Title IX: Equality for Women's Sports?

Abstract

Since their beginnings in 1859 with a crew race between Harvard and Yale, intercollegiate athletics have been central to the mythology of American universities. Varsity football dominates the fall social calendar of student life; “ homecoming,” timed to coincide with an important football game, evokes alumni nostalgia. Winter is the season for varsity basketball, culminating in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) national championship tournaments in early spring. Until quite recently, the participants in intercollegiate varsity sports were nearly all men. The entry of women competitors into the apparently glorious haze of intercollegiate athletics has been belated and awkward. With the passage of Title IX in 1972, universities were required to provide equal opportunity in all of their federally funded programs. Most moved quickly to establish varsity sports teams for women in numbers roughly equal to their offerings for men. The near similarity in numbers of teams, however, belies important continuing differences. Football remains a major source of attention, revenue, and expenditure. Men’s basketball is also a high-profile activity; women’s basketball, particularly with the NCAA tournament and television exposure, recently has taken some steps towards suc­ cess on the male model. In nonrevenue sports, from skiing and ice hockey to swimming and water polo, although teams are fielded in roughly equal numbers, participation and expenditure rates remain higher for men, in ratios that far exceed the proportions of men in overall enrollments. The rosy glow of college athletics, perhaps always exaggerated, has been fading of late. Even football is a losing proposition on most campuses. Sperber (27), Thelin (29), and others report mismanagement, overexpenditure, and corrup­ tion. The National Collegiate Athletic Association, the private body that regulates intercollegiate athletics, has been criticized for behaving as an economic cartel by Fleisher, Goff, and Tollison (), Hart-Nibbrig and Cottingham (11), and Lawrence (13), among others. Colleges are rebuked for exploiting, not educating athletes; premier athletes themselves exit early, in increasingly greater numbers, to professional opportunities. Faculties and even university presidents seek, with uneven success, to establish greater control over intercollegiate athletics. As universities confront shrinking academic budgets, athletics expenditures, often more than 5% of the institution’s total, are viewed with mounting concern (30). Universities are urged to sell off their money-making sports teams as separate businesses and to abolish the remainder, leaving only intramural activities that