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

Lopiano brought the same passion for gender engineering to the Women's Sports Foundation. Her strategy, she told reporters in 1992, was to "break the bank," forcing schools to spend so much to meet the gender quota that what she regarded as the corrupt, male-dominated edifice of collegiate sports would fall entirely and be replaced by "gender equity." And if schools wouldn't spend on athletics, Lopiano made sure they spent on litigation.

Under Lopiano the WSF has worked tirelessly to cultivate future litigants and future complainants in Title IX cases. It maintains an equity hotline complete with a staff ready to assist attorney referrals, "how-to" literature, and expert assistance on everything from the rights of local girls' softball leagues to the arcana of federal regulations. There is an online database that ranks schools according to their commitment to gender equity and allows users to automatically share that ranking with local media and state and federal politicians. To keep Congress and the media aware of its efforts, the WSF sponsors National Girls and Women in Sports Day. Events are staged across the country and female athletes flood their congressmen's and senator's offices to remind them of the importance of gender equity in athletics.

But the Women's Sports Foundation, however formidable, is only one part of a coalition of liberal women's groups, trial lawyers, and "gender equity" advocates and consultants for whom Title IX is the sine qua non of existence. The American Association of University Women focuses on Title IX issues outside sports. And the National Women's Law Center (NWLC), another major player in the battle for gender equity in athletics, provides critical legal support.

ANY ATTEMPT to change Title IX enforcement, even in a small way, will meet with great resistance from these groups. "The law means everything," says Donna de Varona, former Olympic swimming champ and WSF founding member. "Sports are the most visible affirmation of what Title IX did. But if you look behind it--if you look at the success of women in business, the success of women as lawyers, as leaders, and, hopefully, as politicians--our very lifeblood depends on Title IX."

At James Madison University, as at the majority of universities, women were a rising majority of the student body in 2000 but a lagging minority of athletes, even though JMU offered its women more athletic teams than most schools--and more than it offered its men. Lady Dukes ran track and cross-country, played basketball, volleyball, tennis, soccer, lacrosse, golf, and field hockey. They even shot archery, fenced, and swam. What they didn't do was engage in these team activities at the same rate as JMU men. The result was that in the 2000-01 school year, females were 58 percent of the James Madison student body but only 41 percent of student-athletes.

James Madison was failing prong one of the three-prong test, and Al Taliaferro knew it. So on April 2, 2000, Taliaferro, the father of a senior on the JMU women's club softball team, wrote the Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights (OCR) to complain. Despite earlier assurances from university officials, Taliaferro wrote, JMU had not upgraded his daughter's softball team from partially funded club status to university-funded varsity status. Using JMU's Equity in Athletics Disclosure form documenting JMU's seventeen-point "Title IX gap" as his resource, Taliaferro contended that the refusal to upgrade his daughter's team, given the disparity of participation in women's and men's athletics at JMU, was illegal under federal law. "James Madison has blatantly discriminated in violation of Title IX on the basis of sex against female athletes for many years," he wrote. The university, he demanded, must create a varsity softball team "immediately, without further delay." Either that, Taliaferro insisted, or "the college should be forced to eliminate its baseball program until it can provide equity to both programs."