Michigan, Title IX, and Don Canham - A History
As a history teacher, I subscribe to the History News Network's email list, which sends out biweekly history stories across a wide range of topics. Today's article, on the heels of March Madness is about the early years of Title IX in American law and how Michigan AD Don Canham was one of the most vociferous opponents of its application to college athletics.
It's somewhat remarkable to realize how successful many of Michigan's women's sports programs have been given this early opposition.
https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/this-is-standby-alert
Maybe.... probably.... I haven't thought much about it.... But 250 years ago we were engaged in genocide.... and 150 ago we bought and sold people.... and 70 years ago Jim Crow kept the people who used to be property legally unequal and lynchings continued... and 40 years ago there was rampant sexism/racism/homophobia/antisemitism in the Detroit 'burbs.... and 20 years ago certain people are still losing their minds over gay Ellen having a talk show..... and today there are battles over pronouns for trans people... not whether they have rights as citizens or deserve equal protection or whether it is okay to use slurs to describe them.... but what the most appropriate pronouns are.
It appears we are limping toward a more perfect Union. Often grudgingly. Hopefully asymptotically.
That's kinda the thing. There is no perfect union, there is no utopia. We are simply meandering our way through the ever changes in cultural norms and mores.
Just 8 years ago, I could have posted on social media "boys have a penis, and girls have a vagina" without much reaction, other than something to the effect "why would you post something so obvious". If I was to post that today, I would likely lose my job! What's more, in this hypothetical situation, someone would find this post from 8 years ago and judge it against current norms.
Key learning: stay off social media people!
Lol. This should be under a tutorial labeled “how to get a post locked.”
Thank you for proving my point!
Genocide was worse than slavery which was worse than Jim Crow which was worse than bigoted jokes in high school circa 1985 which was worse than controversy while finding non-harmful ways to address non binary people. There's no perfect union. The point is to make it more perfect. That appears to be happening (see above).
That assumes that everything will always move with the same trajectory though. 200 years from now we could look at the last 200 years and say wow we really laid the ground work for the REALLY bad stuff.
Well, you can always say you were just quoting Kindergarten Cop and you'd be just fine! Everyone loves that movie.
"It's not a tumor!"
(This was in response to WCB, hard to follow now)
I generally agree with your position. The sucky thing about Title IX isn't women having the opportunity - that is great and necessary. The problem is when non-revenue men's sports have to get cut in order to make up the scholarship numbers. That's ultimately football's fault - it has enormous rosters and no women's equivalent balance. Too many universities wind up cutting programs like men's wrestling or gymnastics or swimming as a result.
I'm not sure what the best answer is, but honestly separating football due to its unique revenue and roster situation seems to be the best answer.
The problem is when non-revenue men's sports have to get cut in order to make up the scholarship numbers.
They don’t have to do that. They choose to address it that way.
MAC schools and the like kind of do. Plenty of smaller D-1s are resource constrained to the point where adding women's teams (instead of cutting men's teams) is not a feasible option.
Then those schools should move football down a level and (literally) stop playing with the big boys. It's not like those schools are using football to fund other sports; those are the schools that lose money trying to keep up.
When I was going to Michigan in the late 2000's, people were still complaining about how many black people, Jewish people, and women were attending the school. I know many people feel the same way today, but it does seem less intense and some statistical measures bear that out. People will use initialisms like "DEI" and "CRT" instead of the one you know they want to use, but it's really easy to figure out when that's the case.
When I was going to Michigan in the late 2000's, people were still complaining about how many black people, Jewish people, and women were attending the school.
Unless this is a very small minority of people, there is no way this is true.
I attended M in the late-80s. I heard no such complaints. The term "JAP" was pretty commonplace. Black kids were often assumed to be athletes. There was great controversy over whether to wear jeans on a certain day in support of gay people. So yeah, imperfect, but pretty mild compared to what Johnny Orr clearly thought!
I don't remember any complaints that there were too many women!
It was not an uncommon sentiment in my high school or among the adults in my life at the time. This was in Macomb County, so I imagine if you're familiar, it will be a lot easier for you to believe.
So the sentiment was primarily from home and not from within the student body while you were in A2? Yes, now it makes sense.
Oh boy, I did a bad job making myself easily understood in that comment, didn't I?
Agree, I never heard any of that in the early to mid 2000s.
DEI and CRT are real concepts and philosophies that are not merely “double-speak” for other observations. Anybody with a school age child in nearly all public schools can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that DEI is very real, involves far more than just racial representation, and has brought about very tangible changes to curriculum, some for better, some for worse.
You can support the ideas and mechanisms used to implement measures consistent with the concepts, or not, but to allege they are just new abbreviations for people to use to be racist is just not true.
Yeah, I know. That's why I said that it isn't hard to figure out "when that's the case." For example, let's say a cargo ship hit a bridge and it collapsed. If a bunch of people said it was because the mayor of the city the bridge was in is a DEI hire, you would know that they aren't actually talking about the concept of DEI, wouldn't you?
Ok, Gotcha.
You make a valid point with DEI. CRT is an academic viewpoint/concept. It is not taught at levels beneath the University level and has it no real effect on much of anything so far as I can tell. When people bitch about how much "damage" CRT is doing or how "dangerous" it is for our youth they clearly using coded language.
Michigan was definitely behind most of the Big Ten in welcoming women's athletics. Women's basketball was basically a club sport even with Diane Dietz leading some decent teams in the late '70s and early '80s. They made their first NCAA tournament in 1990 (two years after Canham retired).
I tried writing a story on women's sports at the university a couple of years before he retired. After meeting with the women's athletic director (Phyllis Ocker), I realized there wasn't even any acknowledgement that things could be different. They were going to spend the minimum and that was that. It didn't occur to anyone that they could invest in excellence. No one was interested. No one was behind the scenes pushing anything. I ended up killing the story - why stir up something when no one was stirring?
They hired a 25-year-old to assist part time with softball in 1983, elevated her to head coach in 1985. The transition was slow, but steady, and what happened with Carol Hutchins bringing excellence to Michigan women's sports was really just one person with a vision. IIRC, the swimming teams were often quite good as well.
The times I talked to Canham, he was laser focused on building the brand, and often talked about George Steinbrenner (baseball was a lot bigger then). When it's written that he opposed Title IX - it was undoubtedly true (I never asked him about it). It was such a small thing at the time - the focus was the cost of the scholarships and they were going to comply and do nothing else.
I'm surprised Johnny Orr wrote what he did. His wife was a legendary figure in the high schools as a PE instructor.
I was a student from Fall 1981 to Fall 1985. I had the same opinion of another here that (at that time) I felt an exception should have been made for FB. Some years later, I changed my mind and felt they should be equally divided 50/50 on scholarships and support. Societal norms influence us more than we know, especially when we are under 25. It's not until other people challenge the norms that you can ponder why things should be as there are and not to benefit all.
Also, I've shared the same thing with my daughter who is a grad school at UM that the 1970s and even 1980s had a very entrenched attitudes towards LGTBQ, women, minorities, etc. It wasn't pretty and sometimes was very public. I had a lot of those attitudes back then but started to change my mind when I was out of school and working in my mid-20s. It sure took time but I'm a lot more open minded today than ever before.
Cudos to Prez Ford for making the tough but right call. I also wouldn't fault Johnny Orr for his views in 1975. I'm sure as he aged and saw that Womens' successes didn't mean he couldn't be successful in his own right. I doubt Canham every changed his views, but many of us have on Title IX, etc.
You were a year ahead of me. Definitely when it comes to gay rights in particular, the change from 1980 to about 2000 was enormous. I'll maintain that there are attitudes many undoubtedly hold today that, 20 years from now, will be viewed as despicable. And we likely can't even predict which ones.
But I point out gay rights because that was often used as weapon against women's athletics at the time. There was a small, but strong community in Ann Arbor. The status quo worked within that small community, even though it certainly wasn't fair and they were quite aware of that. The reason why Title IX was so important at the time wasn't the universities. It was for all the younger girls who didn't stick with sports after junior high because they would be accused of not being feminine enough otherwise.
Growing up in Ann Arbor, my father was a professor there, going to Michigan, I can remember at the time thinking I was exposed to the cutting edge of liberal ideology, feeling good about that in a way that makes me cringe today because so many flaws seem so obvious in hindsight, including how girls were pressured into giving up sports. Getting older makes me so much less certain about values and so much less trusting of the endless enthusiasm of feeling righteous, however that manifests.
Even in the mid-80s, as I was finishing up at UM, the gay jokes, typically pointed at males (using the F word), were commonplace, especially at all guys gatherings like going to a bar to watch a game. Some guys also commented that some of the women athletes were probably lesbian (using the D word). Thankfully, as my daughter has told me, for the most part, LGTBQ are fully accepted for who they are amongst their age group and friends. Some of their parents have evolved to a better way of thinking.
What makes me proud of Carol H as our long-time softball coach is that she found a way to succeed in spite of working for a guy (Canham) who felt softball was a waste of money. I remember watching womens' hoops (when the networks actually shared their games) in the 80s and seeing teams like USC (Cheryl Miller) and Tennessee and La Tech win titles while our women's team went through back to back 4 win seasons and no support. Proud of the job KBA has done with our hoops team!
Go Blue!
Gay jokes of that kind were widely accepted back then. Or imitating gay men using a lisp. Think about Eddie Murphy’s stand up or his character in “Beverly Hills Cop” when Axel Foley barged into the private club, imitating a gay man. And so many derogatory terms for both gay men and women that were regularly used in public with zero thought about how it might affect someone who was gay. They were treated in many instances like pariah.
There was no "Title IX" for men or women when Baseball, Basketball, Track (Athletics), and Football began at the University of Michigan. Of those sports, only Basketball and Football have managed to become profitable operations, and that took over 100 years to achieve. No one from Government was mandating opportunities for boys/men back then, were they? No Federal/State subsidies were provided to establish programs and oversight to achieve conformance, right?
While I don't condone the chauvinism and obstructionism of Canham, Orr, and others, I think some allowance needed to be made for profitable programs. Especially when those programs literally funded the other unprofitable programs (Unlike other schools, Michigan AD does NOT receive money from the University General Fund or the State Gov). The failure to do this has created the situation we now have with Football and Basketball sinking huge $$$ into gaudy facilities and coaches' salaries merely to prevent those $$$ from going elsewhere.
"some allowance needed to be made for profitable programs" is an example of a systemic bias. It basically says that money is more important than opportunities.
Title IX, on the other hand, explicitly makes opportunities the most important factor, and mandates that access to those opportunities be provided no matter the cost.
The top football schools don't have a problem here - they can fund football and all the other sports they want. It's the schools that are breaking even on football at best that should consider radical changes (drop down a level in competition, halve your football scholarships, and so forth).
This should be a diary entry.
One thing struck me as I read the article. One of the talking points against Title 9 was the fear it would lead to mixed gender teams. What did these people think was already happening when there was no supported women's team?
Background: I played on Michigan's water polo club from 1984-87. Our team, and several of the other teams we played, had 2 or 3 women on the squad. It was already happening!
Today we have a varsity women's water polo team, but none for the men. (I assume there is still a club level squad.) I don't have a problem with that, and I'm proud of the fact our ladies are often the best team in the country outside of California. (Californian dominance is a major thing in water polo; the reasons are TL;DR.)
Title IX like Affirmative Action has the best of intentions but can also be misused and abused. Until a woman's sport generates as much revenue as a respective Men's sport women should expect equal or representative pay and not the same pay as men.
This also falls into financial support for facilities. Women's hockey is a no brainier - no problem if it does not cut into the current facilities of Men's hockey or the funding of NIL of the already sustainable Men's and/or women's programs.
Equality is not Equity. The current NCAA Financial war can not afford to supplement Equity at the cost of NIL and self sustainable revenue generating sports. If you argue there is enough $ to go around make the Equity supplements come from sources not already being used in a war Michigan must win.
Pretty sure Bo, being the forward-thinking man he was, opposed it as well.
Bo's line of attack was on the "limited" scholarships ("down" to 95). I read a CFB annual magazine from the early 80s where he was griping about how much it was "ruining" the game. When, in fact, it helped balance the playing field. Instead of having guys like Anthony Thompson playing 2nd string RB for UM, they started for IU.
BO was also sexist toward women reporters when he was the Tigers Prez - the 1990 interview with a woman reporter and Jack Morris (at least Jack later apologized years later for his comments). Bo's response was the mens' locker room wasn't for women.
I thought Canham was an asshole, but didn't know Orr was one too
Oh well
Honestly it's amazing we still have athletic facilities named after this guy.
Thanks for sharing. While this is just a tidbit in the piece I was glad to see that President/Wolverine Ford approved applying Title IX to athletics over pressure not to.
I know a couple of guys who wrote sports for the Daily in the '70s, and have a crazy, darkly comic story (that might be embellished by age and retelling) about going to report on a Title IX-focused meeting of the Board in Control of Athletics, and having Canham tell them they weren't welcome and order them to leave. When they wouldn't go voluntarily, the story is that Canham then called the A2 cops who. apparently unaware of opening meetings laws, hauled them off to the police station downtown. When they got there one of them called a lawyer/family friend who contacted the University general counsel getting them sprung quickly with an apology. Different times.
My W was on the women gymnastics team in 1976 & 1977. They had scheduled the IM Building gym for practice, as usual. It was raining outside so Bo brought the football team into the IM gym and kicked out the gymnastics team.
True Story.
Behee wrote about this, in quite some detail, in HTTV 2022. Canham's record on women's participation in varsity sports is awful, the polar opposite of his record on Black participation, for which he was a primary mover.