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 ast
week, as the Olympics were set to begin, female athletes of all
ages across the nation celebrated the 30th anniversary of Title
IX, the law that prohibits sex discrimination in schools receiving
federal funds.
Brandi Chastain
in her sports bra after scoring the winning goal at soccer's World
Cup is the face of Title IX we're all to celebrate. Conveniently,
male college students whose wrestling scholarships are taken from
them because their school does not have a women's wrestling team
are not.
Thirty years
ago, no one was supposed to get hurt. The law was simply supposed
to mandate equal opportunity for women in the classroom and the
gym. What it has evolved into, however, is a proportionality mandate
that has created a numbers game in high-school and college sports
programs — killing men's sports across the country.
At the end
of last season, for instance, Marquette University eliminated their
men's wrestling program in order to comply with federally mandated
gender quotas. As a result of Title IX, their program had already
been downgraded to a club by the school and was being fully funded
by alumni of the school's wrestling team. But no school wants to
be targeted as discriminating against women, and so they simply
killed it — killing scholarships in the process. (The time
some of the wrestlers once spent practicing — honing their
athletic talent — is now spent earning the money to stay in
school.) Bucknell's men's wrestling team will be shutting down for
similar reasons at the end of this season — even though an
alumnus offered $500,000, to be used at the school's discretion,
to fund gender equity in its athletic programs.
Of course,
the story is not new and those teams won't be the last. Men's baseball
at Boston University, hockey at Kent State University, and swimming
at the University of New Mexico are all history. To try to stem
the tide, the National Wrestling Coaches Association has filed suit
against the Department of Education challenging a Clinton administration
interpretation of the 1972 Title IX statute that mandates those
gender quotas. The administration should listen to the coaches and
preempt a judicial ruling by dropping the numbers game the previous
White House created for colleges — which discriminates against
men.
The wrestling
coaches emphasize that they aren't against Title IX or women in
sports — in wrestling, even. They are only calling for a return
to the intent of the original law, which simply — however ironically
— prohibited discrimination, even against men.
What ends so
many men's teams is numbers. Instead of equality of opportunity,
the Clinton-era regulations mean that if a school has 50 slots on
the men's baseball team, then women have to have 50 slots available
on their softball team. And it doesn't matter if the school can't
find 50 women who want to play softball. This, as you might imagine,
becomes even more of a problem in more traditionally male sports
— for instance, wrestling.
But no matter
how fair the wrestling coaches want to be, don't expect too many
to acknowledge the boys' plight. Olympic gold medalist Donna De
Varona's comment on Paula Zahn's CNN morning show echoed the conventional
wisdom on Title IX: "Despite many gains, sports today is still
far from a level playing field" — for girls. It's a women-as-victims
message that the National Women's Law Center and other feminist
groups have successfully peddled to the media — and used to
frighten schools, via the threat of lawsuits.
Yet a 1999
General Accounting Office study found that our pursuit of "gender
equity" has left men's opportunities on the decline, dropping
by twelve percent since 1985. In some schools, gender equity means
slashing men's sports — especially when participation in sports
for women tends to spike at about 40 percent. Ultimately, that hurts
women too: If men's chances have to be capped, then so do women's
in sports where there might be more female interest, such as gymnastics.
Instead of the Nike slogan that has become a stand-in for excellence,
"Just do it," today's schools are being forced to say:
"Sorry, give us that scholarship back." "Find something
else to do with your time." "Find another way to finance
your education." "We gotta bean count."
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