A New Season: Using Title IX to Reform College Sports

(Hardback)

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This book demonstrates how colleges might retain threatened varsity programs and expand sports opportunities for women students if they replaced the current commercial model with one that emphasizes student participation. This would benefit the college students who play varsity sports, instead of benefiting the coaches, athletic directors, or over-generous boosters who dominate many programs. In Title IX, the federal law prohibiting sex discrimination in education, schools have been handed a golden opportunity to bring fiscal sanity and academic integrity back to their campuses by once again making students, and not money, the focal point of athletic policies. This book demonstrates how colleges might retain threatened varsity programs and expand sports opportunities for women students if they replace the current commercial model with one that emphasizes student participation. This would benefit the college students who play varsity sports, instead of benefiting the coaches, athletic directors, or over-generous boosters who dominate many programs. Reformist tinkering has done little to solve the deep-seated problems plaguing college sports. Porto argues that replacing the enormous commercial pressures corrupting college sports with a student-oriented participation model can solve these problems. Fiscal sanity, academic integrity, personal responsibility, and gender equity in college sports are possible. Faculty members can lead a broader movement to reclaim their institutions from the college sports industry. This book shows how college sports may once again be the integral part of the educational program the NCAA advertises them to beand that they should be.

Reviews

"A manifesto for college faculty concerned with maintaining academic integrity in the face of the burgeoning college sport industry. Porto's creative synthesis of significant scholarly work on college sport over the past decade, coupled with his insights into how Title IX and shrinking athletic budgets are challenging the way athletic departments do business, are likely to convince even cynics that athletic reform is possible, if not inevitable. Porto's love of amateur college sport and his desire to maintain sports as an integral part of the educational process come through on every page, as does his grasp of economic and legal realities related to collegiate sports. If someone only has time to read one book on current controversies in collegiate sport and how to deal with them, this is definitely the book of choice."-Allen L. Sack, Professor of Management and Sociology, University of New Haven, Coauthor of College Athletes for Hire
"A New Season provides a timely prescription for the reform of college sports. I share Brian Porto's view that the participation model will eventually prevail on our college campuses."-Tom McMillen, former college All-American and professional basketball player and Member of Congress
"Fascinating, informative, and engagingly written. The reader is treated to an extremely broad range of divergent points of view masterfully woven into a cogent, in-depth view of the world of intercollegiate sport as it is and as it might be. If viewed only as a literature review, the book is a delight in its coverage of both the popular and academic presses. But the book offers a great deal more to the reader. It is thought provoking, interesting, and, in a phrase, an overall 'good read.'"-Linda Jean Carpenter, Ph.D., J.D. Attorney at Law and Professor Emerita, Brooklyn College
"Well researched and delivered in an engaging manner, this book is a worthy contribution to the on-going dialogue regarding college sport, its present state, and future direction."-Ellen J. Staurowsky, Ed.D., Professor & Chair, Department of Sport Management & Media, Ithaca College Coauthor of College Athletes for Hire
[S]uccesfully questions the extent to which athletic teams benefit a university, demonstrates various ways in which athletic programs subvert the integrity of the institutions they represent, and makes imaginative suggestions towards reform.-The Boston Globe
Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through graduate students.-Choice
"Succesfully questions the extent to which athletic teams benefit a university, demonstrates various ways in which athletic programs subvert the integrity of the institutions they represent, and makes imaginative suggestions towards reform."-The Boston Globe
"Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through graduate students."-Choice
"[S]uccesfully questions the extent to which athletic teams benefit a university, demonstrates various ways in which athletic programs subvert the integrity of the institutions they represent, and makes imaginative suggestions towards reform."-The Boston Globe

Author Bio

BRIAN L. PORTO is an attorney, a freelance writer, and Adjunct Professor at the Community College of Vermont. His writings have appeared in the Seton Hall Journal of Sport Law, the Vermont Bar Journal, and the Journal of Sport and Social Issues. He is the author of May It Please the Court: Judicial Process and Politics in America (2001), and The Craft of Legal Reasoning (1998).