Fairness, equity, and Title IX

December 2, 1998
Courtesy of H. Clay McEldowney

Universities nationwide are cutting men's athletics programs and blaming Title IX. Could Princeton be next?

Last spring, as a freshman at Providence College, Mike O'Keefe was the starting first baseman for the school's baseball team. Partially propelled by O'Keefe's hot bat, Providence finished third in the Big East -- another solid season for one of the strongest programs in the Northeast. But this fall, in order to comply with the gender-equity requirements of Title IX, Providence decided to cut three men's programs: golf, tennis, and baseball. O'Keefe, who will have to transfer after this season if he wants to keep playing collegiate baseball, was bewildered. "It makes no sense to us," he said to the New Haven Register. "Title IX is supposed to create opportunities for women, not take opportunities away from men. They're screwing us."

In the fall of 1996, Goga Vukmirovic '00 arrived at Princeton wanting to play water polo. She'd picked the sport up as a junior in high school and quickly turned herself into an outstanding goalkeeper. As it turned out, she'd arrived at Princeton at the perfect time -- women's water polo had just become a varsity sport. Her first year most of the players were converted swimmers who had never touched a water polo ball before arriving at Princeton. "Everyone was there because they wanted to be there," Vukmirovic recalls. "There were no recruits in my class, and the year before I came the team didn't have a coach." With varsity status, however, everything quickly changed, and the team qualified for nationals last year. The expansion of Princeton's team mirrors the success of women's water polo nationwide -- with 50 collegiate teams, women's water polo just became an NCAA sport, and will have its own NCAA championships starting next season.

* * * *

Welcome to the complex world of college athletics in the Title IX era, where high-minded concepts such as Opportunity, Gender Equity, and Fairness often slam into one another. Title IX is the 1972 federal statute banning sex discrimination in higher education, which, to this point, has been primarily applied to collegiate athletics. Since its inception 25 years ago, the number of women participating in intercollegiate sports has quadrupled. Yet recently the increase in female athletes has been more than offset by a decrease in male athletes -- in the five-year period ending in 1996, the number of men participating in NCAA sports shrunk by 20,800 athletes, while the number of women participating rose by only 5,800.

Princeton became one of the schools that cut male athletes in 1993 when it dropped varsity wrestling for, among other reasons, the "favorable impact" on gender equity. Yet today, wrestling is once again a varsity sport (albeit donor funded). According to Clay McEldowney '69, the head of the Friends of Princeton Wrestling, "To my knowledge, only Princeton wrestling [among the 250 wrestling progams eliminated nationwide since 1972] has been cut and then reinstated." Although the reinstatement of wrestling is largely due to Princeton's fanatically committed alumni, the return also reflects the university's overall approach to Title IX -- expanding opportunities for women while carefully protecting existing opportunities for men.

THE RULES OF EQUITY

Understanding how the university has tried to achieve this goal requires knowing a few specifics about Title IX. While the law is oft-debated and extremely complex, the basic standard for compliance comes from a test established in 1978 by the Office of Civil Rights. The test has three parts:

1. "Substantial participation proportionality." In English, that means that the ratio of female student-athletes ought to match the ratio of female undergraduates -- i.e., if 50 percent of the students at a university are female, 50 percent of the student-athletes ought to be female. Under this criterion, Princeton is not in strict compliance with Title IX. In 1997-98, the undergraduate student body was 46 percent female, but women made up only 39 percent of the university's student-athletes.

Princeton could comply with this criterion by putting a cap on the number of athletes allowed to participate on men's teams -- which is how the few schools that pass this test have reached proportionality. Among Princeton's programs that have male-female counterparts (such as soccer or lacrosse) the men's teams average 35.8 men per squad while the women's teams average only 28.3 women. "If required to be proportional, we could get there in a heartbeat," says Gary Walters '67, director of athletics. "We'd just cap our men's teams. But capping would reduce what Princeton athletics is all about: broad-based participation."

2. Whether or not opportunities for the underrepresented sex are "continually expanding." This is the criterion under which Princeton complies with Title IX. Princeton has added four women's varsity sports since 1988, created a gender-neutral compensation program for coaches, added or upgraded assistant positions in women's sports, and is building new women's locker rooms. Walters says, "We think we've taken the major initiatives that are required. Now we just need to do the fine tuning."

Yet the paradox of Title IX, as currently interpreted, is that Princeton will no longer meet this criterion if it doesn't keep expanding the program -- a budget-draining prospect. And Princeton is, according to vice-president Thomas Wright '62, "very close to the point of equilibrium: the full scope of our athletic program."

3. "Whether it can be demonstrated that the interests and abilities of the members of that [underrepresented] sex have been fully and effectively accommodated by the present program." Unfortunately, it is nearly impossible for any university to prove that it has "fully and effectively" accommodated all the "interests and abilities" of either sex. Still, Princeton -- with 18 women's varsity teams and 521 female varsity athletes -- could make a pretty good case. "Our operating tenet has been to provide student-athletes with an ability to compete on equal terms with their adversaries," Walters says. "And the best indication that we're meeting that goal is that last year our women had a won-loss percentage of 73 percent and our men 70 percent." Wright adds that in recent focus groups and surveys, "We didn't hear that the university was failing to provide support to women in a fair way."

THE PRICE OF FAILURE

Princeton doesn't have to look very far for an incentive to comply with Title IX. In 1991, Brown University announced that it would no longer fund four varsity sports: men's golf and water polo, and women's gymnastics and volleyball. Less than a year later, women from the eliminated teams sued the school alleging sex discrimination. Last spring, after six years and over a million dollars in legal fees, Brown finally settled the case by agreeing to elevate women's water polo to donor-funded varsity status and guaranteeing funding for four women's teams.

Brown lost the case largely because it failed all three parts of the above test. First, like Princeton today, Brown didn't meet the proportionality test. Second, while Brown had aggressively expanded its opportunities for women throughout the 1970s and '80s, it hadn't added any women's programs in several years. Finally, Brown couldn't claim it was fulfilling the interests and abilities of its women for the obvious reason that women were suing the school for not fulfilling their interests. For many universities, the lessons from Brown were clear -- proportionality was the goal, and, in the absence of proportionality, women's programs were untouchable.

Walters arrived at Princeton in the middle of the Brown case while Princeton itself faced several Title IX issues. In addition to the vehement campaign by alumni to restore wrestling, Princeton had two men's club sports -- volleyball and water polo -- that participated in NCAA tournaments and were therefore considered varsity squads by the NCAA even though they did not receive university funding. In order to keep the participation numbers reasonably close, something had to be done. "We basically started women's water polo to keep men's water polo," Walters says. "That may appear byzantine, but it isn't." In order to comply with Title IX, Princeton needed counterpart programs -- it's no coincidence that a women's lightweight crew program appeared in the boathouse around the same time that wrestling returned.

In the case of water polo, both men and women seem to have benefited from the current arrangement. Women's water polo is a fully funded varsity sport -- meaning that when the team went to nationals last year, the university picked up the tab. The men, on the other hand, are donor-funded varsity and therefore have to raise money for the program by selling T-shirts, working Reunions, and calling alumni. "Still," says Oakley Brooks '99, captain of the men's team, "we benefit by having a woman's program -- it supports a full-time coaching position." As he points out, "there are only about eight similar positions in the country for water polo." Just as importantly, the team can still participate in NCAA events.

HOW PRINCETON HAS COMPLIED

"We wouldn't want anyone to come to the conclusion that [these steps] are a product of the relative wealth of Princeton," Walters says. But some factors inherent to Princeton did make these steps easier. For starters, alumni are committed to sports at Princeton other than basketball and football. Less than a year after Princeton eliminated varsity wrestling, the Friends of Princeton Wrestling presented two million dollars worth of formal written pledges to the university. "If it had not been for the 800 committed wrestling alums," McEldowney says, "Princeton wouldn't have a wrestling team right now."

Second, Princeton has more flexibility in its athletic budget than most universities. According to Deborah Brake, senior counsel at the national women's law center, football and basketball make up 73 percent of the budget for men's sports at the average university. At Princeton, however, those two sports make up only 38 percent of the total budget for men's direct program expenses -- leaving more room for other sports. The athletics department also spends money extremely efficiently. Princeton's cost per varsity sport and recruiting budgets are among the lowest in the Ivy league.

Furthermore, unlike many universities, Princeton has not made football and basketball immune to belt tightening. "A lot of schools are scapegoating Title IX and dropping men's programs when they don't have to," Brake says. She claims that those schools could keep their smaller men's programs if they reallocated money away from football and basketball. Her critics point to universities such as Michigan, where big-time sports have helped fund Title IX compliance. But, the truth is that four out of every five NCAA schools (including Princeton) lose money on football.

Beyond money, football presents another problem. "If the law ultimately becomes a strict interpretation based on proportion," Walters says, "it inevitably will create tension because there's no counterpart sport for football." The 100-odd players on a football roster unbalances the gender ratio at most schools from the start. But while Princeton does have both varsity and sprint (lightweight) football, two factors work in Princeton's favor: First, the sheer number of varsity teams (38) helps dilute football's impact on the gender ratio; and, second, Princeton remains 54 percent male -- if the university was 50 percent male, 100 fewer men would have to participate in athletics to keep the current gender ratio.

THE FUTURE

"We feel that we are extremely far ahead of the curve as it relates to Title IX," Walters says. While that may be true today, the future of Title IX is uncertain enough that every university must be wary. In the short term, expanding women's programs and equalizing coaches' pay has bought Princeton some time. "So long as you're expanding you're OK," Wright explains, "but when you stop expanding, it's crunch time." Ultimately, however, proportionality is the problem, and so long as the university remains reluctant to cap men's teams, proportionality will probably be unobtainable.

Yet some administrators privately say that the courts will eventually strike down the proportionality test in college athletics as unconstitutional. In a legal brief developed from her senior thesis, Crista Leahy '96 writes, "Proportionality with student body enrollment is the functional equivalent of imposing employment quotas on employers based on aggregate population statistics -- a principle the Supreme Court has expressly rejected." Perhaps the Court is just waiting for the right case.

Beyond the law, a blind test based on proportionality ignores the issue of whether or not men and women have a different level of aggregate interest in athletics. Last year, 60 percent of the students participating in high school athletics were male. "Title IX, as currently interpreted, doesn't take into account that the feeder system for collegiate athletics is 60-40," Walter says. When it comes to explaining why men's rosters tend to be larger than women's rosters in equivalent sports, it seems that men are more willing to ride the bench. As one women's coach, explaining her smaller roster, said last spring, "Rudy [the movie character who rode the bench for four years] was a loser."

"It seems that the benefits and rewards of athletics are different for men and women," Walters says. "Title IX has served a wonderful purpose, but there are differences in intensity of interest that the law doesn't take into account."

This spring, Goga Vukmirovic and the women's water polo team hope to return to nationals. Meanwhile, Mike O'Keefe will be playing his last season with his teammates at Providence while he applies to other colleges. "We want to win the Big East and go out with a bang," he says.

May no Princeton athletes ever end their careers on that note.

-- Wes Tooke '98

A gender breakdown

Men and women playing varsity sports at Princeton


Number of women = 521
Percent of female undergraduates = 24.5% 

Number of men = 795
Percent of male undergraduates = 32.3% 

Princeton's most expensive teams in 1997* 

1. Football = $523,449
2. Crew (three teams: one women's, two men's) = $330,276
3. Men's hockey = $271,117
4. Men's basketball = $251,866
5. Men's lacrosse = $159,524

*measured in direct program expenses, not including coaches' salaries and benefits.

Case study: Water polo
Where the money comes from 

Women's water polo (full varsity) 

General funds = $13,580
Restricted funds = $1,772 

Men's water polo (donor-funded varsity) 

General funds = $752
Restricted funds = $34,216

General funds come from the university. Restricted funds usually come from Friends groups and are earmarked for a particular sport.

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