October 24, 2007
Men's sports sacrificed to meet Title IX quotas
In your October 11 issue of the Kaimin, you published an article in which Roman Stubbs “celebrated” the 35th anniversary of the passing of Title IX. Frankly, I find it disturbing how quickly this law, which was passed by the Nixon administration and has not been significantly changed since its introduction, is embraced, and more shockingly, how quickly its negative effects are dismissed.
Title IX creates a quota system in which the number of female athletic opportunities at a university must be proportional to that school’s female enrollment. Sounds fair, right? In reality, it has been, and still is, used by athletic directors as an excuse to cut any non-revenue producing men’s sports teams he or she doesn’t feel like funding anymore. Essentially, all sports except football and basketball are in danger – and even those two are not entirely safe.
In Stubbs’ article, Carol Tracy of the Women’s Law Project in Philadelphia says that the loss of men’s athletic opportunities is not a problem because “often times there needs to be programs cut to balance equality.”
My question is, what good does that do? Tracy’s ‘if we can’t have it no one can’ mentality does not help women, and it devastates men’s programs everywhere. Since 1981, more than 2,200 men’s athletic teams have been eliminated because of Title IX – a consistent, declining trend of 17 percent.
Non-mainstream sports like wrestling and swimming have been hit the hardest. Wrestling, for example, has seen 449 programs dropped since 1972. Cross country has lost 183 teams in just the past 15 years. Golf, tennis, swimming and track have seen similarly unsettling numbers of programs eliminated in that amount of time, and even football has seen a decline in the number of teams.
Stubbs says that Title IX “forbids gender-based discrimination at educational institutions.” Make no mistake: that was what it was designed to do, and its proponents will tell you it has been a success. But actually, it has done just the opposite: Title IX is a government-backed form of gender-based discrimination which has devastated men’s athletics by promoting the systematic elimination of young men’s teams and opportunities for 35 years.
Marty Byrne
Graduate Student
Geography
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