Title IX's Pyrrhic Victory
ow the quest for "gender equity" is killing men's athletic programs
Michael W. Lynch from the April 2001 issue
Former National Wrestling Champion Stephen Neal is grappling with his toughest opponent yet. The 6-foot-5-inch 270-pounder racked up numerous awards during his four-year wrestling career at California State University at Bakersfield (CSUB): He was a four-time All American and an Academic All American, and he took home the Heisman Trophy of wrestling, the Dan Hodge Award. Yet the heavyweight, who graduated in 1999, burns for one more win -- not on a wrestling mat but in a court of law.
Neal's longest match started in 1996, when officials at CSUB announced plans to cut the wrestling team. It's not that the team wasn't performing. The only Division I sport at CSUB, the program had distinguished itself over the years, winning two PAC 10 championships and finishing in the top 10 in the NCAA finals three out of the previous four years. The problem had to do with "gender equity," the proportion of male to female athletes. Critics charged that CSUB, like many other colleges and universities, had too many men playing sports and was discriminating against women.
In 1993, when Neal was a junior wrestling at a San Diego high school, the California chapter of the National Organization for Women (CAL-NOW) was completing litigation against the California State University System, of which CSUB is a part. CAL-NOW claimed that the Cal State System discriminated against women in its athletics programs. A state superior court judge crafted a consent decree that gave individual CSU campuses five years to bring the gender breakdown of their student athletes and scholarships to within five percentage points of the breakdown in the student body. If a school's student body consisted of 55 percent women, then at least 50 percent of intercollegiate athletes needed to be women. On the financial front, total expenditures for men's and women's programs were to be within 10 percentage points of each other .
When he learned of the consent decree, CSUB wrestling coach T.J. Kerr knew he had a problem. CSUB's student body is dominated by women, 63 percent. And even though the school had seven women's teams and only six men's teams, men accounted for 61 percent of its varsity athletes. Kerr studied the issue and developed a plan, figuring that the way to comply with the court order was to expand opportunities. He took the initiative to start a women's wrestling team. "I started looking at the participation number of women wrestlers in high school -- it had doubled over five years," says Kerr. "I was thinking if I could get women on my team, I could leverage this thing." School administrators denied his request for women's wrestling, but Kerr went around them and started it as a club sport. Soon he had 17 women on his team. Two even competed for the varsity squad.
The cuts came anyway. In late 1995, CSUB's athletic director capped Kerr's squad at 27 men, and the coach was forced to cut 10 male athletes. Five former wrestlers filed grievances with the school, alleging sex discrimination. Then Kerr was told he could carry a total of only 34 wrestlers, forcing him to cut seven women. In 1996, on the eve of the PAC 10 finals and the Division I championships, the Intercollegiate Athletics Advisory Committee, which advises CSUB's president on athletic policy, announced plans to cut the wrestling program to meet the consent decree.
Enough was enough, thought Stephen Neal, who'd experienced the damage on a personal level: His roommate, a freshman walk-on, was cut from the squad. "He didn't know what to do. He was in shock," says Neal, adding that the roommate ultimately quit school. Neal, along with 21 male wrestlers and eight female ones, filed suit against CSUB in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California for sex discrimination.
The root of Neal's problem -- and that of thousands of male athletes across the country -- lies in the widespread push for gender equity in scholastic and collegiate sports. In California, Neal and hundreds of other male athletes have been affected by state law. Elsewhere, it's a federal law that's at issue: Title IX of the 1972 Amendments to the Education Act. Title IX sought to give women equal access to educational programs, including athletics. Now it's evicting men from the locker room.
