A Department of Education committee's report on Title IX guidelines, set to debut today, will likely challenge schools to find a way to increase and maintain parity for women without cutting opportunities for male athletes.
A final copy of the report, authored by the Commission on Opportunity in Athletics, which convened last summer, will be presented to Rod Paige, the U.S. Secretary of Education. The report focuses on the alleged drain of resources from men's programs in response to the federally mandated beefing-up of women's programs.
"It's hard to deny that some institutions that have chosen to comply with Title IX [have led to a decline in] the number of wrestling programs," said Chris Kennedy, associate director of athletics. "We have the resources here just barely to get into compliance without dropping men's sports."
The 30-year-old Title IX, passed as part of the Education Amendments of 1972, was aimed at bringing the level of female participation in college athletics to at least the proportion of women enrolled at a given university. The statute bans gender discrimination at educational institutions that receive federal money.
The report offers 23 recommendations, ranging from the vague - reaffirming a commitment to "equal opportunity and the elimination of discrimination for girls and boys, women and men" - to the pointed, including many recommendations for the Office of Civil Rights to more clearly enforce and define compliance.
"I thought, of the 23 recommendations, the vast majority were vague exhortations to the Department of Education to provide more information, reexamine regulations [and] encourage the NCAA to do something or other," Kennedy said. "A lot of them were vague and not likely to produce much."
Among the most tangible recommendations of the report was that "walk-on" athletes no longer count as participating athletes, although the report did not clearly define walk-on or examine how that would affect schools with no scholarships at all.
Clar Anderson, head coach of the wrestling team at Duke, said that at some schools, walk-on wrestlers, who participate in practice and cost a university nothing, have been prohibited because of Title IX enforcement.
"There's some folks who've suggested removing the roster cap, which emanates from the proportionality of the quota, but at Duke, we haven't done that," he said.
The report also takes aim at the "three-prong test" of proportionality - first, the number of athletes must be proportional to the number of male and female athletes; second, the institution should have a history of continued program expansion for women's sports; or third, the school must show that it has fully accommodated women's interests and ability on campus.
The report called for the Office of Civil Rights to clarify the tests and ensure schools balance all three.
Kennedy said the three-prong test comes down to the first test - absolute proportionality - since the second test is really a measure of how close the institution is getting to the first test. He added that few schools have successfully argued compliance with the third test.
"I would feel uncomfortable going to court with a bunch of surveys in my hands saying, 'We don't have women's student tiddlywinks, because only 1 percent of the student body wants it,'" Kennedy said. Duke, which was sued with 24 other schools in 1997 for noncompliance with Title IX, currently offers 41.2 percent of its scholarships to women and hopes to achieve 48 percent.
Kennedy argued one positive change that could come from the report is more consistency from different regional offices of the Office of Civil Rights - currently, he said, schools on the East Coast and on the West Coast may be held to different standards.
Anderson said he saw the injustices toward women in sports because his mother was a physical education teacher and a coach herself, but said there has nevertheless been a negative impact on sports like wrestling, men's gymnastics and men's swimming.
"It's galvanized the sporting community and the wrestling community to rally around and fight some of the injustices, but the National Wrestling Coaches Association wants to be very clear that they're not against Title IX," he said.
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