Title lX: How a Good Law Went Terribly Wrong

Article here. [Ed. note: The embedded links in this post are modified from how they are in the referenced story as it currently exists. It appears as if the Time web site folks made a mistake with these links; when clicked in the cited page, they send the browser over to Time's on-line Outlook web access portal, undoubtedly not something they wanted to have done. I have sent them an email making them aware of this fact. As for the embedded hyperlinks below, they have been corrected from the originals to point to their intended places.] Excerpt:

'A weary wrestling coach once lamented that his sport had survived the Fall of Rome, only to be vanquished by Title IX. How did an honorable equity law turn into a scorched-earth campaign against men’s sports? This week is the 42nd anniversary of this famous piece of federal legislation so it’s an ideal time to consider what went wrong and how to set it right.
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Title IX applies to all areas of education but is best known for its influence on sports. Women’s athletics have flourished in recent decades, and Title IX deserves some of the cheers. But something went wrong in the law’s implementation. The original law [see ed. note below full item view] was about equality of opportunity and indeed forbade quotas or reverse discrimination schemes. But over the years, government officials, college administrators and jurists — spurred on by groups like the National Women’s Law Center and the Women’s Sports Foundation — transformed a fair-minded equity law into just such a quota-driven regime, with destructive results.

Women’s groups strongly object to the “q” word. “Title IX does not in any way require quotas,” says the National Women’s Law Center. “It simply requires that schools allocate participation opportunities non-discriminatorily.” That can mean many things, but in the hands of bureaucrats and advocates, this diffuse requirement somehow came to mean that women are entitled to “statistical proportionality.” That is to say, if a college’s student body is 60% female, then 60% of the athletes should be female — even if far fewer women than men are interested in playing sports at that college.
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Schools have cut back on male teams and created new women’s teams, not because of demand but because they fear federal investigations. Since football is a money-generating male sport with large rosters, Title IX quotas have all but decimated smaller less lucrative sports such as men’s swimming, diving, gymnastics and wrestling. More than 450 wrestling teams vanished since 1972, with only 328 remaining.'

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Ed. note: Re the original law reference, the URL has a space in it. That is because the server path on which the document exists has a space in it. This is by today's standards considered a very big no-no, however this document has probably been at this location on PSU's server since 2002 when people cared less about such things. So if using Firefox, you may have trouble getting the .pdf to download. However, Internet Explorer is a bit more forgiving, so if things are not working for you to see this document using Firefox, try IE.