Town Hall triggers Title IX fireworks

11/21/2002 Mark Zeigler, STAFF WRITER http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/uniontrib/thu/sports/news_1s21title9.html

Critic repeats claim panel just a 'setup'

Topics included proportionality, interest surveys, football budgets and whether men are biologically predisposed to like sports more than women, but the most fervent exchange at yesterday's Town Hall meeting to examine Title IX's effect on athletics involved something said a few days earlier.

Donna Lopiano, executive director of the powerful Women's Sports Foundation, was an invited speaker by the Department of Education's commission that met in a packed ballroom of a downtown San Diego hotel.

And as soon as the panel was allowed to question the speakers, member Tom Griffith asked Lopiano about a quote attributed to her Tuesday.

"This is a fiasco," The Baltimore Sun quoted Lopiano as saying. "I think the commission is a setup.

"If I were on the commission, I would quit. I would worry about my integrity."

Lopiano did not back down from her comments and instead expanded on them,

She said the 15-member commission is composed primarily of NCAA Division I-A athletic directors who have "a vested interest in weakening the law to make it less necessary to do the tough budget decisioning that has to be done to comply with Title IX."

Lopiano also alleged that requests for certain expert speakers have been ignored by the Bush administration.

To which Griffith, the general counsel at Brigham Young University, said:

"I bitterly resent your suggestion that my integrity or the integrity of my fellow commissioners is in some way compromised by this service . . . Your comments about our integrity are not helpful to the process. Would you publicly disavow your comments now?"

Lopiano: "No, I would not."

Commission co-chair Cynthia Cooper, a former WNBA player, interrupted and diplomatically steered the discussion to the 30-year-old law preventing gender discrimination in federally funded education programs and what should, or shouldn't, be done to it.

The Town Hall, the fourth and final before the commission submits a report to Secretary of Education Rod Paige, concludes today with a morning discussion. The public is allowed to attend, but unlike yesterday it cannot comment. Yesterday's invited speakers were allotted 10 minutes each in the morning, and members of the public could comment in five-minute time slots during the afternoon.

One criticism of the process is that the previous three Town Halls - in Atlanta, Chicago and Colorado Springs, Colo. - focused more on problems associated with gender equity than any concrete solutions.

The San Diego meeting was aimed to address the latter, and in that regard one of yesterday's more illuminating speakers was Andrew Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College in Massachusetts who has written several books on the economics of sport.

Hundreds of collegiate men's teams that have been eliminated in the past decade blame their demise on a Title IX interpretation compelling schools to bring female participation levels in line with female undergraduate enrollment.

Zimbalist argued that the problem lies not with Title IX but with poor financial management in big-time college football and men's basketball programs, and that a simple reduction in football scholarships (from 85 to 60) and limits on spending could save athletic departments millions of dollars annually.

"The athletics arms race is alive and well," Zimbalist said. "Athletic departments are run by (people) who do not have to answer to stockholders and do not face the financial discipline of the marketplace. The consequence is endemic waste."

He proposed seeking a congressional act giving the NCAA legal authority to cap coaches' ballooning salaries.

"Currently, there are dozens of Division I men's basketball coaches who make $1 million or more and dozens more football coaches in this category," Zimbalist said. "Knock them down to $200,000, which would still put them above 99 percent of the faculty, and colleges would be able to add another three to six sports teams or, heaven forbid, reduce their large athletic deficits."

The more common remedy proposed during the Town Halls is to eliminate the "proportionality" provision under which schools can achieve Title IX - that if 50 percent of your student body is female, then roughly 50 percent of your athletes should be females.

In that camp was San Diego State athletic director Rick Bay, who regards "proportionality as a quota system . . . that we should not tolerate."

Commission member and Olympic swimmer Donna de Varona asked Bay why, when faced with a budget crisis in 2000, he cut a men's volleyball team that cost $134,000 per year instead of trimming that amount from the school's $5 million football budget.

"Our football budget is pretty modest by competitive standards," Bay replied. "Yes, I guess I could have gone in and slashed (funds) from our football budget, but it would have reduced our ability to be competitive in football."

(SDSU is 9-24 in football since 2000.)

The first speaker in the afternoon public commentary session was actress and competitive archer Geena Davis, who delivered a passionate speech in support of the status quo.

Over the lunch break, she appeared at a "Preserve Title IX" rally in front of the Wyndham Emerald Plaza hotel, where the meetings were being held.

Today's session runs from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m.

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