In the summer of 1999 when the U.S. women's soccer team won the World Cup, some women television sportscasters got teary-eyed and their voices trembled with emotion. The young girls cheering wildly in the stands were largely oblivious to the full symbolism of the moment. They had never lived in a world without stunning women athletes who ran like the wind, leapt gracefully and fearlessly into the sky after the ball, and had bodies with sculpted, defined muscles.

By contrast, for many of us writing in this inaugural Online issue of On Campus with Women (OCWW), our youth and young adulthood were shaped not by possibilities but by limitations. The passage of Title IX in June of 1972 changed all that.

It is fitting that during this thirtieth anniversary year celebrating Title IX, we will devote our next three issues on the new Online OCWW to examining the impact that piece of legislation had on the academy.

This issue looks back at the world before Title IX existed. A quick demographic snapshot of 1970 would reveal that women comprised only 44 percent of undergraduates, most of whom were white and between the ages of 18-22; 19 percent of college faculty; 3 percent of college presidents, almost all of whom headed women's colleges; and 28.5 percent of the combined total of master's and doctoral students. The first women's studies program had received approval that year, date rape didn't exist as a term, and domestic partner benefits still referred to married couples.

Three decades later women number 56 percent of the undergraduates; 41 percent of the faculty; 21 percent of the college presidents; and 58 percent of combined master's and doctoral students. It is instructive how fast women were able to achieve when fortified barriers to access were no longer tolerated, and in fact, illegal. See the article by Jeanne Miller and Carol Hollenshead at the Center for the Education of Women at the University of Michigan for more about the successes we have seen under Title IX.

But Title IX did not just happen. It was itself nested in the midst of a period of dramatic democratization in our nation, a period in which the Civil Rights Movement held the nation accountable to its "promissory note," as Martin Luther King would describe it. The women's movement took root in the soil of the Civil Rights Movement, and Title IX owes its existence to a newly embraced commitment to equality that the Civil Rights movement shamed the nation into.

At the center of the drive for sex equity was Bernice "Bunny" Sandler, who helped spur the passage of Title IX through her class action lawsuit against the University of Maryland. Her compelling narrative of the political organizing and data collecting it took to pass Title IX is the feature article of this issue. Although Bunny worked first through the Women's Equity Action League (WEAL), she established her place in history right here at the Association of American Colleges & Universities where she established the Project on the Status and Education of Women (PSEW) and spent two decades functioning at AAC&U as the nerve center for campus change agents for gender equality.

Under Bunny's leadership, PSEW translated meanings of the new laws and regulations, monitored legal cases, invented the concept of chilly climate on campus, and described how to set up mentoring programs, measure the content about women in courses, and create strong policies to prevent sexual harassment.

Bunny also understood that not all women were facing the same kinds of issues. She brought Yolanda Moses to AAC&U on a summer research grant to produce Black Women in Academe in 1989, the first in a series of AAC&U publications on women of color in higher education. Yolanda, who has had a distinguished academic career as dean, academic vice president, president of both a university and a disciplinary society, and currently as president of the American Association for Higher Education, reflects in this OCWW issue on the process of change she has witnessed.

When Title IX was passed, I was a young, untenured ABD instructor at La Salle University who had just been appointed Title IX Coordinator. There were only twelve women on the faculty at the time, and though I had some expertise in women's issues, I certainly had little institutional clout. But as a result of Title IX legislation every institution was compelled to submit a self-study to the government to illustrate through data that it was not discriminating against women. Such a requirement was a brilliant strategy that produced far ranging institutional changes.

At La Salle, Title IX forced us to ask new institutional questions, and the self-study caused us to examine many areas that had not formerly been analyzed in terms of gender: admissions, counseling services, career planning, access to athletics and its resources, co-curricular activities, where women were employed at the institution, which women were located in which jobs, how those jobs were defined and what women were paid for their labor, how that pay compared with comparable jobs men held, and whether there were gendered patterns as students moved across the curriculum.

Institutions committed to full equality still track these items and many more. We have learned over the years how resistant some areas are to change, how subtle the forms of everyday micro-inequities are, and how deeply embedded gender privileges are in many institutional structures. All this is complicated by social expectations across ethnic, racial, class, and religious groups as well as unresolved national policies about family work and leave policies.

Nonetheless, as Judith White writes in this OCWW issue, you have to continue asking the big and complex question, "What does equality look like, for this institution, at this time, for these different groups of people?" And when that new vision of an inclusive educational community is defined, you have to work together to use that blueprint to construct a building in which everyone can live happily. Succeeding in that goal might almost make one feel like you are soaring through the air, gracefully and fearlessly. It's enough to make you weep.