(from _The Cornell Daily Sun_ and _The Post-Standard_)
 
Last September, US District Court judge David Hurd issued a ruling on a
Title IX suit brought by the Colgate University women's hockey team, which
was seeking varsity status.  In the first Title IX suit to make a sport-
by-sport comparison of men's and women's teams (rather than comparing the
entire men's and women's athletic programs, as had been done in the past),
Judge Hurd ruled that Colgate was in violation of Title IX and ordered the
school to move the women's team up to varsity status by the 1993-94 season.
 
Colgate appealed the decision, and last Tuesday, the Second US Circuit Court
of Appeals overturned the earlier ruling.  The interesting thing here was
that the Court of Appeals ruling was not based on Title IX but on a tech-
nicality -- the five plaintiffs in the case, all women's hockey players at
Colgate, would not benefit if the team were to get varsity status because
they will all have graduated by the 1993-94 academic year.  The decision
reads, in part, "The last of the complaining parties will graduate before
the district court's order can affect them, and there has been no suggestion
that Colgate's policies will be visited upon any one of them in the future."
The Court of Appeals issued no ruling on whether or not Colgate was in
violation of Title IX, but apparently, the university is no longer required
to elevate the women's team to varsity status.
 
Colgate thus becomes the first school ever to win a Title IX case in court,
as only one other such case has even gone to appeal.  Part of the "problem"
with the original lawsuit, filed in 1990, was that it was on behalf of the
five players, not as a class action suit on behalf of the whole team.  At
any rate, according to athletic director ?? Murphy (I think his name is
Mark), the women's hockey team did get an assistant coach and had its budget
increased "substantially" last season after the school lost the original
case.
--
Bill Fenwick
Cornell '86 and probably '94
LET'S GO RED!!
"Men who sleep with daughters of their mothers-in-law -- on the next Geraldo."
-- "Shoe"