03-17-2001

EDUCATION: The Price of Equality

When the U.S. women's soccer team in 1999 captured its second World Cup,
Title IX was exalted as valuable and victorious. When the NCAA announced
last year that wrestling programs had been discontinued at 136 schools
over the past 20 years, Title IX was decried as discriminatory and unfair.
Almost 30 years after it became law, Title IX of the Education Amendments
of 1972 has done what it was supposed to-and also some things that it
wasn't.


How did a well-intentioned law that doesn't even mention athletics become
so divisive? The answer is relatively simple: It's because the landmark
statute, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex at federally
funded institutions, is widely blamed for the loss of men's sports
programs across the country.


Obviously, that was not the intent of the law. As one of 10 parts to the
education amendments, Title IX hit the books at the height of the women's
movement, soon after both houses of Congress passed the ultimately stalled
Equal Rights Amendment. Its aim was to give women the same opportunities
as men for a college education-to get rid of admissions quotas and to give
women a shot at studying engineering, medicine, and other fields in which
they had been largely shut out.


"It was not the primary goal to get women athletes scholarships-it
was trying to get women scholarships," says former Sen. Birch Bayh,
D-Ind., who pushed Title IX in the Senate. "I think it's pretty hard
to argue with the idea that our daughters ought to be treated the same as
our sons. That's important enough that an institution ought to be willing
to invest the necessary resources."


Certainly, Title IX architects must have been pleased when women began
filing into male-dominated courses of study. But outside the classroom,
women were also making gains. When President Nixon signed the bill, 31,000
women played college sports; that number has quadrupled. Spending on
athletic scholarships for women went from less than $100,000 in 1972 to
close to $180 million today. And on July 10, 1999, the U.S. women's soccer
team clinched the World Cup in front of 90,000 spectators and almost 40
million television viewers.


At the same time as school administrators and athletic directors tried to
level the playing field, male students began to see some of their
opportunities disappear. Although men still outnumber women on the field,
court, track, and in the pool-207,592 to 145,832 in 1999-they have 330
fewer teams than do women. From 1992-2000, colleges added nearly three
times as many women's teams as men's teams, according to a GAO report
released on March 8, and they discontinued more than twice as many men's
teams as women's teams.


At Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, men on the NCAA Division I wrestling,
soccer, and tennis teams were told in 1999 that their programs would be
dismantled, just as many of them were entering the championship phases of
their seasons. "Nobody wants to drop sports, and it was hard for the
athletic department, the athletes, and the coaches," said Richard
Little, a spokesman for the university. "That's why it took as long
as it did."


"I didn't come to Miami just to wrestle," says former team
member Nate Studeny. "I loved the atmosphere and I loved wrestling,
but once I heard that my team was going to be disbanded, it really tore me
away from the university." Studeny is one of seven Miami athletes
who, represented by the Washington-based Center for Individual Rights,
filed suit against the university. Their complaint argued that Miami
unfairly applied Title IX, and that the loss of the sports programs
violated the men's 14th Amendment rights to equal protection under the
law. U.S. District Court Judge Sandra S. Beckwith dismissed their fourth
and final claim in January, but the plaintiffs have appealed the
decision.


With 22 sports, budget constraints, and some hefty Title IX compliance
problems, Miami's then-athletic director, Eric Hyman, brought in a
professional. Lamar Daniel, a leading national Title IX consultant and a
former 20-year veteran of the Education Department's Office for Civil
Rights, which enforces the law, concluded that Miami did not comply with
the law, despite having added three women's sports since 1995, and could
not afford all of its sports offerings.


Following Daniel's findings, two years of campus-wide debate, and the
hiring of a new athletic director, university President James C. Garland
submitted to the Board of Trustees his plan to drop four men's programs.
In a 1998 statement on Miami's predicament, Garland said: "Title IX
has become a blunt instrument that does not adequately acknowledge the
economic realities of intercollegiate athletics. Nevertheless, Title IX is
the law and must be obeyed to the best of our ability."


According to Little, the main issue was cost. "We were already
putting an extra burden on the student by requiring a very high fee for
athletics. We looked at this thing every which way, up and down, inside
out, and it all came back to the same answer-we had to cut sports. And
then we still needed to raise more money."


Miami's dilemma isn't unique. Many schools across the country are
confronted with the rising costs of sports, while facing academics who
rail against athletics, increased interest from women and men, unchanged
budgets, and Title IX compliance problems. In most cases, Title IX takes
the lion's share of blame for the current controversy surrounding athletic
departments. Indeed, despite its good intentions, Title IX has contributed
to pulling the mat out from under the Miami wrestlers and other sportsmen
who participate in low-profile, non-revenue-producing sports.


It wasn't meant to be that way. Most of the debate over the equality
standards in the Education Amendments of 1972 centered on busing. In fact,
arguments over Title IX and athletics arise from one single declarative
sentence in the statute: "No person in the United States shall, on
the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the
benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program
or activity receiving federal financial assistance." Other than a
couple of athletic directors warning Bayh that Title IX would spell the
end of their football programs, very few people mentioned athletics in the
course of the long debate.


It wasn't until 1974, when federal education bureaucrats drafted
regulations for Title IX, that the Health, Education, and Welfare
Department's Office for Civil Rights received a torrent of public
feedback-10,000 comments, mainly on athletics. During that same turbulent
year, Walter F. Byers, executive director of the NCAA, testified before
Congress that Title IX would mean the end of college sports as they
existed at the time.


What has given colleges fits is the way that Title IX is enforced. To
comply with the statute, colleges need to show that they are meeting the
sports interests of women on campus, or that they've had a history and
continuing practice of responding to women's interests and abilities. But
the most common way to comply-and the safest, if they want to fend off
lawsuits, some experts say-is for schools to keep close track of the
number of male and female athletes. If a college's student body is 60
percent female and 40 percent male, its sports teams are expected to have
a similar ratio.


But that is hard to do. For one thing, the football programs at most
colleges involve more than 80 male athletes, which means that many more
slots must be made available for women-or be taken away from men in other
sports-to compensate. This proportionality requirement "was designed
20 years ago, and it's outdated," said Kimberly Schuld of the
Independent Women's Forum, a conservative advocacy group. "It was a
poor policy to begin with." Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a critic of
feminism at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research,
says she favors accommodating any women interested in sports, but adds
that it "verges on unfair" when men's programs are dropped if
the numbers don't turn out equal.


Many Title IX experts disagree. "Schools don't even have to consider
desperate measures unless they are already discriminating against
women," said Valerie Bonnette, a leading consultant and former senior
program analyst in the Office for Civil Rights.


Title IX advocates also disagree with the conservative critics. Bayh
argues that schools that have abolished men's sports just won't spend
enough money on athletics across the board-"half of which will go to
women, half of which will go to men." Rep. Patsy Mink, D-Hawaii, who
authored Title IX in the House after she was rejected for medical school,
has said, "No longer can anyone say that girls don't deserve equal
opportunity in athletics because they don't have interest or
aptitude."


When asked whether anyone in 1972 ever thought that men's programs might
be dropped in the future, Bayh replied: "No, that was not the purpose
of Title IX. And that has been a very unfortunate aspect of this. The idea
of Title IX was not to give fewer opportunities to men; it was to make
more opportunities for women."


It isn't clear yet whether the Bush Administration will enforce Title IX
as vigorously as the Clinton Administration did. "I support Title
IX," George W. Bush said during last year's campaign, but "I do
not support a system of quotas or strict proportionality that pits one
group against another."


So the fight continues over who is to blame-uncreative athletic directors,
tightfisted university officials, plaintive plaintiffs, mean-spirited
bureaucrats, or shortsighted legislators. It is clear, however, that
without the landmark legislation, women probably never would have received
the same athletic opportunities as men-and men probably never would have
lost their teams.


Gia Fenoglio

National Journal

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