No Medals for Title IX
EDITORIAL No Medals for Title IX In February 1998, after an American team won the first Olympic gold medal ever awarded for women's hockey, there was a brief rainshower of patronizing media...
...Needless to say, this is not what Congress intended in 1972 when it banned discrimination "on the basis of sex" in the administration of educational programs receiving federal financial assistance...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...Which is exactly what they've been doing...
...By its application to life in general, however, this latest outburst of halfwit boosterism for Title IX will be falser and more damaging still...
...Society has conditioned women to expect less than their fair share," according to the Ninth U.S...
...But as these pages have taken pains to recount in the past, it has been rendered a practical nullity...
...But she also found the self-congratulatory spin everyone was putting on her team's triumph more than slightly weird...
...Where'd you see us?'" Face it, Mleczko told the Washington Post, "Women's hockey has grown up in the dark...
...women has ever played hockey on a single team that owed even the slightest part of its existence to Title IX...
...Almost without exception, Mleczko and her teammates had each learned to play hockey as the only girl on the ice—and had been taunted for it...
...Most Division I schools already offer a wider range of sports to women than to men...
...More than one of them had never so much as seen another female hockey player before joining the national program...
...Certain Olympic specialties for men, wrestling and gymnastics in particular, are approaching extinction...
...Nothing" in Title IX, this provision warned, "shall be interpreted to require . . . preferential or disparate treatment" in any college program purely on the basis of statistical notions about how many men and women "ought" to be participating...
...Gerald Reynolds, the president's Office for Civil Rights nominee, has been denied a confirmation hearing by Sen...
...But they'd done so with region-wide volunteer youth leagues, or at richly endowed prep schools, or, most importantly, on campuses like the University of New Hampshire and Providence and Harvard...
...In all but the rarest circumstances, so says this case law, a college runs afoul of Title IX any time it fails to distribute athletic opportunities to men and women in proportions closely mirroring the undergraduate population at large...
...But all along, one key part of the law's text remained unchanged...
...By which point—unless Congress or the White House should find the courage to intervene on behalf of justice and sanity—men's college athletics may well be crippled beyond near-term repair...
...Many people are calling them the most dominant team, male or female, in the history of the sport...
...Defense-woman Tara Mounsey, for example, had signed up while still a teenager in 1996, shortly after leading her otherwise all-boy high school team to the state championship, where she'd won top individual honors as the tournament's "Mr...
...The federal courts have been hearing sports-related Title IX lawsuits for ten years now...
...Kennedy of Massachusetts, who takes instruction on such questions from Title IX's fiercely ideological "gender equity" lobby...
...That the school may be having difficulty finding enough students to play on the women's teams it already sponsors is no excuse...
...Circuit Court of Appeals, it would be "extremely prudent" for university administrators to comply with Title IX the horrible but easy way: by canceling one or more of their traditional—and fully sub-scribed—varsity programs for men...
...So the carnage will likely continue...
...What if, on the questionnaire appended to each year's college-entrance SAT, men's expressed interest in varsity athletics continues to be three times higher than women's...
...Neither do we...
...The same language is nominally in force even today...
...The Bush administration could realize any such reform unilaterally, of course, by rewriting the law's enforcement rules...
...Weren't they a great bunch of gals...
...And it wasn't until 1992 that meaningful legal activity to enforce the ban became possible—after the Supreme Court ruled that Title IX authorized private-party litigation and large, monetary damage awards...
...And—forget about them—didn't the rest of us deserve it even more, since it was our Congress that had passed that Title IX thing back in '72, finally forcing colleges to offer our women some serious varsity-level sports programs...
...The bad news is that even this rosiest of scenarios will take years to play out...
...We hope they're upheld at the Circuit Court level and the Supreme Court then agrees to hear the case and winds up invalidating an entire decade of disastrous Title IX precedents...
...EDITORIAL No Medals for Title IX In February 1998, after an American team won the first Olympic gold medal ever awarded for women's hockey, there was a brief rainshower of patronizing media coverage, as is customary in such matters...
...And, you would think, unambiguous...
...And yet it remains the case, despite turnover at 11 of 25 roster spots since 1998, that none of the U.S...
...Women's teams already outnumber men's in the vast majority of NCAA-sanctioned sports—and absorb a notably outsized share of available scholarship money...
...We hope they win, though it's a longshot...
...But it has made only a negligible contribution to the overall growth of women's sports at American universities...
...To be sure, a fair number of Mounsey's 1998 co-medalists had previously skated in a full-fledged women's program...
...Speaker of the House Denny Hastert, a former wrestling coach himself, would dearly love to take a corrective crack at Title IX's underlying text...
...Circuit Court of Appeals, a problem the Ninth Circuit "presumes" can best be remedied by offering women more than they want...
...And what if they just won't take it...
...It would be sixteen years before legislative amendments made clear that the ban extended to indirect aid beneficiaries like college athletics departments...
...We're already at the point where, adjusted for population growth, significantly fewer men now play American college sports than at any time in the past twenty years, simply because they're not being allowed to...
...In its application to a particular women's hockey team, this interpretation of events will be false and thus will cheat some genuinely peerless athletes of the full credit their accomplishment is due...
...A little-noticed plank in the 2000 Republican platform called for "a reasonable approach to Title IX that seeks to expand opportunities for women without adversely affecting men's teams...
...Last month the National Wrestling Coaches' Association filed a federal district court lawsuit in Washington arguing, among other things, that Title IX's current implementing regulations should be declared void by virtue of procedural irregularities in their adoption...
...We suppose, instead, that our women's hockey Olympians, should they sweep through the games the way they're supposed to, will be advanced as proof—along with Brandi Chastain's legendary Nike-brand brassiere—that Title IX, at long last and all for the better, has permanently remade the gender map of American sports...
...Baseball programs are dying left and right...
...Mleczko, the U.S...
...it's been a bloodbath these past few years...
...Most observers expect them to earn a repeat gold medal when the hockey final is played this Thursday...
...hockey squad's star defense-woman, thought all this attention was "wonderful," of course...
...A.J...
...But he knows his colleagues are cowed—what with Brandi Chastain's brassiere and all...
...Mleczko and her Olympic hockey colleagues, will unquestionably continue to flourish...
...We hope they win and are upheld at the Circuit Court level...
...Hockey...
...We think they're right about that...
...And Kennedy's successful obstruction of Reynolds is probably an accurate measure of congressional feeling generally...
...Do you suppose any of the NBC announcers or morning-paper sportswriters will take note of this detail...
...And in the process, Title IX has forced hundreds of schools to mothball decades-old team and Olympic-specialty programs, involving tens of thousands of lost varsity roster opportunities—for men...
...That would seem to leave only the courts, whose unbroken record of abysmal rulings on the subject is somewhat less than encouraging...
...team has entered the competition on an astonishing 31-game winning streak, during which they've outscored their opponents by a combined 252 to 28...
...Their U.S...
...In that case, advises the Seventh U.S...
...And didn't they really deserve it...
...Doesn't sound like he ever expects to close the deal...
...And for ten years now—inexplicably bending to a Clinton administration "clarification" of a Carter administration "interpretation" of original legislation that plainly bars the use of quotas—the federal courts have been ruling that Title IX is . . . a quota, simple as that...
...And so on and so forth, blah, blah, blah...
...In any case, there'll be good news, too: Come what may, serious women athletes in America, like A.J...
...And still there are "too many" active jockstraps nationwide, largely because "too many" schools refuse to let go of their 100-man football rosters...
...Just as they would have had Title IX never been born...
...So far as Mleczko could tell, they'd come a long way, baby, pretty much entirely by themselves...
...It has made millions of dollars in fees for attorneys representing a few dozen undergraduate plaintiffs...
...It's four years later already and Mleczko and Mounsey are back for a second Olympics, now underway in Salt Lake City, Utah...
...But even were they inclined to try, which is doubtful, there'd be no one at the relevant Education Department branch to do the work...
...For that law has become an outright pestilence...
...It's a long hard sell," Hastert acknowledges...
...Come to think of it, none of the women who won an Olympic gold medal in 1998—not one—had ever played hockey on a single team that owed even the slightest part of its existence to Title IX.Oh, well...
...And virtually unnoticed: "People say they love watching us play, and all we can ask is, 'How is that possible...
...And these were colleges—among a tiny handful across the country—that had been fielding top-flight varsity women's teams for years and years before Title IX was ever enforced...
Vol. 7 • February 2002 • No. 22
