HANOVER — When Dartmouth College announced last week that it was reinstating five varsity sports it had dropped during July budget cuts, it explained the reversal by saying data used to make the decision “may not have been complete.”
In fact, the choice to cut men’s and women’s golf, men’s and women’s swimming and diving, and men’s lightweight crew triggered scrutiny of Dartmouth’s compliance with Title IX, the federal law designed to prohibit sex discrimination at schools that receive federal funds.
That’s according to Arthur Bryant, the California-based lawyer who signed a settlement agreement with Dartmouth last week on behalf of women athletes whose teams were reinstated.
Dartmouth, Bryant said, should have been more aware of the repercussions of the elimination any women’s sports team.
“No woman goes into college thinking she is going to sue her college for Title IX compliance,” said Bryant, who represents 19 student-athletes in the case. “But in almost all cases, a team is cut and those women want to be reinstated. So you go look to see if the athletics participation rates are substantially proportionate to the school’s enrollment.”
Bryant, who specializes in Title IX cases and was threatening to bring a sex-discrimination lawsuit against Dartmouth, said if the programs had remained shuttered, the college would have been obligated to add about 23 women to reach gender equity under Title IX.
His analysis was in direct conflict to a Dartmouth announcement in July in which Hanlon asserted that cutting the teams would in no way impact compliance with Title IX regulations.
“With the remaining 30 teams, the percentage of women who are varsity athletes will be identical to the percentage of women in the undergraduate student body,” the Dartmouth announcement said at the time.
A review of the Big Green’s 2019-20 Equity in Athletics Data Analysis survey shows the numbers were not “identical” and that the college wasn’t proportionally aligned even before the cuts were made.
The survey is a product of the Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act, which requires federally funded co-ed institutions to submit annual reports about their athletics programs to better monitor Title IX compliance. The number of student-athletes are counted on the first day of competition for the sport.
According to the EADA report, Dartmouth had an undergraduate population of 4,363 in the 2019-20 academic year, 50.8% of them men and 49.2% women.
Before the five programs were cut, Dartmouth varsity athletes included 524 men and 452 women, a percentage breakdown of 53.7% to 46.3%.
Title IX requires that “participation opportunities” have to be proportionate to enrollment, so that, before the cuts, roughly 55 more female athletes would have needed to have been added to match the 49.2% rate of enrollment for women.
Because three men’s teams and two women’s teams were being dropped, the program cuts would have boosted the percentage of Dartmouth women in athletics to 47.9%, according to estimates using the EADA report data.
But that still fell short by 1.3 percentage points to reach parity with overall enrollment by women.
In other words, even with the cuts, Dartmouth would have needed to add the 23 women athletes, the equivalent of two women’s golf teams or one women’s swim and dive program.
Dartmouth technically was not in violation of Title IX before the July cuts, Bryant says, because athletic departments can also comply with the law by stating they are fully accommodating the underrepresented sex by offering every sport for which there is sufficient interest and ability for a viable team, or offering continued program expansion for the underrepresented sex.
But those two factors take a back seat when programs are eliminated, as happened at Dartmouth, shifting the focus back to the number of women athletes at Dartmouth in proportion to total enrollment of women.
“You look at all these other schools and they have a big gap in these percentages, but all these schools didn’t eliminate women’s teams,” Bryant said. “In theory, they could comply with parts two and three of this test and satisfy Title IX.”
Dartmouth athletic director Harry Sheehy has not commented publicly on the matter since the reversal was announced by Hanlon. School officials deflected questions about what data was incomplete and whether Dartmouth acknowledges it was in violation of Title IX with the July team cuts. A spokesperson referred a reporter to a frequently-asked-questions webpage set up by the college.
Dartmouth last week said it has hired an outside law firm to conduct a gender equity review of varsity athletics at the school and that the Ivy League also will begin an NCAA compliance review of the athletic department, too.
“We look forward to the findings and recommendations of the upcoming, comprehensive set of external reviews,” Dartmouth spokeswoman Diana Lawrence said. “Beyond that, we refer you to our previous statements and FAQ.”
The list of frequently asked questions says that part of the review “will examine items the courts regard as important in determining Title IX compliance — records like squad lists and practice logs to determine if, where and how our record keeping was incomplete.”
An academic who researches and writes about gender and discrimination in college athletics said the situation at Dartmouth should have been avoided.
“When something like this happens, more often it is usually because it is misunderstood, or understood and being deliberately ignored,” said Erin Buzuvis, a professor of law at Western New England University. “It’s either ignorance or malice, in general.”
Senior swimmer Maggie Deppe-Walker recalls a handful of parents from the women’s golf and women’s swimming and diving programs reviewed rosters last fall and realized there was a noticeable discrepancy in the men-to-women ratio.
Soon after, the group reached out to Bryant, who then compared the data to the college’s undergraduate population, which is his routine first step.
“He was sold on it,” Deppe-Walker said of Bryant. “I felt like we had a case from the moment Arthur said we did, because I had so much confidence in him.”
Each EADA report must be signed by the institution’s primary contact person, in this case Sheehy. He declined to comment on the Title IX numbers when reached by phone on Thursday.
A former Dartmouth athletics’ compliance official said part of his job was to help report the data.
Jake Munick, who is the associate athletics director for internal operations at Babson College, previously worked in the Big Green’s compliance office from spring 2013 to September 2019. During his time in Hanover, Munick was charged with making sure participation numbers were correctly counted in NCAA and EADA reports.
“That would include an understanding of when someone counts for a particular report and when they don’t,” he said in Monday phone interview. “My role was to make sure that if a certain report specified when they counted and when they didn’t, I was reporting out that number.
“Title IX is an institutional requirement. It’s not necessarily an athletics requirement, it has the nexus of this impacts all of the institution’s operations, which includes athletics. My time there, my scope was making sure for a particular report that we were counting athletes correctly.”
Munick said he was never part of any conversations of cutting sports since he left before the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Kristene Kelly, who served as the executive associate athletics director for varsity sports and the deputy Title IX coordinator when the cuts were made, is now Vanderbilt University’s deputy athletic director for internal affairs and liaison to the Title IX office. She declined comment through Vanderbilt’s media relations coordinator.
The reversal of program cuts followed lobbying from some alumni and public protests from some of the athletes. A story on the Global Golf Post online magazine last week said, for instance, that John Lundgren — the former chief executive officer of Stanley Black and Decker and a former golf team captain at Dartmouth — had “severed his relationship” with the college. Lundgren had previously funded the endowment for the men’s golf coach, among other donations.
Dartmouth acknowledged such fallout in one of its statements last week: “We sincerely apologize that this process has been, and continues to be, so painful to our current and former student-athletes and all who support them.”
Sheehy, Hanlon, and Dartmouth Board of Trustees members Laurel J. Richie and Elizabeth Mahoney Loughlin met with a handful of alumni last Friday morning for a 30-minute Zoom call before the reinstatement announcement was made.
The conversation included a question-and-answer portion where Hanlon made clear that Dartmouth will still reduce admissions spots set aside for athletes by about 10%, but will need to be equitable across all sports.
According to Ted Dardani, who played on the Dartmouth golf team in the 1980s and helps support the program, Richie, the chairwoman of the trustees, ended the call acknowledging Dartmouth had made a mistake.
“This was not our best day,” said Richie, who previously served as president of the Women’s National Basketball Association. “We can do better in the future.”
Pete Nakos can be reached at pnakos@vnews.com.