“What Would Cocky Do?”

Button, 2011
Metal and plastic
2017.01.01

Because sexual assault and interpersonal violence can occur on college campuses, UofSC, like other institutions of higher education, try to prevent it through educational campaigns, training, and personal support. In 2011, the University launched “Stand Up Carolina,” a bystander intervention program using UofSC’s mascot, Cocky. The idea was to ask, “what Cocky would do” if confronted by a situation where an active bystander should intervene. In spring 2020, the program was rebranded as “Gamecocks Stand Up.”

Title IX

Title IX of the 1972 Education Amendments Act bans discrimination based on sex in schools receiving federal funding. However, UofSC’s provision of equal opportunities in athletics stalled. A Daily Gamecock article detailed the “appalling” situation of females’ “second-class citizenship in all areas except the kitchen and diaper pails.” In response, women’s rights organizations, alumni, faculty, and students created an ad hoc committee in 1974 for women in sports to lobby UofSC’s athletic director.

Title IX also protects against sexual harassment and assault and expands opportunities for women in other arenas. Nationally, by 1990, women made up 42% of law school graduates, 31% of dentists, and 34% of medical school graduates. Even with this progress, women’s basketball coach Dawn Staley said in 2018, “We probably need to revisit” Title IX because “we need to keep moving in the right direction and giving females an opportunity in all areas.”