A field of nightmares: a number of male sports have been kicked off campus - cutting college sports teams for men to make room for women's sports under Title IX

Women's Quarterly, Spring, 2002 by Jessica Gavora

MIKE SCOTT came to Providence College in Rhode Island for one reason: to play baseball. His dad had played college ball, spent some time in the minors, and was now a high school baseball coach. The younger Scott had been playing baseball since he was old enough to hold a bat. Now he had his eye on a chance at the big time: to play in the majors.

Providence, Scott thought, was the place to begin his journey. Since joining the program as an assistant coach in 1991, head coach Charlie Hickey had worked to build the eighty-year-old Friars program into a northeast powerhouse. In the 1990s, the team began to attract NCAA tournament bids and recorded just one losing season.

A standout high school hitter, Scott briefly considered the baseball program at the University of New Hampshire. But when UNH announced that it was cutting baseball in order to comply with Title IX, a federal statute that has caused gender quotas in sports (see page 13), he turned to Providence College. And although Coach Hickey couldn't offer him a scholarship, a spot on the team and a chance to play were enough. One crisp fall day in October 1998, just two weeks into the pre-season practice schedule, Coach Hickey was summoned from the practice field into Providence athletic director John Marinatto's office. A few minutes later, he returned to the practice diamond with shocking news: The 1998-99 baseball season would be the Friars' last.

The reason was Title IX. Because Providence--like virtually every college and university--receives some federal money in some form, the school was legally bound to comply with the provisions of the law.

But Scott and his teammates were confused: What women had faced discrimination at Providence? The Catholic university had a strong program of athletics for females. Of the twenty varsity programs carried by the college, half were for women. No female athlete had filed a complaint of discrimination at Providence, and no investigation had found a pattern of discrimination that somehow had escaped a complaint. What, Scott and his teammates wondered, was wrong at Providence College?

The answer could be found in a set of statistics that Marinatto had compiled that fall and submitted to the Department of Education in Washington, D.C. The Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act (EADA) requires that all colleges and universities submit a mind-boggling array of detailed information on their sports programs, broken down by sex. Schools report the number of athletic participants by sex, the assignment of head coaches by sex, operating expenses by sex, recruitment expenses by sex, coaches' salaries by sex, and on and on. In addition, the EADA demands one statistic that has nothing to do with athletics: Schools must compile and submit the number of full-time undergraduates, by sex.

Feminist women's groups like the American Association of University Women (AAUW) pushed hard for passage of EADA--with data on the gender balance of the student body included--in order to expedite the process of bringing lawsuits against schools under Title IX. By framing the issue in terms of "equity" they were able to convince Congress to impose yet another bookkeeping burden on colleges and universities and create a taxpayer-funded database with which to pursue Title IX "proportionality." Previously, finding the data needed to bring a lawsuit under Title IX necessitated a little digging; but the EADA created a readymade client shopping list for trial lawyers. One glance at a school's EADA submission shows a would-be plaintiff's attorney whether a school is vulnerable to a Tide IX lawsuit.

WHEN PROVIDENCE COLLEGE filled out its EADA form in the fall of 1998, the findings sent shockwaves through the administration. Like the majority of colleges and universities today, Providence's student body was majority female, and growing more so, but its athletic program failed to keep pace. Drawn by the security of Providence's Catholic tradition, women comprised a whopping 59 percent of all students in the fall of 1998. Female student-athletes, however, were only 48 percent of all varsity athletes. This was well above the national average of 40 percent female athletic participation, but not enough to pass the Title IX "proportionality" test. Providence had "too many" male athletes--11 percent too many, to be exact. Adding enough women's teams to meet proportionality, Providence's Gender Equity Compliance Committee calculated, would cost $3 million, a prohibitive expense for the school. Something had to give.

Seven years earlier, Providence's cross-town rival, Brown University, was sued by a group of female athletes when it attempted to de-fund two men's and two women's varsity teams in a cost-saving effort. The female athletes at Brown argued that cutting women's teams was illegal under Title IX because the university had not yet achieved proportionality--despite offering more teams for women than any other school in the country except Harvard. Brown decided to fight the lawsuit, arguing that Title IX required it to provide women equal opportunity to participate in athletics, not guarantee that they actually participate at the same rate as men. A series of adverse rulings led Brown all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case. The result was that the rulings of the lower courts stood: Title IX was interpreted to mean that the university did, in fact, have an obligation to see that women participated in sports as enthusiastically as men. The case was a landmark in the institutionalization of q uotas under Title IX. Colleges and universities across the country began to cut men's teams to comply with what the court had decreed was the correct interpretation of the law.