the student body, as required by Title IX of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

During a wide-ranging discussion of athletics-including consideration of UB's conference affiliation and the role of the Faculty Senate in athletics-

Townsend told committee members that the university dropped out of compliance with Title IX when it started awarding football scholarships. Up until that time, with a student-population make-up that was about 57 percent male and 43 percent female, UB had been spending about 47 or 48 percent of its athletic funding on women's programs, he said.

Under Title IX, spending on intercollegiate athletics is to be made at the same proportion as found in the student body.

"Since the day we started to upgrade, it was never an issue," Townsend said. "Once we started to upgrade football, it was automatically understood and recognized that we must upgrade women's programs as well in order to achieve this equity."

Al Price, associate professor of planning and chair of the Intercollegiate Athletics Board (IAB)-the body that has jurisdiction over athletics-pointed out that during the recent NCAA certification process, UB was asked to restudy minority opportunity and gender equity and "whether or not we were satisfied with what we saw.

"We were not satisfied, given what our position was at that time and given the university's general commitment to minority opportunity and gender equity," Price added. "We committed ourselves to adjust the five-year plan internally in order to be able to have an orderly timetable.

"This is not a resource environment where we can snap our fingers and make money fall out of the sky," he noted. "Accepting that, we needed to be able to move in a systematic way to achieve the balance that faculty of the institution, I believe, are committed to and the administration as well. And that has now been done and we're on that track."

Townsend added that Brown University was spending more money on women's athletics than any other institution in the Ivy League and was found to be out of compliance because it didn't provide locker rooms or other opportunities for women athletes to have the kinds of things that male athletes had.

"So that's where the greater concern is, that women have been denied opportunity," he said. "It is possible to have the same opportunity and not have the same dollars," he said, noting that the facilities available for women at UB "mirror" those available for men.

"Our problem right now," Townsend said, "is we do not have equal amounts of money being spent in our program, and that's what we're attempting to address to make sure there are opportunities for all of the women who desire to play a particular sport."

For example, he noted, while UB does not have a lacrosse program for men, there is a very strong women's lacrosse club program that is being upgraded to the intercollegiate level, along with crew and softball, within the next two years.

"We recognize that we are not in compliance as we want to be in compliance, as we meet the letter of the law from OCR (Office for Civil Rights in the Department of Education, which has enforcement authority over Title IX), we're closer than most institutions in this country."

Claude Welch, chair of the Faculty Senate, told committee members he expects the body to hear more on the issue during the year from the IAB, as well as from a subcommittee on gender equity of the senate's Affirmative Action Committee.

He noted that Faculty Senate responsibility in the area of athletics has been limited primarily to policy as it affects the academic program, such as the good-standing requirement, academic requirements like the physical education requirement, or the quota admissions policy. The body's chief involvement, he stressed, should be the way in which it is consulted by the president in terms of the composition of the IAB.

President William R. Greiner agreed. "The jurisdiction of the Faculty Senate with regard to athletics is different than it is with regard to a variety of other things," Greiner said. The IAB specializes in intercollegiate athletics, while FSEC members must be generalists because of the wide variety of topics they deal with, including the academic program and admissions, he said.

Greiner said he would like to alter the process in which he makes faculty appointments to the IAB, he told the FSEC. Instead of taking recommendations from the FSEC and then making appointments, he would rather offer names of interested faculty members to the FSEC, and have that body make the appointments.

"I think this (athletics) is a very complicated set of issues, regularly watched by a body of faculty membersŠthey're specialistsŠFor this thing to be periodically dropped into the Faculty Senate, which then has to pick it up as a kind of a special-interest item, I don't think is fully functional," he said, urging the FSEC to work closely with IAB.

In other business, UB's marketing consultant told FSEC members that the university projects a fragmented image to the outside world.

Ann Duffield, senior associate and director of communications for the University of Pennsylvania's Institute for Research on Higher Education who has been working with UB's development office on communications for the upcoming capital campaign, conducted a communications audit of the university as a whole. In doing so, she said she spoke with many groups on campus, including deans, other administrators and students.

"You are a huge research university; you are a federation," Duffield said. "You are a place that has very strong areas and some that aren't so strong. You have a fragmented image; some of your parts are probably fairly well-known with their specific constituencies and some of them are not. You are not a place that's known in totality."

UB, Duffield noted, is seen, both internally and externally, as being somewhat impersonal, "a little daunting as an environment." People inside the university don't know what the common mission of the institution is, she said, adding, "there's isn't an integration.

"This is not atypical," Duffield says, but that finding leads to a set of questions that must be addressed by the university.

"Does the university want to present a unified image, or does it want to have a story, or does it want to have a series of stories that are not tied together?" she asked.

She noted that there are some institutions that are known by their parts, such as Penn and its Wharton School, and others, such as the University of Michigan or the University of California at Berkeley, that are known by their whole names.

If UB wants to be known by its whole name, it needs to have some component of its public relations and other outreach efforts unified," she said.

"That has to be a conscious decision and it's a tough decision because it means that parts of the institution give permission for decisions to be made about how the institution is going to present itself," she said. "It means some very tough and purposeful discussions, with faculty at heart of it."

These discussions should not focus solely on "we are quality institution," but rather should "demonstrate and identify how the institution manages that quality.

"ŠThe good news is you are doing probably just as well as most of those other research universities out there; the bad news is you do not distinguish yourself from them, nor they from you."