- I am Kari Borne. I'm from the Office of Continuing Education at UW Whitewater, and we host the Fairhaven Lecture Series each semester. This semester we're talking about remarkable women, and we're pleased today to be joined by Dr. Christina Navarro.

- 
[Christina]
 Thank you.

- Dr. Navarro serves in a joint role as faculty member in the College of Education and Professional Studies at UW Whitewater and liaison for student athlete development with Warhawk Athletics. As an assistant professor in the College of Education and Professional Studies, Dr. 

Navarro oversees the higher education leadership and higher education athletic administration graduate programs. Dr. Navarro's lecture today is titled The Evolution of Women in Higher Education and Intercollegiate Athletics. Welcome Dr. Christina Navarro.

- Thank you. Thank you. 
(applause)
 Well, I have to say this is my second year here at UW Whitewater, but I'm very close in heart to UW Whitewater. Both of my parents graduated, I even had a grandparent who graduated from UW Whitewater. 

So I'm very excited to be here today. Any UW Whitewater alum in the audience today? Fantastic. Fantastic. So, a little bit about me. I think it might be interesting, I always like to start with my students bringing what lens do I bring to my work and what kind of qualifies me to talk about this subject matter. So, I'll start out saying that I was a student athlete myself during higher education. I started out at UW Madison competing on the women's rowing team and also going to completing my education in business administration. From that point, I really worked, was focused on working at the nexus of higher education and athletics. So a lot of my skill set is how do we develop student athletes to not only excel on the playing surface, which obviously we do quite well in these parts, but how do we focus on that developmental aspect of administrators and how do we focus on the aspect of developing our student athletes in terms of community involvement, Warhawk outreach, and specifically leadership. 

So that idea of leadership really kind of pegs what we're talking about today. My doctoral degree is actually from UW Madison in higher education leadership. So we do a lot, and I was just speaking with Tom here before, we do a lot with Madison in terms of joint programming. At our K-12 level we have a joint co-op program between higher education entities to prepare students to go out and be contributors to society in the K-12 system. This new program, which I'll share a little bit about today, is really prefacing what the importance of athletics in higher education is and what is that nexus, and how can we think about a lot of the interwoven relationships between athletics in higher education for how women have kind of moved to the forefront in society here. So I think it's excellent that you're showcasing remarkable women, and this definitely, I think, will fit in with that. So with that, let's go ahead and get started. So a bit of a historical perspective. I'm by no means a history professor, but I think it's very important for us to understand where we are now is based on where we've been in kind of that evolution of where women have been in terms of higher education and athletics. So, a quote, and again, this is my mentor at the bottom, Dr. 

Barbara Osborne. I did my master's degree at UNC Chapel Hill in sport administration. She was very pivotal in the sense of Title IX and women in athletics. We're going to talk a little bit about how Title IX really streams through education and athletics today. So I do have to give her a shout-out and say a lot of this is adapted from what I learned from her as a mentor in my graduate program. But a quote to kind of kick us off here: "A historical myth has been persistent in modern culture. "Women are not as competitive as men." Does that resonate with anybody in here? I'll tell you, I'm pretty competitive. You probably see that as I go. 

I have a little bit of a spark in me, and I think this definitely is not where we are today. But let's try to bring ourselves back to the 1800s when maybe this was a predominate philosophy. So we're going to take a little bit a walkthrough starting in the 1800s and moving forward to bringing us up to present day. So, old social structures labeled us in terms of patriarchal or matriarchal societies. If we consider this in the sense of partnerships, dating all the way back to prehistoric times here, partnership societies in the sense that in order for us to survive, everybody is vital to that process. Man, woman, animal, whatever you are, it's of essence for you to work together in a partnership mentality. Everyone had to pull their weight for humans to survive. The first image, if we look here, the first some of the images that we'll contact with here in a second. So the first image is a painting of an Egyptian gymnast on limestone dating back to 1300 to 1500 BC. So we see a gymnast doing sort of a back flip situation going on here. 

Below that is a sculpture of an Egyptian swimmer from 500 BC. So we see the Egyptian swimmer. And then, finally, the sculpture on the right is from Greece of a Spartan woman running. So what we're going to see here is kind of a cyclical process where we had equality if you will, partnership. We kind of departed from that as we went through up until the Civil War part, and now we've kind of come full circle. So, bringing us into the 1800s. From 1861 to 1865, Civil War. So why was the Civil War a turning point for women in the United States in general? If we think about this, it was a huge political debate around freedom, not only around slavery but also the idea of equality for women, rights for women. This really presented an opportunity for women to have a more visible role not only in politics but kind of in all facets of life. 

So we have pictures as we go through here. We have suffragettes. We have individuals who were very much at the forefront of this. An opportunity for women to really vocalize their inner voices. Subjects in the women political platform included things such as: dress reform, birth control, better conditions for working women, entry into higher education and typically male professions such as law and medicine, a right to use bodies as they wished, so enter this idea of physical participation, physical activity, and the right to a professional career. So, again, we have our photo. So, from a historical perspective, a premise, is that intellectual study or higher education could in fact perhaps weaken women. And that's really hard for me to wrap my head around as a doctoral student who's now a professor thinking about how intellectual study could weaken me. I've always been taught that higher education is a way in which you further your voice, and it opens opportunities for you. So I think that the dynamic here is much different than where we sit today. 

But this is basically the same argument that was used regarding slavery. You couldn't educate slaves because it would weaken them, and, therefore, somehow they wouldn't be able to work as hard. So it's pretty much a strong departure from the knowledge is power that we hear a lot and we preach a lot to our students. Quite a big difference. So, thinking about it in the context of that, going on politically. In the 1800s, we have creation of women's colleges. So we're still kind of in that separate but equal mentality. We're okay with individuals who are females or identify as females going and completing higher education, but we still need to have separate programming. Women's colleges as late as the 1800s were really there to create opportunities for a quality education, but again, we didn't really see any support for competitive sporting experiences. So, physical education wasn't necessarily seen as a positive thing. 

We saw individuals even going as far as to say that your right to bear children or your ability to bear children would be impeded by you competing in sports. Right? So, do you recognize a common link in these? Sports that individuals in the 1800s were almost open to were those such as tennis, golf, equestrian, rowing, ice and roller skating. However, all of these were sports that men already competed in. There was no such thing as women paving the step forward in terms of new sports or new opportunities, which is, again, a huge departure from today where we see a lot of different sports developing. What were the most popular sports at women's colleges during this time period? Basketball and tennis. So we see a lot of Title IX, a lot of history tied to the sport of basketball and women's tennis. Just for kicks, I brought some pictures here for you to see. 

You might not be able to really even tell what's going on here. It's a far cry away from our Nike/Under Armour outfitted people of today. We have a women's basketball team, a college women's basketball team here. This is a college women's tennis team. 
(audience laughs)
 I'm not sure how they get the racket under the muff. But they did. So, if we think about this in the sense of some quotes and ideas of how history has brought us up now into the 20th century. So, Harper's Weekly, December 19, towards the mid-19th century, 1868. It's not proper for women to ride bicycles or even horses. 

And I'll tell you this, as a competitive mountain biker myself, I laugh at this. Why would women be allowed to ride bicycles in the sense that it would harm their reproductive organs, it would be impossible for them to bear children, and it really wasn't seen as a cultural norm at this time. So, why were women riding bicycles? Was it to buck the system and start just moving forward? So, I love this photo. 
(audience laughs)
 I'm happy to see it's not a tricycle. They actually have two wheels, and they're going. But it allowed women mobility. I think people were scared in the sense that if we give women wheels, we give them the power to fly, what's going to happen? 

Right? So, if we allowed women mobility, they could go much further from their homes, they could interact with more people, and, by golly, they could have ideas, and that's scary. Now, I'm not here to bash men. So please don't get that sense. But this is the general historical perspective of what has shaped athletics today and brought women's athletics into the forefront. When bicycles were invented, women learned to ride just as much as men did. However, that freedom was something that they could really exercise in a new fashion. Something that helped them really bring their ideas for recreation to the forefront. We talked about how the bicycle myth was in fact that it would somehow be damaging to you from a physical, mental standpoint. So, what is the real truth about bicycle seats? 

(audience laughs)
 It's kind of funny, right? Really, cycling and an overuse of cycling, sitting on a bicycle seat could, in fact, put men at a significant risk of lower sperm count and sterility. So it's kind of a kicker that comes full circle in terms of, you see, Lance Armstrong and a lot of the different aspects in the media now with men being the one that are really suffering from overuse of physical activity at times. So, let's fast forward a little bit. The '70s obviously is a time we have Title IX going on. We'll talk a little bit about what Title IX is and how that applies to higher ed and also athletics. But we start to see kind of organized formation around higher education in athletics for women. So, in 1971, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women was formed. The AIAW. 

This was formed by an executive board of commissioners really focused on empowering women in the sense of sport. They conducted their own national championships, quite separate from the NCAA, the National Collegiate Athletic Association. We were two very separate entities. Goals and objectives of this. It being very much student centered, so the nexus of higher education and athletics, these were kind of parallel movements coming up together. An education oriented model, which, as we go forward here, we're going to see how UW Whitewater has embraced, even back in the 1970s, this in the mentality moving forward. It recognized the abuses observed in men's athletics and tried to create safeguards against these such as running them into the ground with too much practice, trying to create an idea of this could be a holistic experience for women to help with that holistic idea of bearing children, being individuals who give back to society as well. AIAW leaders were intentionally trying to develop a different model to govern athletics than what we traditionally would hear and identify as the NCAA.

So the successes of the AIAW. For about 20 years, this was the primary organization that supported women's athletics. 

Much, again, that separate but equal mentality. It started with 276 institutions, and it quickly grew to 971. If we think about today, the breakdown of divisions, NCAA Division I, II, and III, Division III is the largest. We have over 400 member institutions. This far surpasses that number. They conducted 750 state, regional, and national competitions each year. So if we think about March Madness that just concluded, AIAW would put on versions of that, to a much smaller scale obviously, specifically for women. Championships were competitive enough to attract national television coverage, moving forward into the age of TV, but it wasn't by any means the commercialized aspect of what male sports are. The AIAW actually fought against the NCAA against Title IX. And I think this would be a good place to enter the idea of what is Title IX specifically. 

When we think about Title IX, we think about opportunities. So when I teach a Legal Aspects of Sport class and I think the general premise behind Title IX is it's about inhibiting male participation in sports. So a lot of times we tie it to wrestling programs being cut, or we tie it to, if you watch the news, UW Oshkosh is having to cut two of its athletic programs because of Title IX compliance type issues in terms of eligibility and also funding with the budget cuts. But what I like to have our students think about is Title IX is providing opportunities. Opportunities that mirror what's going on on the general campus. So there's many different prongs that you consider, but showing that you're trying to adequately meet the needs of students at the university setting. And with that, typically we see, even now at UW Whitewater, the women's enrollment is just a bit higher than that of the male enrollment.

So we talked a bit about the NCAA resistance. Why wouldn't they want to just bring women's sports into the entity? Why are we continuing to do a separate but equal opportunities here? 

Individuals worry that funding needed to support women's programs would drain resources away from men's programs. So we think about today's shared resources, March Madness is the primary source of income for many different athletic departments. Where if you think about a pie chart, quite a bit of that is divvied out between the individual teams that make that championship. So if we have more pieces of the pie, everybody gets a smaller slice, more or less. Men's teams didn't want to share funding, facilities, travel, coaches, or the spotlight with females. So the accomplishments of the AIAW were thought to be a serious challenge to this power structure.

However, in 1981, the NCAA won out. No more two organizations. We're going to try to work this out. We're going to try to all come together under the National Collegiate Athletic Association. 

So the NCAA, in 1981, voted to offer women's championships, trying to streamline efforts. A big part of this was realizing that it wasn't as effective or efficient to duplicate models. Trying to streamline it into one process. Obviously, we talked about until this time the NCAA had little interest in showcasing female athletics. This really started to change in turn in the '80s, as we see more individuals at the high school level competing, more competition for college scholarships, and females really becoming an engrained part of athletic departments.

So the NCAA today. I teach a class on athletic governance, and we take a lot of looks at, we look very deeply at what are the differences between Division I, Division II, and Division III. There's quite a few differences between each of the divisions. If we think about this, and actually I think this is a nice model to look at, but NCAA Division I institutions. So, down the road we have UW Madison, the other direction we have UW Milwaukee. 

350-member institutions. Division I schools typically field more than 6,000 athletic teams. Usually per campus we have in the range of anywhere from 12 all the way up to 28 sport programs on one university's campus. Provides opportunities for more than 170,000 student athletes. So we can kind of juxtaposition that against the other divisions. NCAA Division II. In the state of Wisconsin we don't hear much about NCAA Division II because we don't really have that many institutions. The Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference is probably the best example of this where we have quite a few Division II private institutions. A little bit smaller. 300-member institutions. 

DII schools provide thousands of student athletes the opportunity to compete at a high level where they have a scholarship, but they also are there for kind of the love of the game, if you will. Really at the heart of the DII philosophy for administrators in higher ed and student athletes is this idea of balance. Balancing the student and the athlete ideals. That brings us to NCAA Division 3. Obviously, this is what's closest to us right down the street here. UW Whitewater is a member of the D3 model and mentality. 450-member institutions. With that, the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference is at the forefront of national success. So we see quite a bit of success that occurs across the entire state between La Crosse and Whitewater, Eau Claire, Oshkosh, etc. As I mentioned before, this is the largest NCAA division, both in number of participants and number of schools. 

So when we think about this, the opportunities for women at the Division 3 level are greater than that of any of the other two divisions. Division 3 is primarily non-scholarship. So you receive no aid for athletic participation. That doesn't mean you can't come and receive FAFSA support, student support on the academic side, but there's no athletic scholarships. And really the mission, D3 athletics, the experience is offering participation in competitive athletics while being a student first. So we hear the word student athlete, and in the media you'll see a lot of institutions that are struggling to balance that. We really try to do that well at UW Whitewater, balancing student and athlete experiences. I want to pause for a second and talk a little bit about remembering where we were in terms of riding two-wheel bicycles and really struggling to get to have that accepted in society to now having an NCAA affiliate that is specifically focused on training women to be administrators in higher ed in athletics. So I'm going to pause and play this for a second. I'll give a synopsis of it. 

So I'll send out the PowerPoint if anybody cares to watch this at a different point. But, basically, the NACWAA, so NACWAA is what we like to call it among individuals, the National Association of Collegiate Women Athletic Administrators, this is an entity specifically to build women up and forward their progress in moving up that career ladder. So it states in their mission: "It's the premiere leadership organization that empowers, "develops, assists, celebrates, affirms, involves, "and honors women working "in all fields of intercollegiate athletics." When we think about intercollegiate athletics today, it's much different than during the 1800s and 1900s moving up into 2000s now. When we think about intercollegiate athletics at the Division I level, we have almost mini colleges within colleges at some points. So if you think about that, we have student affairs units dedicated specifically to assist athletes. We have marketing divisions specifically dedicated to showcasing and broadcasting our sport programs. Even at the Division 3 area, we're feeling that pressure to keep up with the Joneses, if you will. Our facilities are good, but we still need to keep moving forward. It's a consistent arms race. 

So, with that, the pressure to work in this field is even greater. There's always that need to be cutting edge, to understand what's going on, to be on Twitter, to be on social media, to be on Snapchat. I know some of these things, they continue to move and change so even as a staff we need to continuously go through professional development to realize what's reaching our fan base and what's reaching our student athletes. So NACWAA takes a proactive role in advancing women into positions of influence and powerfully shapes the landscape of women leaders. Amy Edmonds and I and some of the other members of our admin team try to make a point of going to this every year. It's a national conference where it really brings together women in athletic administration to share best practices and understand how can we keep the UW Whitewater brand moving forward. So, again, the mission: NACWAA is the premiere leadership organization dedicated to empowering, developing, and advancing the success of women throughout the profession. So if we think about in juxtaposition that to the initial quote of women are not as competitive as men, there's a lot of competitive women at this. It's definitely not only competitive in the sense of wanting to beat each other, not necessarily around that realm, but how do we mutually develop each other so that we can collectively all be better.

Some parts that I really strive to instill in the students that I work with, and I'll talk a little bit about the approach that UW Whitewater has taken with our higher ed program, but moving forward in the sense of how can NACWAA really offer added value to participants knowing that we kind of live in, if you will, a man's profession. 

It still is very much dominated by males, and individuals who are Caucasian males specifically. So trying to enhance the diversity of the workforce in higher education and athletics is a big focus. So NACWAA offers educational programming, networking, and mentoring experiences. So I've gone through their mentoring program, and I can say it's not just a situation where you're paired with somebody and you have a conversation. It's about having strategic plans and developing marketing plans and really thinking about what are case studies and how we approach these across the NCAA divisions.

NACWAA promotes the growth, leadership, success, and advancement of women in athletic administration, but also in higher education. I think a lot of times we think athletics and we think big business. What we really try to focus on is thinking about how are we as administrators also educators. And I think that's what we can really do well here at UW Whitewater, specifically thinking about the administrator and the coach is also somebody that that athlete is seeing many times throughout the day. So it's our duty to also serve as an educator for them.

NACWAA provides a forum to facilitate discussion. NACWAA is committed to taking a leadership role by advocating on behalf of its members with respect to national issues. So, with this, we have quite a bit of legislation. If you look at my office, we have compliance manuals that are about this thick with every rule that our student athletes and coaches have to abide by. So, with that, it's a very dynamic profession. It's constantly changing. And we have to make sure that we're educating ourselves in addition to our student athletes.

Some of the basic values, and these are not foreign to us, they're pretty much at the heart of the NCAA as well, but excellence, leadership, diversity, equity, education, advocacy, empowerment, and commitment. So these are the core areas of how we're developing women in athletics and higher education moving forward.

So, with that, I wanted to talk a little bit about the UW Whitewater higher education program. 

So we used to be in this state where we thought about educational leadership in the sense of a K-20 perspective, and we still do, but we realized that the K-12 system is much different than the higher education system. So those individuals that want to work on a campus setting need a different set of skills than those that are working with kindergarten through 12th grade. We have a lot more politics at play, we have a lot more units that we have to collaborate with in a campus environment. Within our higher education leadership program, and I'm actually going to pull this up.

So right at the forefront here we talk about it being a student centered program producing this idea of the scholar practitioner. And this is really kind of coming out of the idea that women need to embrace, and men as well but anybody that wants to work in higher education, embrace that idea of being intellectually stimulated, understanding the inner workings of knowledge is power, and being able to apply that to a practitioner setting. So that's kind of the mantra behind the program. With that, individuals take classes at the forefront of these issues. So legal aspects, compliance, organizational leadership, student development.

So, as I was mentioning before, we have a track for individuals who want to work in a college setting specifically with students, maybe as an academic advisor, a student affairs individual, someone who wants to work directly with programming or budget finance. 

And then we have a subset of individuals who want to work in intercollegiate athletics. So with that understanding specifically with these two, what are the diversity inclusion aspects of this? What should we be aware of in areas such as HR, human resources, moving forward?

I wanted to conclude today, and we're not done, but I wanted to conclude with the idea that we'd talk a little bit about what UW Whitewater is really doing to try to advance the idea of females in athletics and higher education. So if we frame this from the national wide perspective and then funnel it down to what we're doing on campus here, the NCAA is really focused to this idea of leadership development for all individuals, men and women alike, but really providing opportunities for our young women, young females, to excel on the playing surface, playing arena, but also in life. So, with that, we've recently kicked off the Warhawk Leadership Academy. This afternoon, Amy Edmonds and I later, after this, are going to be featured on Hawk Talk, which is our university-wide radio station, to try to really create buy-in and awareness of this opportunity for student athletes. So, with this, the mission of this, what does this look like? It's really a professional development entity for student athletes. As one of the nation's premiere Division III athletics programs, student athlete development is at the forefront of our mission. 

Education is knowledge, education is power. The Warhawk Athletics Leadership Academy develops, challenges, and supports student athletes. So a lot of common language here with what we've gone through throughout our historical perspective. Really focusing on developing our coaches, our administrative staff, and our student athletes to become leaders in athletics, academics, and life.

So, some of the key players in this. Amy and I presented a proposal to the chancellor, Chancellor Telfer, at the beginning of the semester. A year later, we have approval to make this go forward. So we have a very innovative chancellor who supports this vision of knowledge is power, and how do we educate our individuals in athletics who are very much often the front porch to our institution. They're visible on campus. They're highly visible. 

Director of Athletics, our Student Athlete Advisory Committee, which is a group of student athletes who are really our executive body. Specifically of interest, three of those four individuals are women at this very point in time. Career and Leadership Development Office, our Center for Students with Disabilities, Academic Advising and Exploration, First-Year Experience Office, and obviously our Warhawk alumni. So we're really trying to bring this full circle, and, as Amy likes to say, close the loop in terms of developing people to go forward that hopefully then want to continue to give back and attend our sporting events.

So we kind of position this to the chancellor in terms of what are the benefits to our students and how do we think about this and what is important to develop future contributors to society, higher education, and athletics. So, really, it's a focused intentional developmental program for all student athletes. We also consider it to be a developmental tool for our coaches and a developmental tool for our athletics administration team. Coming all the way down to the bottom, the benefits we see for providing to the university is being a proactive approach to student athlete social responsibility. So, how do we understand that we're the forefront of the university and front porch often, how do we act with class, we talk about that quite a bit, and how do we specifically make sure we're contributing to society and the campus environment in a positive way?

So, what I was mentioning here is really what shaped our programming. 

So we're really trying to think about, historically, what has brought us to this point, and how do we bring it full circle? So we talked a lot about NCAA leadership development initiatives, and this really comes specifically out of that. We're working with some of our faculty in the HPERC department and curriculum and instruction around a grant with the NCAA to really enhance opportunities for females and males in athletics administration.

So, based on quite a bit of the AIAW all the way moving forward to NCAA, the program pillars that we've adopted to really enhance this idea of female leadership and leadership across the board. Some of the pillars include personal enhancement, social responsibility, career development, and leadership at the center of all of these to really develop a prepared professional, someone who is going to contribute to society. A brief outline for some of our sessions, and we hopefully will reach out to Fairhaven and some of our alums as well to engage with us in this process so that we can bring some of you in and really learn from our alums who have gone through.

Basic structure, we just went live with our website a couple days ago, so this is all up there and definitely open to the public to see. But reframing how we think about things in terms of developing rising Warhawks, moving them through the sophomore year, really focusing on Warhawk outreach, and then moving into a veteran Warhawk program that focuses internally on developing individuals in addition to outreaching to the community.

So, with this, what we're trying to do is I talked about our Student Athlete Advisory Committee and how we're really trying to provide more leadership opportunities for our student athletes specifically. So the WLA, our Warhawk Leadership Academy, we like to say think about it as an investment in you. 

SAAC, we think about it as an investment in the community via Warhawk outreach. So we'll have specific selection criteria, our rising Warhawks program, will be for incoming freshmen. We're working with our First-Year Experience Office specifically on enhancing the number of student athletes who participate in learning communities. Again, our SAAC, typically this is two to three members from each team, a male and a female representative that provides more opportunities. And we're really striving for equal participation here to enhance both male and female participation. Then, finally, our veteran Warhawks program. We just had a working group session right before this where we're getting ready for our Warhawk awards. And our Warhawk awards, if anybody's watched the ESPYs in terms of individuals being granted notoriety for specific things they've done for the community, on the playing surface and also in terms of being a leader in developmental role model. So we're going to have that event on April 26th where we showcase this to the greater community.

And I'd be happy to share more with individuals if there are specific questions, but this really outlines our programming with how we're approaching the nexus of higher education and athletics at the UW Whitewater campus.

So, with that, I'd love to take any questions you might have.