Patricia Babcock interviews former Senator Birch Bayh about the recent Title IX changes. Bayh was the primary author of Title IX.

"We’re still at a place where only 41 percent of all college athletes are women," Bayh said. "For all the progress we’ve made, we’ve still got more to do. If anything, Title IX needs to be made tougher. Now’s not the time to back away.”

And Sally Jenkins, writing from Indy, has another column today criticizing the new rules.

"If you pick out the right population for your survey, you can get the answer you're looking for," Coach Summitt told Jenkins, "But it's not necessarily the best answer."

The biggest news today is that the Washington Post editorial board has weighed in. It gives the feds credit "for developing a model survey that improves on the sloppy questionnaires in use by a number of schools." But overall, the Post's editors are critical.

[T]he new policy sets too lax a standard. Schools can simply e-mail students, providing links to the survey and warning that failure to respond will be taken as evidence of apathy. "Although rates of nonresponse may be high with this procedure, nonresponse is interpretable as a lack of interest," the department says. That goes too far, especially given the new rules for rebutting the results of the surveys. Indeed, the co-chairman of the administration's Title IX commission, Stanford University athletic director Ted Leland, criticized the policy, saying the administration erred in changing the rules without discussion and that it would be a "huge mistake" to rely solely on survey responses. He's correct on both counts.