Lecture~Concert Series event to feature Gold Medalist and women's advocate

Olympic Gold Medalist and law professor Nancy Hogshead-Makar will speak at the Fowler Center on Thursday, Sept. 9, at 7:30 p.m. at Arkansas State University in Jonesboro for the season’s first Lecture~Concert Series event.

The topic of her speech is “Fulfilling Civil Rights Under Title IX: Lessons Learned from the Commission on Opportunities in Athletics.”

Hogshead-Makar became a Title IX advocate after the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles, where she achieved fame as a three-time Olympic champion in swimming. Title IX is the landmark federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in education and is best known for creating opportunities for women in athletics.

As an intern at the Women’s Sports Foundation, and later as its president, she actively campaigned to amend the law on Title IX after a Supreme Court decision limited its application. Then later, as an attorney in private practice, she represented both plaintiffs and defendants in Title IX and Title VII matters with an emphasis on achieving compliance without litigation.

Early in her career, a collegiate wrestling coaches association filed suit against the Department of Education seeking to weaken Title IX. The lawsuit led the U.S. Department of Education to create the Commission on Opportunities in Athletics, an unbalanced group of 15 representatives from large Division I-A schools.

In response, the Title IX Coalition Leadership Counsel was formed to counter the attacks, which were based on everything from gross stereotypes to outright misstatements of the law. As a coalition member in the frontline of the battle, Hogshead-Makar used her legal and athletic expertise by testifying before Congress twice, speaking at several national press conferences, writing scholarly and mainstream articles, and appearing on numerous national media programs including 60 Minutes, CNN, MSNBC, and ESPN.

In August 2003, the U.S. Department of Education officially reaffirmed the importance of Title IX and its regulations, effectively halting the ill-advised movement to undermine the only law that has effectively enabled girls and women to fight gender discrimination in sports.

In recognition of her work for Title IX, Hogshead-Makar received the Yolanda Jackson Give Back Award at the Women’s Sports Foundation annual event in New York City in October 2003.

Today, she is a professor at the Florida Coastal School of Law and is an integral member of the Title IX Coalition while writing articles, teaching courses, coauthoring amicus briefs, serving as an expert witness, and filing supportive affidavits such as her submission in support of the plaintiff.

All Lecture~Concert programs are free and open to the public. The Lecture~Concert Series presents diverse programs to enrich the cultural life of the campus, community and region.

The next Lecture~Concert Series event will be on Wednesday, Oct. 20, with Byron Motley who will speak on “Oh, How They Lived – Stories of the Negro Leagues.”

            For more information, please contact Dr. Gil Fowler, interim Dean of The Honors College at 870-972-2308 or via email him at gfowler@astate.edu.

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