Douglas Alexander: “It is a noble and good effort for us to think about how can we make certain young girls as well as young boys have the…”

“It is a noble and good effort for us to think about how can we make certain young girls as well as young boys have the opportunity to learn more about science and math and to make careers of science and math should they choose to do that. I would like to urge some caution in the application of title IX to cause that. We may want to be more selective in our approach. I watched the good title IX can do. I was president of a university which saw a fantastic women's sports program, as an example, develop because of that--at the University of Tennessee. At least it encouraged that. But it might have some unintended consequences because, in many cases, girls are doing better than boys. Almost every liberal arts college in America today is having a hard time recruiting males, not females. In many of the graduate professional schools across the country we are finding growing numbers of women, which is a wonderful development, and they are in the majority. Were we to begin to apply too strict an application of title IX, we might find it restricting money spent for females because they are doing better than the males. One of the greatest problems affecting our country is why African-American males are not doing as well in high schools, so I would like to discuss that some more.”