State Sen. Dean Florez, D-Shafter, has just released this statement in the wake of Tuesday's hearing in Sacramento on gender equity. He titled it: "Hearing Outcome? What should CSU do?"
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY SYSTEMThe CSU should remove the University's legal counsel as the Title IX compliance officer and create a new independent office of gender equity that reports directly to the CSU Trustees.
The CSU should develop an emergency Gender Equity and Title IX training regime, ensuring that all appropriate staff receive training prior to the commencement of the 2008-09 school year. Appropriate staff includes all athletic department personnel and executive level university management.
The CSU should require mandatory gender equity committee on each campus to meet quarterly in an open and public forum, subject to the open meetings laws of the Brown Act. Members of the committee should be representative of all aspects of the campus community including appointees from the administration, academic senate, athletics department and student government.
The CSU should require an administrative structure where gender equity complaints go directly to the CSU Office of Gender Equity rather than through an individual campus's human resources administrative structure.
The CSU should require new monitoring and data collection processes that will capture data on the facility use, scheduling, coaching experience and salary.
The CSU should tie job performance of University presidents and top administrators to campus compliance with all three Title IX goals as outlined in the California NOW consent decree. This information will be used for consideration of raises and promotions within the university system.
The CSU should require gender equity investigations to be conducted under stricter rules of evidence gathering, including the requirement that all statements are made under and penalty of perjury. The CSU should further require that the complainant, as well as the persons being investigated, have the right to record any statement made in this process in order to ensure availability for future proceedings as well as accuracy.
California State University, Fresno
Fresno State should immediately "un-recess" the Gender Equity Committee at CSU Fresno and have quarterly meetings of the committee. Additionally, all meetings should be public, with the committee keeping minutes that are available to the public.
LEGISLATIVE PROPOSAL(s)Create State Government Position, the Office of Gender Equity in Academics in the California Department of Justice, Office of the Attorney General.
Require the California State University to create an Office of Gender Equity that reports directly to the Trustees.
Require the University of California to create an Office of Gender Equity that reports directly to the Regents.
Require each campus to have a Gender Equity and Title IX compliance officer that reports directly to the Office of Gender Equity in the respective university system. This individual shall not hold any other position or responsibilities within the University system.
Require and implement annual mandatory Gender Equity and Title IX training for all athletic department personnel and executive level university management.
Specific Requirements Under California Law: codify the requirements of the Cal-NOW consent decree as the exclusive means to comply with Title IX pursuant to California Law.
Participation: 5%
Expenditures: 10%
Scholarships: 5%Plan for Compliance: require each campus to write a plan and make it public that outlines how they intend to reach the participation, expenditure, and scholarship goals required by law, as well as all other issues of parity in athletics.
Certification of Status of Compliance: each university campus must certify the status of compliance with "California Title IX" to the Attorney General on an annual basis. The certification shall be made by the head of each university campus and shall be made under penalty of perjury. The Office of the Attorney General shall make the certifications available to the public, and shall publish the certifications on an appropriate website.
Compliance Plan: any university not in compliance in any given year must submit a compliance plan to the Office of the Attorney General within 30-days of the certification of non-compliance.
Statement of Compliance or Non-Compliance: based upon the status certification of compliance with the Office of the Attorney General, each university campus must include a statement of compliance or non-compliance on all correspondence, promotional materials (irrespective of media type), and recruiting materials related to athletics. For Example: "CSU Fresno is a California Title IX Non-Complaint University", or "CSU Fresno is a California Title IX Compliant University."
Receivership: any university that fails to certify compliance with "California Title IX" requirements for two consecutive years may have up to 20% of their athletic department budget placed into receivership by the Office of Gender Equity in Academics under the Attorney General. The Office of the Attorney General would then be empowered to make appropriate adjustments in an effort to obtain compliance with the requirements of "California Title IX."
Complaints: the Attorney General's Office shall develop a process to receive and investigate complaints of gender inequity in academics. Additionally, the Office of the Attorney General shall receive copies of all complaints made at each individual campus and shall monitor the status of those complaints and subsequent investigations. The Office of the Attorney General shall have broad jurisdiction to investigate any complaint of gender inequity in academics, irrespective of where a complaint was filed, if at all.
Investigations and Statements: all statements made during investigations of gender inequity and academics shall be made under penalty of perjury. Any individual providing a statement under such an investigation shall have the right to record the interview and any statements made.
Dean Florez
Fresno State Grapples With a Spate of Sex-Discrimination Claims
Advocates of gender equity in athletics say they will continue to use the courts to force compliance with Title IX
By SARA LIPKA
Sacramento, Calif.
College athletics departments are no strangers to accusations of sex discrimination. But lately the department at California State University at Fresno has become all too familiar with them.
In July a jury ordered Fresno State to pay $5.85-million to a former women's volleyball coach who had sued the university for sex discrimination and retaliation. She said her contract was not renewed in 2004 because she protested unfair treatment of female athletes, and because administrators thought she was a lesbian. Two similar gender-bias cases involving former athletics officials at Fresno are scheduled to go to trial this fall. And the U.S. Education Department's Office for Civil Rights is once again investigating the Bulldogs -- as it did in the early 1990s -- for alleged gender discrimination.
"This is an athletic department just run amok," says Donna Lopiano, chief executive of the Women's Sports Foundation, an advocacy group. She followed closely the case of the former volleyball coach, Linda L. (Lindy) Vivas, whose soaring jury award has drawn the interest of state legislators.
The university plans to appeal the verdict, but there are more cases coming. Diane Milutinovich, a former associate athletic director at Fresno State, sued the university in 2004 for discrimination and retaliation. She was forced out of the department, she says, because she is a woman who argued for more opportunities for female athletes. Stacy Johnson-Klein, a former women's basketball coach, sued for sexual harassment in 2005 after she was fired in the middle of her team's season. Her case and Ms. Milutinovich's are scheduled to go to trial this fall.
Fresno State is not the only California college facing such allegations. In July the University of California system announced a $3.5-million settlement with a former women's swimming coach at the Berkeley campus, Karen Moe Humphreys, who sued in 2004 after she was laid off. She said the move was discriminatory, based on her sex, and retaliatory, for her complaints about the poor treatment of female employees in Berkeley's athletics department (See article on page A30). In January the California system settled a case, for $725,000, with Michael Burch, a former wrestling coach at the Davis campus who said he was fired for trying to give female athletes a place on his team.
At a time when the Office for Civil Rights is widely considered to have become lax in its enforcement of Title IX, advocates of gender equity, like Ms. Vivas and Ms. Milutinovich, are turning to the courts. And gender-equity supporters in California are threatening to file more lawsuits unless discrimination in college sports and retaliation for blowing the whistle abate.
These public cases may be just the tip of the iceberg. Colleges often settle sex-discrimination and retaliation cases, and many such settlements have confidentiality provisions, says Ms. Lopiano of the Women's Sports Foundation. "The importance of the Vivas and Humphreys cases is people knowing they're winning, and they're winning big," she says.
Meanwhile, Fresno State officials say the athletics department has turned itself around. All but one of its top leaders have been hired in the last two years, in large part because of the university's commitment to gender equity, says the athletic director, Thomas C. Boeh, who started there in 2005.
"There's been an acknowledgment that not everything was perfect in the past," says Mr. Boeh. "But we feel very comfortable with the way we're running the program today."
State legislators are less comfortable. At a hearing here last week, State Sen. Dean Florez, a Democrat from Fresno's district, grilled Cal State leaders on the lawsuits and other measures of compliance with Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the law that prohibits sex discrimination at institutions that receive federal funds.
Mr. Florez, who released a series of recommendations for gender equity the day after the hearing, promised more action in the coming months. "This review is somewhat long overdue," he said. "There are significant problems that need to be investigated and corrected."
A Contentious Hearing
The legislative hearing followed a furious exchange of letters. First Mr. Florez wrote to Charles B. Reed, chancellor of the California State University system, expressing concerns about "the recent epidemic of discrimination against women."
"Nothing could be further from the truth," Mr. Reed responded to Mr. Florez's characterization. The chancellor provided statistics -- that expenditures for women's sports, for example, had increased by $65-million, or nearly 600 percent, since 1993 -- but Mr. Florez accused him of drawing on "political rhetoric and partial truths."
The state assembly's Republican leader, Michael N. Villines, also wrote to Mr. Florez, saying the "appropriateness of holding a public hearing on a matter that continues to be adjudicated through the courts is questionable." But Mr. Florez went ahead.
The long, contentious hearing was the first for the new Senate Select Committee on Gender Discrimination and Title IX Implementation, which Mr. Florez convened after the announcement of Ms. Vivas's jury verdict. He questioned Mr. Reed and John D. Welty, president of Fresno State, for an hour each.
"People want to know, How did this thing explode to where we are today?" Mr. Florez said. "They want to know if there was a culture of gender discrimination that permeated the university."
There was not, said Mr. Reed, implying that the jury verdict was an aberration. The chancellor testified that in the past decade, there have been six lawsuits against the Cal State system under Title IX. One was unrelated to athletics, he said, Cal State won two, another -- Ms. Vivas's -- the university lost, and the two others against Fresno State are pending.
Six lawsuits in 10 years at an institution with about 46,000 employees is not so bad, Mr. Reed said. "I, all my life, have worked as hard as I can to prevent any discrimination at all," he said. He described a "zero-tolerance policy" toward discrimination at Cal State.
"Is six cases zero tolerance?" Mr. Florez asked. In the first of numerous barbs, the legislator derided the chancellor's apparent measure of success. Mr. Reed outlined Cal State's pro-gress toward gender-equity goals identified in a consent decree it adopted in 1993, to settle a lawsuit filed by the California chapter of the National Organization for Women, but Mr. Florez pointed out that 30 percent of the system's campuses were still not meeting those goals.
A Thing of the Past
The tenacious legislator also emphasized his distaste for taxpayer dollars' covering steep jury verdicts and settlements. Mr. Reed said that the Cal State campuses all contribute to a self-insurance fund that covers such losses. But rates do go up, the chancellor said, to recoup funds.
Mr. Welty told the legislator not to worry. The president testified that the Fresno athletics department described in Ms. Vivas's trial -- one in which male administrators celebrated "Ugly Women Athletes' Day" -- no longer existed.
"It's a new era in Bulldog athletics," he said. In 2001 the U.S. Education Department's Office for Civil Rights, which had found the department out of compliance with Title IX seven years earlier, said that the university had successfully remedied that discrimination.
At the hearing, Mr. Welty commended Mr. Boeh, the new athletic director, for his commitment to gender equity, including new training sessions on the issue. "It's a core value of our senior leadership team," Mr. Welty said.
If it were so important, Mr. Florez shot back, the president would know how many members were on a new equity subcommittee of the Athletic Advisory Council, and how many of them were women. In response to Mr. Florez's earlier quizzing, Mr. Welty had said he could not recall the exact numbers.
Ms. Vivas and Ms. Milutinovich also testified at the hearing. Both said they found the president's and chancellor's reassurances deeply troubling.
"I have some major concerns in regard to some of the statements that were made today," Ms. Milutinovich said. She has continued to track athletics-department statistics at Fresno State, and told Mr. Florez that in the 2005-6 academic year, the university spent less than a third of its sports budget on women's teams. And now, she pointed out, only three of the 10 women's teams are led by female coaches.
One of those three women, Maggie Wright, coaches softball, and she testified at the hearing, too. She said her declining budget had left her without enough money to pay for uniforms for all her players. Ms. Wright has filed a complaint with the Office for Civil Rights.
But Ms. Wright expressed hope that Mr. Florez's committee would hold the athletics department accountable. "The attitude, the culture, everything else about it," she told the legislator, "we need your help to change."
A Troubled Department
Fresno State's athletics department is used to scrutiny. In 2003 the National Collegiate Athletic Association penalized the Bulldogs for academic fraud in the men's basketball program, among other violations. The NCAA imposed further penalties on Fresno State in 2006 for improper recruiting, also in men's basketball. A former player on the team who was convicted of murder this year is now dishing to reporters about rampant marijuana use in the basketball program. The university has also come under fire for cutting several men's and one women's team in recent years.
Many of those actions occurred on the watch of the then-athletic director, Scott Johnson, whom Mr. Florez sharply criticized Mr. Welty for hiring. Mr. Johnson cultivated an "almost fraternitylike" athletics department at Fresno, the legislator said. And the predominantly male board of directors of the university's Athletic Corporation perpetuated that culture, Mr. Florez said.
The state senator's recommendations defined stricter gender-equity standards he dubbed "California Title IX." He said all public colleges in California should undergo an annual certification process, based upon state-mandated guidelines covering men's and women's athletics participation, budgets, and scholarships. Under his plan, any colleges that failed to meet those guidelines would have percentages of their athletics funds revoked.
Mr. Florez also proposed the creation of new offices of gender equity -- one for the Cal State system and one for the University of California -- that would investigate any students' and employees' complaints, collect testimony under the penalty of perjury, and report directly to the regents or trustees.
It was unclear last week how university officials would react to the state senator's recommendations, but Mr. Boeh, the new athletic director at Fresno, says he is reviving an equity subcommittee that has languished there for the past few years. He will also appoint a task force to investigate the treatment of female athletes and athletics-department employees at the university, after which the subcommittee will monitor the university's progress on the task force's recommendations. The group will include Janice Parten, director of human resources at Fresno, and Betsy Mosher, senior associate athletic director for administration and program integrity.
Looking Ahead
"We have made every effort to try to focus on the future here," says Mr. Boeh. The athletics department has recently built a visitors' locker room for its softball stadium and 10 new horse stalls for its women's equestrian team. Fresno State is up for NCAA certification this year, a process that includes an analysis of Title IX compliance. In addition, if the department does not fulfill the task force's recommendations for gender equity, Mr. Boeh says he wants the monitoring committee to let him know: "It's their responsibility to say, 'These people are slipping.'"
Ms. Vivas has little confidence that the university's efforts are in good faith. "The lip service is old," she says. The university has admitted no wrongdoing in her case, maintaining that she was fired for failing to meet performance clauses in her contract. "They blamed the jury, they blamed the judge, they blamed the media," she says, "and they still haven't admitted that maybe they did something wrong."
According to Ms. Milutinovich, Cal State at Fresno's athletics department continues to discriminate against female athletes. "People don't change behavior unless there are consequences," she says. She scoffed at the data charts Fresno officials distributed at the hearing, which said the expenditures for male athletes in 2005-6 were $10.7-million, and for female athletes, $10.3-million. The operating budgets the university reported to the Education Department for the same year are $10.8-million and $4.8-million, respectively.
Ms. Milutinovich says that calling such inequities to the attention of top athletics administrators got her fired. She is encouraged by Ms.Vivas's verdict, and, looking forward to her day in court, hopes to change what she sees as a biased system.
Big verdicts are bound to have an effect, says Ms. Lopiano, of the Women's Sports Foundation. "There are too many athletic departments that have been getting away with maintaining a culture of discrimination," she says. "Cases like this put those departments on notice that continuing to do so will come at great cost."