Awareness Overdose continued from page 13
MIDREY LEE, DAILY BRUIN, UCLA
Students' daily decisions can feel overwhelming.
The number of choices students must make is, by itself, enough to burn us out. In addition to taking tests, writing papers, holding jobs and staying up late, we're debating between burgers and tofu, alcoholic or non-alcoholic, low-fat, no-fat and sugar free — and we're making ourselves sick. We suffer from headaches, ulcers, addictions and depression.
"Almost everyone I know is pretty stressed out all the time," says Jason Maupin, a senior at Pittsburg State U. "A lot of the girls I know who get stressed out get headaches and stomachaches." He says his friends feel a variety of pressures, including the need to do well in school, and they try unsuccessfully to find ways to deal with it.
UVA's Kinch believes stress is part of the reason students make decisions that
might not be good for them. According to Kinch, it's hard to be healthy when you've got a lot of other things to worry about.
THE INEVITABLE BACKLASH
I love these little facts: Smoking takes 10 years off your life. It's the 10 worst years, isn't it folks? It's the ones at the end!
— comedian Denis Leary, from his No Cure for Cancer album
When awareness feels like overload, students start tuning out the messages. From alcohol to safe sex, we're trying to figure out what's best for us, trying to make good decisions without giving in to anyone else's "wellness agenda."
As a result, some students take Denis Leary's approach. Leary says he smokes, drinks and has done drugs, and he's
proud of it. He's sick of being told what to do, and college audiences can relate to his angst.
Others, like William and Mary sophomore Cristina Brown, try to see beyond the buzzwords.
“[Experts] shouldn't tell us what we just can't do. We should know that we can treat ourselves occasionally,” Brown says. "I think the message should be, 'Be careful, but make it fun.'
"Health and fitness really are important, but we should do it for ourselves, not because anyone else tells us to," she says. "It should be our own thing."
Kinch agrees. "The things we 'shouldn't do' happen every day because of stress, because we need to blow off steam," she says. "And I'm not going to feel bad about saying, I've had a hellish week, I'm going to have a beer."
Does A Solution Exist?
continued from page 11
opportunities for anybody, but on the other hand, if you add sports [for women] you're going to have to
cut men's non-revenue teams."
Former Michigan swimmer Brian Gunn, a recent graduate, says larger teams — like the football squads — can afford to make more cuts in order to accommodate more women's teams. "It's easy to take away 10 scholarships from football because they still have 85," he says.
But just like everyone else, football coaches are zealously guarding their territory.
"Chipping Away" at Football
Athletic directors and coaches readily admit that football makes it much harder to achieve gender equity.
"You just have so many doggone kids playing football, and so many kids on scholarships, that you just don't have a woman's sport to match it," says Joe Dean, Louisiana State U. athletic director. "It would take about seven women's sports to match a football team."
While women's teams are benefiting from Title IX..
For that reason, many football coaches balk at NCAA cuts in scholarships and squad numbers — cuts which they say were caused in part by gender equity.
The NCAA has already mandated cuts in football scholarships: Twenty years ago, Division I-A football teams offered 120 scholarships; by 1994, they will only be allowed 85.
Football makes money at only 10 percent of all NCAA schools, but turns a profit at 55 percent of Division I-A schools, according to a 1989 NCAA study. At schools like LSU, Dean says, revenue sports help fund women's teams. "We fund each women's program at a level that they can win national championships," he says. "But I'm able to do that because of football and basketball."
Former Michigan Athletic Director and head football coach Bo Schembechler says these cuts are going too far. "You can't continually chip away at football in grants and aids," he says. "There becomes a concern
of being able to maintain the same level of perfor mance you had before."
Schembechler predicts that around 60 major football powers will break away from the NCAA to form a "superpower football conference." Although this talk
has been circulating for quite some time, gender equity has fanned the fire, since major football schools would have more money to devote to gender equity if they didn't have to share money with the NCAA.
Dean says that complying with
Title IX would be easier if the government excluded football from the ranks of men's sports when evaluating gender equity. "If we could set football aside, most schools could make gender equity work."
No dice, says Jeanette Lim, who handles policy enforcement at the Office of Civil Rights. Her office is conducting gender equity reviews at 17 colleges and universities.
"We make no distinction between revenue and non-revenue sports, nor do we exclude football from the formula," she says. "In today's economic times there are a lot of hard decisions that universities will have to make. We don't have any sympathy for any schools that aren't in compliance since this has been a law since 1972."
Not Buying the Myths
At the root of inequity in college athletics, says Kathryn Reith of the Women's Sports Foundation in New York City, is "an underlying social attitude that women and sports don't mix, and women certainly can't make any money.
"There have been in the past plenty of myths that have been used to keep women out of sports," she says. "They say that girls don't want to play sports and if they do, they shouldn't. It will either damage their reproductive organs or they couldn't get dates. But we're not buying that anymore."
Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be an easy way
to change these attitudes. For most schools, gender equity is going to mean painful choices and internal division for athletic programs. "What we're going to see are little pockets of resistance," says U. of Michigan Assistant Director of Athletics Bruce Madej. "Everyone's going to start guarding their own territory."
... many of the men's teams are suffering.
Many individual conferences, such as the Southeastern Conference and the Big Ten conference, have passed their own regulations to enforce Title IX. But in the end, Reith says, the matter will be resolved through civil litigation. "Where [lawsuits] are being
filed [by women], they're being won," she says. As far as achieving gender equity, she says, "It's difficult to do that on a one-by-one basis, but that seems to be what's happening."
Georgia's Goff says, "More money has got to be brought in [to college athletics]. Now where that money's going to come from, I don't know."
The NCAA recently approved a gender equity task force report, which called for an increase in coed, "combined" sports, an established means of measuring interest in sports participation, and "institutional," case-by-case standards for measuring compliance.
As for teams like Winkler's gymnastics, they
must either look for alternative means of funding their sports, or they must face the reality of gender equity that it is not equitable for everyone.
Winkler says he and his teammates are not angry at the women's soccer team. But that doesn't change the way he feels about gender equity.
"Gender equity is there to provide opportunities for athletic teams, male and female," he says. "Gender equity shouldn't cut men's sports to add women's sports you're giving opportunities for the women and you're cutting back for the men. I think gender equity is being misinterpreted altogether."
Report compiled by Elizabeth Lee, editor on fellowship. Erin Einborn of The Michigan Daily, U. of Michigan contributed.
OCTOBER 1993
U. Magazine
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