Critics of Title IX in Madison know the 1972 law that prohibits sex discrimination at any school that receives federal funding as the one that helped doom the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s baseball team.
Yet the next major Title IX debate on college campuses, and potentially the UW, likely will have nothing to do with sports.
Over the past couple years, government agencies such as the Department of Energy, the National Science Foundation and NASA have started undertaking Title IX compliance reviews in university science and engineering programs at a handful of schools across the nation. In fact, auditors from the Department of Energy visited UW-Madison April 1-2 to review its graduate physics program, and a final report is due out by the end of the year.