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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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