More Title IX news today, as advocates and administrators pore over the new rules and offer widely varying assessments of their significance.

NCAA president Miles Brand came out against the new rules. He also questioned the shady way that the DOE went about making them. "The department issued its clarification without benefit of public discussion and input," he said.

In the Times' report this morning, the DOE continues to insist that the new rules represent "no change in policy." Marcia Greenberger of the NWLC disagrees (in hilarious fashion):

The new guidance changes the whole landscape. It's like you have three ways to comply, and first is to really comply by giving equal opportunities, and the second way is to keep trying, and the third way is to call your mother every week and tell her you love women's sports. They've made the third test so easy to comply with and so undemanding, and then set up the presumption that if you do the window-dressing efforts they call for, the government will presume you are in compliance and not investigate.

President Bush's blog gloats: "if feminists are upset, then we're doing the right thing."

In the mailbag, Pilight offers his thoughts:

I think it's much ado about nothing. If anything, it makes Title IX more enforceable. As it is, the great majority of schools, nearly 70%, use the third prong to show compliance with the statute. Previously, there was no standard methodology for determining compliance by meeting interest. Schools could, and did, claim the interests of the underrepresented were met simply because nobody expressed it to them. Under the new rules, schools using the third prong are required to survey the student body to determine interest and do it in a proscribed, consistent manner. If they don't use the government's Model Survey they lose the presumption that they are in compliance. The rules themselves state that "schools must administer the census in a manner that is designed to generate high response rates". If a school isn't getting high response rates, you can bet that the DOE will be telling them to change the way they administrate it or the school will find itself hip deep in lawyers. The standard form will make it easier to force school administrators to add sports for underrepresented genders. An organized effort to get Model Survey responses would be a whole lot easier than getting verifiable signatures on a petition or the like.

As for conservatives and anti-feminists, well they're beating the hell out of that straw man. Schools have never been required to show proportionality and it's always been the least used prong for compliance. Interest in college wrestling was already on the decline before Title IX was enacted and the slide has only accelerated. The eliminated programs almost certainly would have been eliminated anyway, some people just like to have someone or something besides themselves to blame.