UC-Berkeley was forced to make some tough decisions this week, culminating in the Tuesday announcement that it was eliminating five sports programs. Men’s baseball, men’s and women’s gymnastics, and women’s lacrosse were eliminated and men’s rugby was downgraded to “varsity club” status.
Cal, like universities across the country, has been cutting its budget across the board. Tuition is up, faculty and staff have been furloughed, and the decision was made to look at the athletic programs. As of last week, Cal had 27 sports teams, more than any other school in the PAC-10 except Stanford. Unfortunately, Cal’s athletic department was operating at a $12 million and growing annual loss.
Four of the cuts were designed to slash the athletic department’s operating deficit to a more manageable $5 million in the red. The elimination of baseball has caused a particular amount of publicity as it has more than a century of history including winning the first college world series in 1947. However, one of the most controversial cuts is the men’s rugby program, which operated at close to financial self-sufficiency.
Rugby was eliminated primarily to help bring Cal back in line with Title IX requirements that universities provide equal opportunities to men and women. Cal has slightly more female than male students, yet currently has about 150 more male than female student athletes. Elimination of the 61 member all male rugby team has provided a quick fix to bring Cal back into Title IX compliance.
This has brought out a number of voices arguing that it is gender discrimination to eliminate an otherwise self-sufficient program largely to avoid having too many more male than female athletes. Many similar arguments were raised last year when Quinnipiac University tried to eliminate women’s volleyball by claiming that competitive cheerleading is a varsity sport (an argument that was rejected, as previously reported by this blog).
Should colleges be required to have the same percentage of male and female student athletes as they have students on campus as Title IX has been interpreted to require?
Why shouldn’t lower interest in and lower profitability of women’s sports programs justify having fewer female than male athletes? Why should able and profitable male athletes be penalized just because women’s athletics cannot make money? Men’s athletics are just more interesting, so they should get more support. Right?
The problem with that theory is that the idea that men’s sports generate more interest and revenue than women’s sports is a myth. Ignoring the obvious arguments that men’s sports have had a substantially longer amount of time to embed themselves in the popular culture and that they get the lion’s share of advertising, it is just not true that sports programs are about the money.
College athletic departments run in the red in all but a handful of universities across this country. Even more notable is that that cannot just be blamed on minor sports costing money as only about half of Division IA schools make money on football and men’s basketball, and few schools make money on any other sports. The idea that schools should be looking purely at revenue generation when deciding what programs to cut is simply not true unless the discussion is about eliminating athletics altogether at many schools and retaining only football and men’s basketball at the rest.
With that in mind, the Title IX argument comes back to, why should women have any less opportunity to play college sports than men? The fact that schools like Quinnipiac and Cal have a disproportionate amount of male athletes across many different sports programs none of which make money is clear evidence that Title IX still has a role to play in ensuring equal opportunity.
It plays well with popular rhetoric to argue that cuts such as the Cal rugby team amount to reverse discrimination forced by onerous civil rights legislation, but is that really what happened? Cal was forced to cut athletics due to budgetary constraints, Title IX simply forced them to spread those cuts evenly across men’s and women’s programs. At first glance, it looks like more men’s than women’s programs were cut in this most recent round, but that is only because there were already a disproportionate amount of male athletes at Cal before the cuts. Cal had the option to add female athletes or to cut male athletes, unfortunately they chose the latter.
We as a nation expect equal opportunities for men and women. It is unfortunate that cuts have to be made, but when they are made it is only fair that they be distributed evenly. Next time a university cuts a popular athletic program, the correct answer is not to look at the women’s programs that did not get cut and whine about Title IX forcing equal opportunity. The better question is which other men’s programs could have been cut to balance the budget and keep the correct distribution of male and female athletes?
Cal had 27 athletic programs last week. I doubt those consisted of football, men’s basketball, rugby, and 24 women’s programs. There were other men’s programs that could have been cut, but were not. It is convenient to blame Title IX, but dishonest as long as there are other programs that could be cut that are still providing more opportunity to men than women.
Mat, thank you for taking the time to opine on this debate! I hope others will as well.
One issue I’m surprised has escaped debate is whether the framers of Title IX intended it to be used in the manner applied to the Cal Rugby team. As pointed out earlier, Title IX was enacted to level the playing field by creating opportunities for women. Eliminating a men’s rugby team from the athletic department can hardly be said to create more opportunities for women.
Head Coach, Jack Clark, of the Cal Rugby team offers a better solution; one that is more consistent with the spirit of Title IX:
http://savecalvarsityrugby.com/coach-clark-with-greg-papa-on-csn-bay-area
Until we can have an honest debate about how to define “equal opportunity” in college sports, then the kind of bitterness expressed over the decisions made at Cal this week will only grow as other schools are certain to face similar financial and gender equity predicaments.
You asked whether equal opportunity should be regarded as proportionality, but then abandoned the question. I think it is absolutely vital to address this issue because it goes to the heart of defining what opportunity really means.
Of course, establishment Title IX activists don’t want this discussion at all, claiming that women are just as interested in competing in sports as men. They can’t prove their claims any more than others insist that they’re not.
I’m a woman in favor of Title IX, but the three-part compliance test for sports needs to be overhauled completely. Proportionality is contradictory to any notion of equal opportunity, because it demands statistical parity above all.
If women do not fill sports rosters to the same degree as they do classrooms, there is a built-in presumption that they are being discriminated against. This is a fallacy. Equal numbers are not the same thing as equal opportunity.
But as long as proportionality persists as the benchmark of Title IX compliance — and it does so with the force of law — the opportunities of male athletes in non-revenue sports will continue to be endangered.
If the ‘equality’ isn’t based on numbers and proportionality, then on what type of metric could it be based? There’s no real way to objectively measure ‘equal opportunity.’ I agree that the system is not perfect as it is right now, but I’m hard pressed to think of a fair solution.
Assume we have 60 male students and 40 female students. We could set it up so that 60% of the roster sports are for men and 40% are for women. Or, we could poll the student body and find out how many of those students have a legitimate and realistic interest in participating in varsity sports, then create the percentages out of the results of that survey. Or, you could base it on funding – where funding would be equal to male and female sports, and it would be up to the University to spend as it sees fit, so long as it spends the full allowance on each. You could base it on national averages of male vs. female participation or interest in participating in varsity sports.
What else? I’m not intimately familiar with this issue, but I am curious about it.
After reading this article on Title IX, I thought I would respond with support in the form of imparting the very personal way Title IX affected me and the local college, whose shadow around which I had grown up. I recently wrote a book about the situation that played out at Providence College in 1999, when the school administration decided to eliminate the men’s baseball team, and two other sports, in order to comply with the gender-equity disparity they faced at that time. The book and the players never blamed gender equity or Title IX, only the school administration for how they got themselves into the predicament in the first place and how they handled it in the end.
STRIKE IX (ISBN 0-7414-5690-7), tells the story of the 1999 Providence College Friars baseball team and their beloved sport, which they learned would be eliminated at the end of that upcoming season in order for the school to address their gender-equity disparity in order to comply with Title IX mandates. Written to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of PC’s historic season, this book was the result of speaking with a majority of the players on that team, and tells the personal ordeal that these Providence College athletes went through on the field and off the field when they learned that their sport had been cut. They collectively put aside all their emotions and anger and went out and had the best season in the 80-year history of the school’s baseball program, winning the Big East Championship and getting into the NCAA Division I Tournament with a lot more to prove. This book speaks of the singular experience of this college team and the players whose sport was cut by their school, but it is a microcosm of the Title IX debate that continues today, showing the real life effects that a sports program cut has on the athletes, the school as well as the community around the institution.
I look forward to hearing back from you with any comments or feedback you may have regarding STRIKE IX. More information is available on the book publisher’s website
http://www.buybooksontheweb.com/product.aspx?ISBN=0-7414-5690-7
or in my website below.
Regards,
Paul Lonardo
Palonardo@aol.com
401-743-3812
http://www.PaulLonardo.com
Really?
You made the argument that Title IX was the reason and then state that it cannot be blamed because it “fairly” eliminated men and women?
A Sport that has been around for ages is eliminated because of equality? Or payback?
You wrote that they were paying for themselves. So it wasn’t about money. It was about sex. Males got slaughtered because it’s payback for the females that do not garner much support as the male sports teams do. Blaming how long males have had sports is a weak argument.
So we should cut all Hockey Teams until there is an equal amount of races on all the teams. Diversity is important. DIVERSITY!!!!
Oh and same with Basketball teams. If there is not an equal number of white, Asian, black and Hispanic then the team has to be dropped.
This idea that you are fighting for fairness is laughable. Title IX is a joke. Title IX was not created to abuse males in sports to make females feel equal. That was not why it was created.
Also equality isn’t based on numbers. How devoid of humanity are you?
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