Title IX Tip-Off

Washington Post
January 29, 2003

Tune in to the discussion over Title IX and you'd think that America's universities were gyms and that a student elective meant choosing between football and soccer. Forgotten in the debate, now nearing hysteria, is that the law prohibits sex discrimination in all areas of education. Title IX began keeping an eye on universities in 1972 because women were discouraged from being math majors and sometimes were discouraged from enrolling at all (lest they become pregnant), not just because the women's soccer team had no locker room.

Yet when a commission on Title IX convenes today in Washington to issue recommendations to Education Secretary Roderick R. Paige, it will consider only the question of how the law applies to college athletics. The controversy is over whether the law has come to demand quotas based on enrollment, so that a school with half female students has to devote half its athletic resources to women's sports. The complaints come mainly from smaller men's teams that say they've been sacrificed to achieve parity. Wrestling and swim teams have been most affected, including the University of Miami's prominent swimming and diving program, which produced Olympic champion Greg Louganis.

But blaming Title IX for these cuts seems the easy way out. Athletic directors have far heavier pressures than a rarely enforced federal law, such as the pressure to cut budgets and make money. If there's any threat to wrestling and swim teams it's bloated football budgets. The NCAA allowance for 85 scholarships for Division I football schools comes closer to an effective quota than anything in Title IX. And the idea that football programs pay for other sports is a myth; it's only true for perhaps 30 teams that can routinely pack 100,000 people into a stadium. Phillip Whitten, editor of Swimming World, who has catalogued the demise of many swim teams, wrote a convincing report arguing that Title IX is a canard and that the real threat to swim teams is the "quasi mystical belief" among many schools that they are but one dazzling football season away from being the University of Notre Dame, and thus winning the generosity and loyalty of their alumni forever.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that Title IX has caused athletic departments to make decisions that defy common sense. Many schools think Title IX mandates that they pay women's and men's coaches the same salaries, no matter what. But why should they? The University of Maryland men's basketball team regularly fills 18,000 stadium seats, while the women's team is lucky to get 2,000 fans. The men's coach should be compensated for the extra pressure. Some men's teams say they've been cut merely because they push the school over the male quota, even if they're self-sustaining.

But Title IX gives schools three ways to show compliance, including a history of responsiveness. Because of a 1996 executive-branch interpretation and a series of court cases, schools have decided that the safest way to comply and avoid lawsuits is to stick to the numbers and make participation by both sexes in sports proportionate to enrollment. Ironically, one of the commission's recommendations for fixing this problem-- giving some leeway with the quota, so a school with 50 percent female enrollment could have 43 percent participation-- seems to codify a quota where there isn't one. Perhaps the best idea is the simplest: Leave the law as it is but clarify to universities that they have several ways to comply-- and that cutting men's teams is not the favored one.