The Bush Team Punts on Title IX
VICKERS, MELANA ZYLA
The Bush Team Punts on Title IX And meanwhile men's college teams disappear. BY MELANA ZYLA VICKERS THE WEATHER may be perfect for a round of golf or a nice long-distance run, but don't tell...
...But victory for the wrestlers is no sure thing...
...The colleges could cut football or basketball, she says...
...Because more men than women seek to participate in campus sports, men bear the brunt of this practice...
...The University of Minnesota dropped golf and men's gymnastics...
...cutting them back would free up money and athletic slots for the more vulnerable sports like wrestling and track...
...Unbowed by his critics, Reynolds quickly pushed forward a Title IX reform designed to bolster same-sex education in public schools...
...Occasionally, notes wrestling-coach association executive director Mike Moyer, lower-profile women's teams are sacrificed as well...
...There are ample ways for the schools to comply [with Title IX] without cutting men's teams [such as wrestling]," counters Jocelyn Samuels, vice president for educational opportunities at the National Women's Law Center, which may weigh in against the wrestlers in the lawsuit...
...He was certainly pilloried by feminists and other left-leaning affirmative-action supporters...
...College Gymnastics Association, the U.S...
...And it steers clear of the gender politics of Title IX— shoals where previous lawsuits foundered—sticking instead to the fairly technical contention that the Education Department's 1979 and 1996 interpretations of the statute violate federal administrative law...
...If they could do that, then any agency with a typewriter and letterhead could change the law...
...Samuels adds that women still need the leg-up offered by the 1979 and 1996 interpretations, as female athletes are still fewer, and attract less scholarship money, than male athletes...
...The National Women's Law Center called his views "troubling...
...The authors of those two interpretations "didn't do what agencies are supposed to do when they write rules [interpreting a statute], so it's a promising kind of a lawsuit," says Joseph...
...Kweisi Mfume of the NAACP called the appointment of Reynolds, a black conservative, "inconceivable...
...For that matter, regulatory reforms haven't been the Bush team's strong suit—the administration has taken a beating and retreated from efforts to reverse some air-pollution regulations and restrictions on arsenic levels permissible in water, to name a few...
...For now, it is up to the courts to decide...
...It targets the federal government rather than individual schools...
...The lawsuit will likely take years to wend its way through the courts...
...But while Bush officials look on, hoping the slow-moving justice system will eventually produce a result that their own regulators could bring about at a snap of their fingers, dozens more teams are likely to disappear...
...Recent hints that the Department of Education would change its approach to athletics under Title IX ahead of the lawsuit came to nothing, and reforms at the regulatory level have been indefinitely shelved...
...Howard University in Washington, D.C., dropped men's wrestling and baseball...
...Track Coaches Association, and the College Swim Coaches Association of America, has sued the Department of Education, claiming it has given colleges unlawful and harmful advice about interpreting the statute...
...That's an unsettling response to anyone who remembers that President Bush's assistant secretary of education for civil rights, Gerald Reynolds, was supposedly chosen for his reformist stand on, among other matters, Title IX...
...Judge Sullivan is a Clinton appointee...
...If male college athletes still outnumber female athletes 209,000 to 160,000 after three decades of aggressive affirmative action under Title IX and a wild explosion of interest in sports among schoolgirls, isn't it possible that women students simply remain less interested in competitive college sports than men, and that college sports should be allowed to settle into a new equilibrium...
...In the last two months, no fewer than 14 college sports teams have given up the ghost, sacrificed in large part to campus bureaucrats' struggle to satisfy the federal requirement that the male/ female breakdown of athletes be the same as the breakdown of men and women campus-wide...
...It sought dismissal of the lawsuit and vowed to fight back in court...
...If the lawsuit goes forward and the wrestlers win, the result could be the very changes to Title IX that the Bush team wants—without Reynolds's having to take a pickaxe to the regulations, an attractive prospect for a recess appointee who must go through the confirmation process next year...
...This carnage brings to about 100 the number of U.S...
...Those hugely popular male sports have large rosters of players and are well funded...
...In Washington things are never so simple...
...The federal government responded to the lawsuit on May 29...
...The University of Wisconsin, River Falls, dropped wrestling, men's baseball, and women's gymnastics...
...BY MELANA ZYLA VICKERS THE WEATHER may be perfect for a round of golf or a nice long-distance run, but don't tell that to college athletes...
...This has generally meant splitting athletes 50-50...
...ed the charge that its interpretation of Title IX is unlawful and that it has caused colleges to drop teams...
...college teams cut since the mid-1990s...
...In a nutshell, it is the 1979 and 1996 interpretations that lead college administrators to match the proportions of male and female athletes with those of male and female enrollment in the college...
...So widespread was the criticism of Reynolds that the administration resorted to a recess appointment...
...And at least six legal challenges to the athletics portion of Title IX have already failed...
...Such a ruling would probably do away with the inflexible interpretations of Title IX that were issued by Democratic administrations in 1979 and 1996, breathing life back into many wrestling, track, and swim teams...
...Among the Department of Education's alleged failings: No president or attorney general ever approved the two contentious interpretations, and the department has denied petitions to amend or repeal them, making them "arbitrary, capricious, [and] an abuse of discretion...
...At colleges where women predominate, such as Howard University, the cuts are drastic...
...The wrestlers and their lawyer, Larry Joseph of the Washington firm McKenna & Cuneo, however, argue that this challenge is stronger on the merits than previous ones...
...So all hopes rest on U.S...
...But there's another way of looking at the data...
...It's an especially attractive prospect for a White House that doesn't appear to have the stomach for a foodfight on the athletics issue...
...It rejectMelana Zyla Vickers is a columnist for Tech-CentralStation.com and a senior fellow at the Independent Women's Forum, which plans to file an amicus brief on the wrestlers' behalf...
...Fed up with what it sees as twisted enforcement of Title IX, the 1972 statute barring gender discrimination in government-funded education, the association, joined by the U.S...
...Given this history, shouldn't Reynolds, the Bush administration, and the wrestlers now be on the same side...
...District Court judge Emmet G. Sullivan's ruling in favor of the wrestlers...
...But it comes at a propitious time for a lawsuit filed by the National Wrestling Coaches Association...
Vol. 7 • June 2002 • No. 38
