Title IX from Outer Space

How federal law is killing men's college sports

Walter Olson from the February 1998 issue

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Ironically, colleges with standout football teams, being flush with revenues for scholarships and equipment, have the easiest time expanding women's sports. Although top-division football as a whole makes money, it is made unevenly, with some strong teams raking in the receipts and others running deficits. Title IX activists urge colleges to boot money-losing pigskin teams, though it seems unlikely that a conference whose cellar-dwellers dropped out could for long achieve a Lake Wobegon effect and consist entirely of teams with favorable win-lose records.

In any event, the head count, not money, is what's often really at legal issue. Wrestling is among the least expensive sports to sustain. Princeton refused to accept a $2.3 million alumni gift intended as an endowment to save its 90-year-old men's wrestling team, just as the University of Southern California did when alumni tried to save its men's swimming program. Roster cutbacks for "big" men's sports, a common feminist proposal, aid compliance efforts not so much because they save pots of money--the non-star "walk-ons" dropped are typically already playing without scholarships, travel, or equipment subsidies--but because they keep down the number of male bodies.

Of course, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission can't resist making things worse. Last October, it put out new guidelines arm-twisting colleges to pay coaches of women's teams as much as they do men's. The guidelines do start with a token concession that not every volleyball coach may be entitled to the salary of a Big Ten football wizard, but from then on it's mostly bad news. Comparisons between dissimilar sports? No problem. Offers based on market rates or current pay levels will be suspect: "Cultural and social factors may have artificially inflated men's coaches' salaries."

The guidelines hint that if colleges can't show that they've advertised and promoted men's and women's squads equally, women's coaches should win salary-dispute cases. Of course, to hype a fanless team may be to throw good money after bad: In one well-known case, the USC men's basketball program brought in 90 times as much revenue as the women's. The agency also suggests a college may lose a case if it "sets up weekly media interviews" for a red-hot men's team but not its languishing female equivalent.

In the whole Title IX controversy, incidentally, it appears next to impossible to find anyone willing to criticize the law in principle. Sure, enforcement has gone haywire and the results are crazy, but everyone hastens to add that of course they just adore the law itself.

As for the old idea that universities in a free society should be entitled to make their own decisions--well, that notion, like so many men's track teams, is on its last lap.