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Letter to Presidential candidate Bill Bradley
(the following is a letter written by H. Clay McEldowney to Presidential candidate Bill Bradley, Mr. McEldowney can be contacted at hcmce@studer.com) To Bill Bradley: You recently stated that "the President lays out the program." I'm writing to ask that you place in your program the reigning in of the Office of Civil Rights in how it administers Title IX, the law which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex or national origin in our colleges and universities. The OCR subscribes to the myth that women in sports depend on a federal law for their success. OCR director Norma Cantu would have one think that the women's recent soccer victory is a win for Title IX, despite that Title IX has no direct application to professional athletics like World Cup Soccer. Women's athletics owes to its success more to to soccer moms and dads who, like me, encouraged and supported our kids to be active in competitive athletics at an early age, together with the transformation of all-male colleges and universities to coeducation in the 1970's, when forward thinking athletic administrators like Princeton's Royce Flippin encouraged women's athletics to flourish and provided the infrastructure to allow them to mature to be on equal footing with men's athletics. Title IX has been transformed into a quota system. The evidence is overwhelming, and the list of Title IX casualties grows every day to support that the proportionality prong of the Title IX test rules. Proportionality is by definition a quota. When you have a quota, someone loses, and the losers have been our sons. I suggest that you look up the recently released study of the General Accounting Office, which documents the painful tradeoffs occurring in intercollegiate athletics. Between 1985 and 1997, women's opportunities rose by 16% while men's dropped 12%. More than 350 men's teams have been dropped since 1992. Thankfully, Princeton wrestling, which was on the list for 3 years, is no longer included. How would you have felt if Princeton basketball had become a quota victim? Incomprehensible? Could never happen? Say that to alumni swimmers from UCLA, football players from Boston University, wrestlers from Syracuse, lacrosse players from Boston College, baseball players from Colgate, fencers from Cornell, gymnasts from Arizona St., .... I'm confident that, once you become informed on this subject, you will draw the same conclusion as thousands of Americans, including a large number of Iowans who live and breathe wrestling - that Title IX is a good law with bad consequences, and our children - both our daughters and our sons - deserve to be able to participate in sports without discrimination. I'm asking that, if elected President, you will see that something is done about it. H. Clay McEldowney '69 hcmce@studer.com
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