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In
one of UCLA's proudest moments, UCLA-trained swimmers and
gymnasts dominated the 1984 Summer Olympics. Half of the
gold-medal winning men's gymnastic team were Bruins. Yet,
despite producing 22 Olympic swimming competitors and dozens of
world-class gymnasts, these UCLA men's teams were eliminated
less than a decade later. In fact, over the past five years more
than 350 men's collegiate athletic teams have been eliminated
nationwide, and the number of men's gymnastics teams has fallen
from 200 to just 21. What happened?
These
athletic programs were not felled by mismanagement, drugs, or
rules violations. They were destroyed by something far more
dangerous than a triple full twist off the parallel bars or a
reverse three and a half somersaults dive. They were destroyed
by Title IX.
Title
IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972 barred sex
discrimination in any educational program or activity which
receives federal funding. In the decades since, women's
athletics have burgeoned in high schools and colleges. Title IX
was and remains an important and laudable victory for the
women's movement.
More
recently, however, misguided feminist lawsuits and political
lobbying have changed Title IX from a vehicle to open up
opportunities for women to a scorched earth policy whereby the
destruction of men's athletics has become an acceptable
substitute for strengthening women's athletics.
Feminists
have used an obscure, hastily prepared bureaucratic
action--known now as the 1979 Policy Interpretation--to mandate
that the number of athletes in college athletic programs reflect
within a few percentage points the proportion of male and female
students on campus. The problem is, as studies have shown, fewer
women than men are interested in playing organized sports, even
though the opportunity is available. Even in all-female colleges
the number of women athletes fall considerably below that needed
to satisfy Title IX requirements in co-ed colleges.
The
fact that women now outnumber men in college 57%-43% nationwide
makes it even harder for schools to achieve the numerical gender
balance demanded by the 1979 Policy--an interpretation never
reviewed or approved by Congress. Time and again the Federal
Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights (OCR) has
investigated schools and allowed them only two options to meet
Title IX--create new women's teams for which there often are
neither funds nor interested female athletes, or cut men's
teams.
Thus
women have gained a little but men have lost a lot. According to
the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), for every
new women's athletics slot created between 1992 and 1997, 3.6
male athletes were dropped. During the same period, colleges
added 5,800 female athletes--and cut 20,000 male athletes.
Kimberly Schuld, director of the Independent Women's Forum's
Title IX Play Fair! Project, calls this "clear,
government-sanctioned sex discrimination."
Critics
of modern Title IX point out that its equity calculations are
misleading in part because they count college football's
athletes and dollars without considering football's money-making
ability. USC, for example, has been hit hard by feminist legal
action based on its greater number of male athletes and higher
men's athletic budget. What's not considered is that USC's men's
teams--largely football--are responsible for over 99% of the
near $20 million total revenue of the Athletic Department. At
UCLA, football alone accounts for $15 million in revenue every
year--over 40% of UCLA athletics' total. In fact, over 70% of
Division I-A football programs turn a profit.
Thus
schools are caught in a vise. Because schools need football's
revenue yet must also equalize gender numbers, they are forced
to cut men's non-revenue sports.
Todd
R. Dickey, USC's general counsel, Schuld, and many others argue
that football should simply be taken out of the gender equity
equation because no other sport earns as much revenue, has such
a large number of athletes or staff, and needs as much
equipment.
"You
can't spend as much on women's sports as you can on men's,
because there is no women's equivalent for football,"
Dickey says.
Title
IX's modern application has struck hardest at minority men.
Lawsuits brought to balance the number of athletic scholarships
awarded to men and women have decreased the number and value of
men's scholarships, upon which minority men often rely to
finance their educations. Black colleges and universities, where
female students outnumber males 60%-40% and money is usually
tight, have been particularly wounded by feminist lawsuits. And
when Title IX forces schools to drop their football programs, as
San Francisco State did in 1995, it is black athletes who are
hurt disproportionately.
While modern Title IX has been devastating for male and
particularly for minority male athletes, it has also hurt
female athletics. By allowing the destruction of men's teams to
substitute for increasing the number of women's teams,
universities have been stripped of the incentive to build more
and better female squads. A school that has six female teams
and nine male teams may find it much easier to cut men's teams
than to provide the new money and resources to create more
women's teams.
At the same time, because a school's Title IX compliance is now
judged largely on the basis of the number of athletes, if
cutting men's teams isn't workable, then it's often better for a
school to add a few new women's teams, even if the teams and
athletes are marginal, than it is to improve the
facilities and training of existing teams.
The
situation cries out for a flexible athletics policy based on
student interest levels instead of rigid proportionality. Title
IX states "no person...shall, on the basis of sex...be
subjected to discrimination under any education program or
activity receiving federal financial assistance." Misguided
women's advocates have used a bureaucratic obscurity to
undermine these simple yet high-minded words, and turn Title IX
from an instrument used to fight sex discrimination into a
policy mandating it.
This column first appeared in the Los Angeles Daily News
(9/7/01).
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