By Greg Piper | Just the News
Female athletes "actually allege a clearer connection" between the NCAA and Defense Department funding for concussion research, making the NCAA subject to Title IX, than the precedents they rely on, judge says.
The NCAA has a “Grand Alliance” with the Department of Defense to study concussions among “more than 53,000 student athletes and service academy cadets & midshipmen.”
That relationship could knock the student athletics nonprofit into a far-reaching settlement with female athletes who claim it’s bound by Title IX via the DoD and committed sex discrimination against them by letting males compete in their sports on the basis of gender identity.
A federal judge refused to wholly dismiss the lawsuit against the NCAA by 19 current and former collegiate athletes led by former University of Kentucky swimmer and women’s sports activist Riley Gaines, complementing the Trump administration’s use of federal funding obligations to ram through its higher education agenda without Congress.
A Department of Education attorney in the first Trump administration credited the Biden administration with giving President Trump’s second term vastly more regulatory runway than it has wielded in its first eight months, warning colleges of much bigger threats.
Harvard’s new “heightened cash monitoring status,” which requires the Ivy Leaguer to pay federal student aid out of its own pockets before drawing funds from the government, shows federal student loan eligibility could be the next “shoe to drop,” consultant Jonathan Helwink wrote in Inside Higher Ed.
In its haste to take down for-profit colleges, the prior administration enabled its successor to “come out swinging against traditional public and private institutions” using the same “regulatory overreach,” he wrote. Few colleges can withstand a costly fight when the feds have successfully shuttered colleges “based upon far weaker versions of the current regulations.”
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