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Courtesy of University of Illinois al Urbana-Champaign 10/September 1995/lllinois Issues
Women step up to bat
A billboard in suburban Oak Lawn shouts an indignant message to passing motorists. "Illinois State University," it says, "is unfair to student athletes." That's the contention of several former wrestlers and soccer players at the Bloomington-Normal campus, whose parents paid for the angry advertisement. Their beef? The two teams were cut this year from the school's intercollegiate sports menu, while a women's soccer team was added. The shuffle was done in the name of increasing women's opportunities at the school, says Chicago attorney Louis Goldstein, who plans to file a lawsuit on behalf of embittered athletes, parents and coaches. But the strategy was unfair, he contends, because it endangered several students' athletic careers. "For years and years the administration was negligent in bringing on women's sports," Goldstein says. "Now the students pay the price."
Like many schools, ISU has cut "lesser" men's teams — those that don't produce revenue — as part of a strategy to comply with federal rules requiring "gender equity" in male and female athletic opportunities. And, like ISU, several schools face lawsuits by athletes angry over their teams' elimination, and must contend with bitter coaches and students. A toothless tiger The reorganization is the result of schools' rush to comply with Title IX, federal legislation enacted by Congress in 1972 that requires equal educational opportunities for men and women. But better planning — and a real desire to improve opportunities for women — could have avoided much of the turmoil. Athletic officials have had 23 years to increase the number of women in sports; instead, they've made little progress. Title IX specifies that no one will be excluded on the basis of sex from participating in any education program receiving federal financial assistance. It calls for schools to accommodate women's interests and abilities, as well as provide comparable equipment, supplies, uniforms, publicity, housing and access to coaching. Scholarship dollars must be divided proportionally based on the number of male and female athletes. The U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights designed three tests for compliance with the law. A school must: • Pass a proportionality test, which means the college's ratio of male-female athletes must nearly equal its enrollment ratio; or • Show progress toward the proportionality test; or • Show women's athletic interests are being fully met, regardless of the percentages. But for many years, there was no compelling reason for colleges to try to meet these guidelines. Schools were threatened with a loss of federal money if the office of civil rights found they had violated the provision, "but it never happened once," says Christine Grant, athletic director at the University of Iowa. "So most universities did nothing to change." In 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court gave schools temporary cover. In its Grove City v. Bell decision, the court said Title IX didn't apply to nonfederally funded sub-units of educational institutions, such as college departments of physical education and athletics. But in March 1988, Congress overrode a presidential veto to enact the Civil Rights Restoration Act, which renewed Title IX jurisdiction over those departments. The real impetus to change, though, came in 1992, says September 1995/Illinois Issues/11 Linda Carpenter, a physical education professor at Brooklyn College who studies women's participation in college sports. In a unanimous decision, the U.S. Supreme Court said plaintiffs in Title IX lawsuits could successfully include claims for compensatory and punitive damages. Although the case at hand, Franklin v. Gwinnett County Public Schools, dealt with sexual harassment, the plaintiff used Title IX as the basis for her complaint. In awarding her compensatory and punitive damages, says Carpenter, the court provided a financial threat against schools that continued ignoring women's demands for equal athletic opportunities. Since then, Title IX has been used as the basis for several cases resulting in financial settlements for women plaintiffs. A jury took less than two hours to award a women's basketball coach $1.1 million in a case involving Howard University. The plaintiff contended she had been passed over for promotion and was paid less than her male counterparts. And when Auburn University rejected a plea by members of the women's soccer club to be elevated to varsity status, they sued and the school quickly settled out of court for $60,000 and the promise to budget $400,000 for a varsity soccer team over the next two years. Meanwhile, complaints to the office of civil rights regarding possible Title IX violations have nearly tripled in just two years. Roger Murphy, spokesman for the federal office, said complaints jumped from 16 in 1992 to 43 in 1994. "Before [the Franklin] case, there was an advantage for a school to drag a complaint out," says Linda Carpenter, the physical education instructor. "The kid got tired and bored with it after a while, and if a school lost they just said, 'OK, we'll be better.' The teeth of Title IX were dulled. The moral imperative has been around for 23 years, but the lack of legal teeth is what kept anything from being done." Scrambling to comply
Since the Supreme Court sanctioned financial penalties for Title IX violations, athletic officials have been racing to set up gender equity plans. (A Chronicle of Higher Education survey this year found only 19 of 257 NCAA Division I schools offer
Earlier this year, the University of Pittsburgh announced it would drop its men's tennis and gymnastics teams and add women's soccer in an effort to comply with Title IX. Between the 1983 and 1993 school years, the number of female college athletes jumped from nearly 85,000 to 105,500, according to the NCAA. Male figures went up slightly, increasing from 188,700 to 189,600. Meanwhile, the number of men's college wrestling teams dropped during that 10-year period from 342 to 264. Men's gymnastics dropped from 71 to 33. Schools will continue slimming down male participation numbers to get their proportions right by eliminating men's wrestling, gymnastics and other teams, says Hal Walker, chair of sports management at the United States Sports Academy, a private graduate school in Daphne, Ala. These teams are easier to cut because they don't bring in revenue like many football and basketball teams do, he says. At the U of I, for example, the football team accounts for just over 10 percent of the school's athletic department's $19.2 million budget, but brings in 45 percent of its revenue. But Carpenter says that instead of pitting money-making sports like football against others, athletic directors should have planned better and avoided the drastic approach of wiping out teams. "The University of Wisconsin at Whitewater went back and looked at its budgeting process from the ground up," she says. "They asked, 'Do we need new uniforms? Do we need 100-plus people on the football team?' The schools that 12/September 1995/Illinois Issues planned long-range are the ones that aren 't getting sued at the moment" by men whose teams were eliminated. Like many people. Carpenter cites football as a sport with room for economizing. "Football made some decisions that are now hurting football and costing an institution its minor sports," she says. For instance, while NFL teams make do with 48 players, colleges have at least twice as many players, most of whom are on scholarship. Another perk: At many schools, football teams stay at a hotel the night before each home game. "Can you imagine how much that costs? That's the kind of extravagance that may have been OK when money was free-flowing in the early 1980s, but denying others opportunities so that these [perks] can be continued doesn't make sense." Not everyone sees such practices as extravagances, though. "The idea that we could hold our teams to NFL size is the biggest misunderstanding," says U of I football coach Lou Tepper. "The NFL has all day to practice their offense teams against defense, and vice versa. I have two hours a day to practice my teams, so we don't have time to take turns. We need the bigger squad. "If I were an athletic director, I'd find it tempting to eliminate football. All my problems would go away. But the money it brings in helps support the other sports, so it leaves athletic directors in a real bind." Number-crunching To get out of this bind, many athletic directors would like to rewrite the rules rather than struggle to meet them. Specifically, they'd like a clearer idea of how to show that women's athletic interests are being fully met without meeting the proportionality test. The problem with the requirement is that it's vague, says Mark Nickel, director of Brown University's news bureau. Brown was found in violation of Title IX earlier this year based on its 1992 demotion of women's volleyball and gymnastics from intercollegiate competition to club status. The school's undergraduate enrollment was 48.9 percent women, while athletic participation was 38.1 percent. But the school argued unsuccessfully that it met Title IX requirements because it had fulfilled women's interest in athletics. It contended that the number of women athletes represented the total number of women who wanted to participate in sports, even though it fell short of female enrollment at Brown. A court disagreed; Brown is now appealing the ruling.
Congress has tried to help schools find a way out of the predicament this year. Illinois Rep. Dennis Hastert, a Republican from Yorkville who formerly coached high school wrestling, sponsored legislation requiring the office of civil rights to clarify the test for meeting women's interests. The measure passed the House. But Doris Hardy, past president of the National Association of Girls and Women in Sports, says this clarification isn't needed. In fact, she says, the proportionality test is a sufficient tool for measuring schools' compliance with Title IX. "The more sports open up for girls, the more interested they become," says Hardy, who is athletic director at Riverside Brookfield High School near Chicago. "If they aren't exposed to sports and don't have the opportunity, they won't be interested. But now we've got a second generation of girls who want to be in sports. The parents of our students are pushing for girls' opportunities, and more girls respond to these chances." Grant, of the University of Iowa, agrees. She says claims of "vagueness" in the Title IX compliance test are a scapegoat for schools that still want to do little to equalize opportunities for male and female athletes. The proportionality test, she says, is a good barometer of a school's commitment to gender equity. "What ... the House did is appalling. Discrimination is still rampant," she says, pointing out that men make up at least 65 percent of the athletes at most schools, and receive a high percentage of athletic scholarships. "There's no great need for further clarification of rules. It's just a desperate move because young women have run out of patience and decided to take the universities to court." Meanwhile, in Illinois, the state legislature this year gave schools a financial tool to improve gender equity. A new law allows each state university to waive up to 1 percent of annual tuition income in pursuit of gender equity. The waivers could be used to expand scholarship opportunities for women, among September 1995/Illinois Issues/13 other things. As those opportunities increase, there are many who believe that after virtually ignoring Title IX for nearly a quarter-century, schools now are acting out of fear of punishment rather than a desire for fairness. The men who ran many schools' athletic departments, they say, had to be dragged into doing what's right. At ISU, for example, an athletic department newsletter explained that officials decided to create a women's soccer team after they received a request from the women's soccer club asking to be elevated to intercollegiate status and concluded that failure to act could lead to an investigation by the federal office of civil rights. "It didn't matter there was a group of women's soccer players ready to play," says Carpenter. "If there is movement — and there is — it's not because people think it's right. And that's sad."
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athletic opportunities to men and women in proportion to their undergraduate enrollment.) The gender equity goal now at ISU, where 55 percent of full-time undergraduates are women, is for women to make up 51.7 percent of the school's athletes. Now, 36 percent of ISU athletes are women. At the University of Illinois, athletic officials cut the men's swimming and diving teams three years ago, while retaining their female counterparts. Swimmer Bill Kelley sued the school, taking his case all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which refused to hear it. To athletics officials, though, it was worth the effort to try to improve the school's 70-30 male-to-female ratio of athletic participation. Now, their goal is to come closer to the school's 45 percent female enrollment.
