Bobby Cuza Quota system hurts Title IX's intentions

The Stanford Daily Online
May 14, 1997

Title IX was a good concept with good intentions when it was first introduced in 1972. But in the scramble for compliance, schools have enforced the law unfairly. The way it is being implemented at most schools, Title IX has degenerated into a quota system, which anyone can agree is a misdirected method for change.

Consider this: According to a recent gender-equity study by the NCAA, college women have gained more than 5,000 sports opportunities in the past five years, while men have lost 17,000.

And this is nondiscrimination? It sounds to me more like preferential treatment, which Title IX expressly states is not required.

Stanford has been one of the lucky ones. According to a recently published report, the University ranks among the nation's best in Title IX compliance, with women accounting for 50 percent of the undergraduate population and 45 percent of the varsity athletes, a mere 5-percent discrepancy. The Athletics Department has achieved this balance by adding more varsity women's sports - most recently, lacrosse, water polo and synchronized swimming - without eliminating any men's programs.

Then again, with football gobbling up 85 scholarships, varsity men's sports like volleyball and water polo (two of the school's most perennially successful programs) have been left with as few as four scholarships to divvy up among a much higher number of athletes. (And the sword can cut both ways; because of Title IX regulations, four years ago Stanford was forced to cut a popular, women-only self-defense class offered by a group called Women Defending Ourselves.)

But men's sports have not been so fortunate at most schools, where more and more, administrators are opting to cut expensive, non-revenue sports like gymnastics, wrestling, golf and water polo. God forbid a school should cut funding for football or basketball; after all, those are the cash cows that help fund the rest of the department. (At Syracuse, which boasts successful programs in football and men's hoops, those two sports generate 98 percent of the athletic revenue.)

The problem is that football eats up more than twice as many scholarships as any other sport, with no equivalent sport for women. The unfortunate consequence is that men who don't play a sport involving a helmet and shoulder pads get the shaft. And where is the fairness in that?

The intent of Title IX is undeniably just, but by forcing schools to operate on a quota system, it fails to take into consideration both the interests and the abilities of students. The question basically boils down to this: Should a school be obligated to fill its varsity rosters with equal numbers of men and women when more men than women want to participate?

If there are more men who want to participate, it hardly seems fair that they should have to compete for the scraps left over after all the women (and football players) have been accommodated.

Granted, Title IX was enacted under the implicit assumption that women will play sports in equal numbers as men if given the opportunity.

The problem is that the opportunities for women are now beginning to outpace their interest and ability. Maybe one day sports like women's water polo will reach the same level of interest and participation as men's water polo, but for now, they haven't.

As Maureen Mahoney points out in the May 5 issue of Sports Illustrated, we should employ the same logic that keeps us from banning collegiate dance programs that are 90 percent women or engineering programs that are 70 percent male. It would be nothing short of ludicrous to suggest that a school receiving applications from 75 qualified female dancers and 25 qualified male dancers should accept equal numbers of each into a 50-member program.

This is not to say that there has been no progress in women's athletics; to the contrary, since the creation of Title IX, more and more female athletes of all ages are participating in sports. But when nondiscrimination against women is being achieved by discrimination against men, another solution has to be devised.

Maybe the changes don't need to be made at the top. The ratio of male to female athletes in high school is still roughly two to one; to go from those kinds of numbers at the high school level to 50/50 at the college level is to eliminate opportunities for thousands of men. Why not implement equality at the lower levels, and watch the effects filter up rather than down?

The bottom line is that two wrongs don't make a right. No one is arguing that women should not receive the same opportunities as men in college athletics. But there is an inherent difficulty in a policy that forces schools to eliminate opportunities rather than enhance them. Equal opportunity comes from well-reasoned, fair-minded policies - not from numerical formulas.