TITLE IX DID IT WORK? : Women Athletes Try to Hold Their Gains in Face of Adverse Supreme Court Ruling

Considering the force and fury with which Title IX made its entrance on the intercollegiate athletic scene in the early 1970s, it certainly made an anticlimactic exit.

In like a lion, out like a lamb.

Not that Title IX itself is off the books. No, the section of the Education Amendments of 1972 barring sex discrimination at schools receiving federal financial aid is still in force.

What is gone, though, is the interpretation that holds that any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance applies to athletic departments. Under that interpretation, if the institution or its students received federal funds, the law applied--regardless whether the athletic department itself received federal funds.

Remember? That was the argument that raged on for years, with every high-powered athletic director and football coach from Darrell Royal at Texas to Bear Bryant at Alabama warning of the imminent demise of all college sports.

How could any athletic department be expected to spend the same amount of money on women’s sports as it did on men’s sports when the football program brought in the millions of dollars that supported all the other sports? How could that be?

So football was excepted, the law was phased in, and at high schools and colleges across the country, athletic directors had to deal with the fact that if men in nonrevenue sports were benefitting from scholarships, training facilities, travel funds and full-time coaches, those same opportunities had to exist for women in nonrevenue sports.

During the decade that Title IX was a consideration, women’s athletics made remarkable strides.

Statistics are always arguable, but the most widely accepted statistics on the subject show that in 1972, girls accounted for 7% of high school athletes. By 1982, it was 35%. The number of women in college athletics went from 16,000 in 1972 to more than 150,000.

Not that women’s programs ever actually achieved equality. In 1980-’81, when women accounted for 30% of all intercollegiate athletes, they received about 16%-18% of the total athletic budget. That’s hardly equality, but it’s still a long way from having to run bake sales and car washes to earn enough money for bus fare to national competitions.

The question these days is how much will the women’s programs slide backward, now that women have no legal recourse? Or will they slide at all? Is the progress that has been made enough to give women’s athletics a strong foundation for future building?

How did this reversal come about? It was a Supreme Court decision, made in a case involving Grove City College in February of 1984.

Grove City, a small, private school in western Pennsylvania, pursued the test case after refusing to sign an assurance that it would comply with Title IX. The school’s president argued that the government had no right to set policy at the school just because some of the students received federally financed grants.

The Supreme Court ultimately ruled that Title IX should be “program specific,” that a school could lose federal funds only if it discriminated against women in the specific programs or activities receiving the federal funds.

The decision was considered a victory for the Reagan Administration, and it left Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) saying: “There will no longer be any all-inclusive prohibitions against sex, race, handicap or age discrimination in schools, colleges, hospitals, state and local governments or any recipients of federal aid.”

Kennedy and Sen. Bob Packwood (R-Ore.) are sponsoring a civil rights bill that would reverse the effect of the Grove City interpretation, but that legislation has bogged down in the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee.

When the Grove City decision was announced there were concerns on many fronts. For example, would Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, barring race discrimination by institutions getting federal aid, come under the same type of interpretation?

The Grove City case is much more far-reaching, but it is causing great concern among those who counted on Title IX to assure further growth in women’s athletics.

Donna De Varona, a 1964 Olympic gold medalist who is now an ABC commentator and who has been active in the cause of women’s athletics, is among the women trying to keep the pot boiling.

At the national long course swimming meet at Mission Viejo last August, De Varona said: “I think everyone knows that women’s athletics made tremendous strides under Title IX. But I don’t think too many people realize that Title IX is no longer effective for us. They’ve taken that away, and if we just stand by, they’ll take away a lot more.”

De Varona is president of the Women’s Sports Foundation, an organization that serves as a resource and research center. It is one of the several organizations lobbying to re-establish the effect of Title IX.

In actuality, no school ever lost any federal funds because of sex discrimination in athletics, but at least the law was there. To have that law made virtually ineffective creates a bad atmosphere, De Varona said.

“Right now there is no visible pressure on athletic administrators and women have no recourse,” she said. “Title IX did not come with dollar requirements, but there was a heavy understanding that if schools discriminated, they might lose federal funding. Without that, who knows what they’ll do?

“Unfortunately, people do not always do the right things voluntarily.”

If high school and college administrators had been inclined to support girls’ and women’s sports, why was there no big surge until after Title IX?

When De Varona was starting college, in 1967, there were no college scholarships for women. She had won Olympic gold medals as a swimmer, but while her male contemporaries--Don Schollander, for example--were going to college on athletic scholarships, she had to decide whether to continue swimming on her own or to take the job with ABC that would bring in enough to pay for her college education.

“Thank goodness we didn’t lose Title IX five years ago,” De Varona said. “Having it for 10 years gave us a chance to show what women can do when they have the chance to develop. Look what happened at the Olympics.

“Everyone was proud of the medals that our women won, and it gave us a chance to show that, no, it isn’t a fluke that girls want to compete as women. They do want to compete on teams. No, it isn’t true that after you have children, you can’t compete. Our track and field athletes showed that.

“Because we had this situation, because all these women benefited from Title IX for a decade, they were our proof.”

Even so, there has been some complacency among women, and some backsliding among schools.

Testifying before the Office of Civil Rights, Eva Auchincloss, executive director of the Women’s Sports Foundation, pointed out that women will now have to “depend on the good will of the (school) administrators, 86.5% of whom are men.”

She also pointed out that the day after the Supreme Court decision was announced, Mercer University in Macon, Ga., cut back its women’s basketball scholarships to four--while keeping its men’s total at seven.

And she said that after the Office of Civil Rights’ Department of Education acknowledged that it no longer had jurisdiction over sex discrimination in athletics, at least 18 sex discrimination cases were dropped.

Then there are those, such as Judith Holland, associate athletic director at UCLA, who were braced for the change.

Holland said: “You had to expect that sooner or later it would either die out or be ignored. That’s the way the world works. It happened with a lot of the racial problems in the ‘50s and ‘60s. There is always a current thing that is talked about and laws are passed, and then something else comes up. Our history is replete with issues that are big one day and put aside the next. After women’s rights, it was the handicapped, the aged.

“You have to know that attention is going to shift, and you have to have your own backup plan.”

At the major universities, where the biggest strides were made, that will probably be easier.

Holland said: “I think at the major universities and the schools with high visibility, women’s athletics will continue as they are. I don’t think the same thing is true at schools with lesser visibility, where people aren’t as interested. . . . I don’t have that same confidence that there will be support for girls’ high school programs.

“A lot of those programs were built strictly on Title IX. The same thing is not true at a school like UCLA or USC. We had a commitment to women’s sports before Title IX. We did not build programs strictly to be in compliance with federal law.

“Title IX came when the time was right. Other forces had moved in that direction. At the same time everyone was more interested in fitness and the women’s movement, as a whole, was making progress. It all worked together.”

Now, Holland says, women’s sports administrators will have to go back to crusading, as they did in the past. “We have to promote our sports and our athletes on their own merit,” she said. “Instead of relying on a law to make things happen, we have to come up with our own arguments and presentations to establish policy on our own campuses.

“Title IX had a big influence. For one thing, it required everyone to do a self-study. That only helps you. At least you know where you stand. Some changes are made, some goals are set.”

And, as anyone who has been working in women’s athletics as long as Holland knows, it’s never done overnight.