Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company The
New York Times
May 30, 2002 Thursday Late Edition -
Final
SECTION: Section A; Column 4; National Desk;
Pg. 14
LENGTH: 505 words
HEADLINE: U.S. Defends Anti-Bias Law on College Sports
BYLINE: By TAMAR LEWIN
BODY:
The Bush
administration expressed at least limited support yesterday for the federal law
prohibiting sex discrimination in college sports, asking a federal court in
Washington to dismiss a lawsuit by coaches of men's college teams who said
enforcement of the law was hurting opportunities for male athletes.
The National Wrestling Coaches Association filed suit
against the Department of Education in January, saying the guidelines for a
federal law known as Title IX discriminated against low-profile men's sports.
Since then, alumni and student groups from Marquette
University, Bucknell and Yale have joined the suit, charging that the Education
Department's enforcement of the law has produced reverse discrimination, forcing
budget cuts and reducing athletic opportunities for college men in sports like
wrestling, swimming, gymnastics and track.
Over the
last week, Washington has been awash in rumors that the Bush administration is
preparing to rethink its Title IX enforcement, with an eye to
softening the requirement that women's sports receive financing in proportion to
the percentage of women on campus. In yesterday's filing, though, the Justice
Department gave no sign of any such plan.
Instead, the
government filing raised only procedural problems with the lawsuit, arguing that
the case should be dismissed because even if some universities wrongly
eliminated men's teams in their efforts to comply with Title IX, only those
institutions -- and not the court -- could reinstate those teams. The government
also said the lawsuit was barred by the statute of limitations, since it
challenges actions taken by the Department of Education more than six years ago.
Women's advocacy groups said they were troubled that
the government brief offered no praise for Title IX, which in three decades has
increased women's participation in college sports to 157,000 female athletes
from 30,000.
"It would have been common for the
government to signal its support for Title IX, even if the case was so flawed
for procedural reasons that it should be dismissed," said Marcia Greenberger of
the National Women's Law Center, in Washington. "We're disappointed by the
silence."
Since the passage of Title IX in 1972, the
General Accounting Office has found, more than 170 wrestling programs have been
eliminated, along with 80 men's tennis teams, 70 men's gymnastic teams and 45
men's track teams.
Over all, the number of men playing
college sports has remained relatively stable, at about 200,000.
This month, the men's track and field teams at Vermont,
Tulane and Bowling Green ran their final races, and people like Ed Kusiak, who
has coached track at the University of Vermont since 1969, resigned themselves
to having only a women's team.
Under a 1995 court
ruling, universities could show they were in compliance with Title IX by meeting
what is known as a proportionality test -- that is, showing that their ratio of
male to female athletes was nearly equal to their overall ratio of male to
female undergraduates.
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