Penn athletics hasn’t been a significant part of the national discourse since around the mid 20th century, when they still had a dominant football program with big fan base. Beyond the occasional NCAA basketball tournament appearance and the Penn Relays, the Quakers don’t get a lot of air time.
That changed a few years ago, when transgender Penn swimmer Lia Thomas became a national story in winning an NCAA women’s swimming championship. Only two years prior, Lia swam for the men’s team, albeit with less success. This launched a national conversation, and I’m using that term generously, about the fairness of someone born male swimming in the women’s division. That conversation spread to political campaigns, state legislatures, college sports commissioners, and launched more than a few public figures, including former Kentucky swimmer and current conservative firebrand Riley Gaines. It also eventually led to the NCAA changing its policy on participation in women’s sports, restricting participation to those assigned female at birth. All the while, Penn swimming, a sport that really couldn’t have flown more under the radar if it tried, became a focal point of the national discourse.
We may have just witnessed the climax to that story, as just this week Penn and the US Department of Education, which apparently still exists, announced that Penn agreed to give all titles won by Thomas to the female athletes that finished behind and remove Thomas from all swimming records. Penn’s president would also write an apology letter to each of these newly recognized female swimmers. And Penn agreed to a biology-based definition of male and female in their athletics program. With that, we will probably hear less about Penn athletics, swimming and otherwise, which is probably just fine with their athletic staff.
The stakes were fairly high for Penn, as the federal government made it very clear they would suspend federal funding for the University if they didn’t comply, based on their belief the University violated Title IX – more specifically, that Penn denied women access to fair and equitable competition. And I think we’re far enough into this administration to realize that’s not a bluff. And especially around an issue like this one, where public sentiment was largely against the Ivy League institution, Penn had basically no choice but to acquiesce in whatever embarrassing way the Trump administration wanted. Say what you want about this particular case, but asking a college president to write apology letters to individual college swimmers is the stuff of John Hughes films. I suppose it’s no longer worth using the phrase “below the office of the Presidency,” because that simply doesn’t exist.
I won’t speak much about whether Thomas should have swam in the first place, something I’ve talked about before. For the record, no, I don’t believe it was fair to the other swimmers, and I do think college administrators did a poor job responding to the moment. And it’s not surprising that pushback has been unduly severe, because we’re clearly incapable of living in a time of reason. And make no mistake, just because I believe Thomas shouldn’t have swam as a female, that is in no way an endorsement of the brazen cruelty towards transgender people by current federal and state governments.
I also won’t spend much time talking about how running in particular a Division I athletics program feels like a no-win situation. Between rising costs from paying athletes, class action lawsuits, and getting stuck in the middle of an election cycle, it’s hard not to imagine that a whole bunch of schools are wondering why they do it in the first place. I get why Alabama plays football. But it’s a whole lot harder to understand why, say, Penn still swims, especially if it could cost them a billion dollars towards scientific research. And if you think it can’t, just ask Harvard.
I wish Penn could have simply said to Linda McMahon, who somehow knows less about college swimming than she does the federal government, that yes, Lia Thomas shouldn’t have swam as a female, and yes, they were just following federal guidelines at the time, and yes, the NCAA changes were a good idea, but no, the President of the University of Pennsylvania, which is older than the US, is not going to grovel for his faculty to keep looking for a cure for cancer. And that in the future, the Department of Education should focus on funding failing public education instead of esoteric Ivy League sports. And that in the future, Penn sports would rather stay far from the public discourse.
Keith Strudler is the Dean of the School of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler.
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