Dave Schwartz · @daveschwartz
5th May 2017 from TwitLonger
The column on the U of Iowa/Meyer verdict has been reposted here:
(This opinion column originally appeared on Hawkeye Nation but was removed at the request of ownership. This column reflects the views of the author and not HawkeyeNation.com. Twitlonger, the app used to make this post, does not allow hyperlinks; the original posted version of this column contained numerous hyperlinks to support statements made by the author that were related to the UI-Meyer trial. Here's the opinion column.)
IOWA DISGRACES ITS RICH HISTORY --------
This Sunday, Iowa City will host the Christine Grant 5K Run. The event benefits Women Build, an organization that helps women learn how to build homes and empowers them to serve local communities.
The University of Iowa was one of the last universities in the United States to have separate women’s and men’s athletic departments. From 1973-2000, Grant served as the UI Director of Women’s Athletics. She remains one of the most influential figures in the history of U.S. women’s athletics, especially at the collegiate level.
Under Grant’s guidance, UI athletics led the charge for gender equity in sport. Under Grant’s leadership, women’s athletics won some and lost some, but it always fought the battles that needed fighting.
Thursday afternoon, a Polk County jury ruled that the UI discriminated against a former associate athletics director on the basis of her gender and sexual orientation. They awarded Jane Meyer $1.4 million – and she’s coming for more. So is Meyer’s partner, Tracey Griesbaum, the former UI field hockey coach fired by the university.
For this to happen at the University of Iowa is beyond inexcusable. The jury’s decision shows that the actions of athletic director Gary Barta have brought shame and humiliation down upon Grant’s House. The UI broke the law. It spit on the foundation and memory of everything that Grant and her peers built, and continue to build.
From the get go, everything about this situation stunk.
Barta said he reassigned Meyer outside of athletics because of a lawsuit being threatened by Griesbaum. But if one followed the trial testimony, the UI’s main beef with Meyer seemed to be that she wasn’t always pleasant to deal with.
Barta testified that Iowa coaches, including football coach Kirk Ferentz and wrestling coach Tom Brands, “felt like they were talked down to by Jane.”
If you’re reading this and you’re a man, you might not be aware how serious an issue this is not just for Meyer, but many women: Women’s workplace demeanor faces far more scrutiny than men’s.
“It’s a Catch-22. Whatever women do at work, they have to do it nicely,” psychotherapist Sonya Rhodes told Business Insider in 2014. “But the more you back off, the more they don’t take you seriously.”
Perhaps if Meyer had smiled more and baked everyone cookies she could have kept her job. After all, Barta told the jury that he “always felt [Meyer] has a lot of talent and works hard.” But if she had spent all her time baking, when would she have had time to successfully oversee UI projects totaling hundreds of millions of dollars, including a major renovation of Kinnick Stadium?
Given its history under Grant, it’s beyond comprehension to think that UI athletics will now and forever bear the mark of an institution guilty of gender discrimination. That’s not the kind of mark that scrubs off easily, nor should it be. Sure, some will dispute the jury’s verdict. But those people are wrong. The UI acted hastily, did a lousy job with documentation and, most seriously of all, broke the law.
“I have been a small part of a societal revolution in which women’s roles and opportunities have been forever significantly changed for the better,” Grant wrote upon her retirement. That was in 2000.
A year later – 2001 – Meyer started work at Iowa. Now she’s gone, too.
And Iowa?
All that’s left in Iowa City is an athletic department that fumbled away its moral compass. The Hawkeyes forgot who they were and what they stood for, and yes, “were” and “stood” both refer to the past tense.
<i>* Talk with David Schwartz on Twitter @daveschwartz. This column would not have been possible without the good reporting of The Gazette’s Erin Jordan and the Des Moines Register’s Mark Emmert.</i>