Skip to Content, Navigation, or Footer.
Support independent student journalism. Support independent student journalism. Support independent student journalism.
The Dartmouth
March 28, 2024 | Latest Issue
The Dartmouth

Bush administration creates Title IX 'loophole'

This March, the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights added to Title IX, the 1972 law aimed to provide women and men equal opportunities to participate in collegiate varsity sports, what many are calling a loophole for those schools who already do not want to add female sports teams.

This "clarification" to the law gives schools the ability to not add female sports teams if inadequate female interest in sports is expressed in campus-wide internet surveys.

Since the inception of Title IX, schools that receive government funding could satisfy the requirements of the law in any one of three ways, called prongs:

  1. The school must make the number and quality of athletic opportunities for men and women proportionate to the relative enrollment of men or women.

  2. The school must demonstrate continued progress toward achieving prong one.

  3. The school must show that the underrepresented group, in most cases women, has insufficient interest in sports to justify the addition of more female sports teams.

Before this adjustment, surveys, especially internet surveys, were not allowed as a sufficient measure to demonstrate girls' disinterest in athletics. Now, schools can e-mail their student bodies a survey developed under government guidelines. Those students who fail to respond to the survey will be interpreted as disinterested.

Critics of the new rule argue that surveys are an inadequate measure of interest and that e-mail is an inappropriate medium for such surveys.

Many who have a problem with the idea of surveys used to gauge interest cite the fact that one of the goals of Title IX was to give women opportunities that they did not already know were available to them. Consequently, these critics say that girls might not express interest in a sport on a survey because they don't know they could play that sport.

Proponents of the clarification argue that direct questions about interest in sports are the best way to gauge interest.

It is not clear, however, what practical effects this new rule will have.

Dartmouth Athletic Director Josie Harper said that the rule will most likely only affect schools already looking for an excuse to skirt the purpose of Title IX.

"The real point of Title IX is to provide opportunities for participation," Harper said. "To me [the new rule] is a vehicle for schools who aren't interested in adding new female sports."

Harper added that the clarification to Title IX will not affect Dartmouth because the College has no interest in changing the relative participation of men and women in athletics.

Currently, the College supports 16 male, 16 female and two co-ed varsity teams. Men outnumber women in total varsity athletes slightly at Dartmouth, but that discrepancy is mostly attributable to the large number required to field a football team, Harper said. Harper also said that she expects the rule change to be similarly inconsequential for the other Ivy League schools.

Outside of the Ivy League, the situation becomes more complicated because Title IX also governs equality in athletic scholarships, which do not exist in the Ancient Eight.

Boston College, many of whose sports teams compete near the top of the NCAA Division I, decided in the late 1990s that it would obtain gender equity by making the amount of scholarship money directed towards female athletes comparable to the amount directed towards men, BC history professor and Faculty Athletics Representative Paul Spagnoli told The Dartmouth.

The U.S. Department of Education Office of Civil Rights accepted this proposal, and since then the ratio of men's athletics scholarships to women's at BC has dropped from about 2:1 to nearly even, Spagnoli said.

According to the history professor, this change came about with a small decrease in scholarships for men and a substantial increase in scholarships for women. Spagnoli also pointed out that many men's teams have suffered because of these changes.

"Outside of football and hockey and men's basketball, there aren't a whole lot of scholarships for men out there," he said.

At the same time, Spagnoli said that most women's sports at BC are fully funded in that they have the maximum number of scholarships allowed by the NCAA.

Critics of Title IX view such an example as discrimination against male athletes, since male athletes provide significant interest in many more than three sports.

It is for this reason that Title IX includes prong three, allowing schools to adjust their athletic programs so as to account for discrepancies in interest.

Despite the preference of some schools toward prong three, what this clarification of the third prong will actually change, even for the schools that already utilize that prong, is not obvious.

Most schools have been dealing with Title IX for 33 years and have already established their own way of satisfying its requirements.

"I suspect that most schools are like Boston College in a sense in that they developed a way of responding to [Title IX] that they've gotten kind of used to now," Spagnoli said.

BC has focused more on prong one than on prong three, but many other schools have focused on the third prong. Those schools that have been satisfying Title IX requirements by gauging the relative interest in athletics of men and women also have already established their own ways of judging such interests.

University of Florida general counsel Pam Bernard, for example, said that UF will continue using its established, more expansive approach to evaluating the athletic interests of its students instead of a simpler internet survey.

Spagnoli also said that schools looking to use these surveys to justify cutting women's sports programs would be hard-pressed to do so. He pointed out that there are many people on those campuses who already play that sport and who would show great interest in that sport on any survey.

It is too early to tell if the clarification to prong three of Title IX will have any practical effect. How schools will adjust to the new rule in the next few years remains uncertain, but as of now, few, if any, schools have decided to implement internet surveys alone in order to fulfill Title IX's requirements. Most remain skeptical of such a simple method that, according to some, misses the point of the controversial law.

"It looks bad, but I'm not sure it will have that much effect," Spagnoli said.