Men’s athletics suffer due to growth of women’s programs

Sacks earned a master’s degree from UCLA in Latin American
studies. E-mail comments to [email protected].

By Glenn Sacks

Over the last decade more than 350 men’s collegiate
athletic teams have been eliminated nationwide, as 20,000 male
athletes have lost their sports. Most of these athletic programs
were not felled by mismanagement, drugs or rules violations. 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 ““ such as those conducted by
Kimberly Schuld of the Independent Women’s Forum ““ 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 falls
below that needed to satisfy Title IX requirements in coed
colleges. The fact that women now outnumber men in college 57
percent to 43 percent nationwide makes it even harder for schools
to achieve the numerical gender balance demanded by the 1979
policy.

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 are often neither funds nor
interested female athletes, or cut men’s teams.

  Illustration by RODERICK ROXAS/Daily Bruin Thus women
have gained a little but men have lost a lot. According to the
National Collegiate Athletic Association, for every new
women’s athletics slot created between 1992 and 1997, 3.6
male athletes were dropped. During the same period, colleges have
only added 5,800 female athletes, while cutting 20,000 male
athletes.

At UCLA over the past decade three men’s teams have been
cut, including the men’s swimming and men’s gymnastics
teams, many of whose alumni had made up the hugely successful 1984
U.S. Olympic team. During the same period, UCLA added two
women’s sports teams, soccer (1993) and water polo
(1994-1995), and restored rowing (2000-2001).

Another reason why modern Title IX has led to the destruction of
male athletics is that its equity calculations count
football’s athletes and dollars without considering
football’s money-making ability.

At UCLA, football alone accounts for $15 million in revenue
every year ““ over 40 percent of UCLA athletics’
total.

At USC, which has been hit hard by legal action based on its
greater number of male athletes and higher men’s athletic
budget, men’s teams ““ largely football ““ are
responsible for over 99 percent of the near $20 million total
sports revenue.

Thus, schools are caught in a vise. Since over 70 percent of
Division I-A football programs turn a profit, schools need
football’s revenue. Because they must also equalize gender
numbers, they are forced to cut men’s non-revenue sports.

Todd R. Dickey, USC’s general counsel, 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 a lot on women’s sports as
you can on men’s football, because there is no equivalent for
football,” Dickey says (“USC athletics accused of Title
IX non-compliance,” Daily Trojan, March 25, 1999).

Title IX’s modern application has struck minority men
hardest.

Lawsuits brought to balance the number of athletic scholarships
awarded to men and women have decreased the number and value of
men’s scholarships. Minority men, who disproportionately rely
upon athletic scholarships to finance their educations, have
suffered the most (“Women’s group condemns action to
eliminate some athletic scholarships for men,” Kimberly
Schuld, IWF press release, June 2, 1997).

Black colleges and universities, where female students outnumber
males 60 percent to 40 percent 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.

San Francisco State athletic director Betsy Alden commented that
“we needed about a 120 women athletes, or about six teams of
20 women each, if we were going to keep football. There
aren’t even six more sports out there.”

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.

An increasing number of coaches, administrators and student
groups have joined with dissident women’s organizations,
including the Independent Women’s Forum, to call 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.