As many of you probably know, this year the wrestling team finished in second place at the NCAA tournament for the second consecutive year, continuing its trend of success and solidifying its place on the Cornell sports landscape. Unfortunately, for many schools, wrestling programs are frequently on the chopping block when the decision is made to cut men’s athletic teams in order to stay in compliance with Title IX.

Title IX is a 1972 amendment to the 1964 Civil Rights Act which declared that “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance...” barring certain exceptions. The statute has most frequently been associated with increasing the number of females participating in varsity university athletics. According to a recent New York Times article, the law has “spawned a cultural transformation” with the participation of female athletes increasing more than 500 percent, from less than 30,000 women in 1972 to 186,000 today.

Unfortunately, the law has also meant the squeezing out of male athletes from sports such as wrestling. According to an article in the Times in 2003, the number of collegiate wrestling programs decreased from 363 in 1982 to 229 in 2001, and the number of wrestlers declined from 7,914 to 5,966, despite the increasing number of NCAA institutions and the steadily increasing popularity of wrestling at the high school level as well. In the absence of a strong alumni base, when athletic funding shrinks, schools must make tough decisions about how to spread around the money, while making sure to stay in compliance with Title IX.

The more recent Times article suggested that some schools, including Cornell, have engaged in questionable practices in order to remain in compliance. For Cornell this has meant counting male practice athletes on the women’s fencing and basketball teams as female athletes, and female coxswains on the male crew teams as female athletes. These practices are actually not illegal, but rather take advantage of loopholes which permit such gender-bending designations. These interpretations of who is considered a “male” or a “female” athlete may be problematic, but the need to resort to such practices perhaps points to a larger problem.

In spirit, Title IX has been a noble way to make sure equal athletic opportunities are afforded to women as well as men. Much like affirmative action programs instituted to provide opportunities for racial minorities, the motivation behind such a law was to make up for past discrimination.

Unfortunately, the 1979 interpretation of the statute has become a rigid system in need of reform in light of changing circumstances. Compliance has been interpreted as adherence to one of the following: 1) that the number of male and female athletes must be proportional to their school-wide enrollment; 2) that the school has demonstrated a commitment to expanding opportunities for women; and 3) that the school is meeting the athletic needs of its female students.

According to Allison Kasic, senior fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum, the first method is considered by many colleges as a permanent solution while the other two are considered short-term fixes. Indeed the other two methods not only require continual monitoring, but are difficult to gauge as they can be interpreted quite subjectively. What’s left then is ostensibly a quota system which can be construed to discriminate against male athletes. Title IX was meant to create opportunities for women where few existed before due to discrimination. But today, with females making up more than 50 percent of enrollment in colleges nationwide and signs of waning interest in varsity athletics, there is a disconnect between the original spirit of the law and its current application.

Cited by the 2003 Times article, J. Robinson, the long-time wrestling coach at the University of Minnesota, wrote a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education which revealed that there is a disparity in participation between males and females in intramural sports by a ratio of 3-1 or 4-1. A quick review of the three most popular Cornell intramural sports this spring reveals a similar disparity. This spring, there were 26 co-recreational basketball teams, 58 male teams and no female teams. There were 25 co-recreational indoor soccer teams, 22 male teams and three female teams.

There were 32 co-recreational softball teams, 40 male teams and no female teams. It is important to recognize that these numbers exclude teams created by sororities because while fraternities and sororities also field teams, the large difference in the number of fraternities compared to sororities creates an artificial disparity.

This lack of interest among women in athletics calls for a less rigid interpretation of Title IX. The statute should keep opportunities for females to participate in varsity athletics as open as they are for men; however, it should take into consideration the discrepancies in interest in participating between the sexes. The proportionality method not only fails to account for interest, but also leads to an unfair quota system.

Rigid quota systems have already been declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court with regards to minority affirmative action programs in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978). The same might be argued for quotas based on sex. In another Supreme Court decision in 2007, Parents Involved in Community Schools v. Seattle School District 1, the Court took a hard line on trying to create racial balance in schools based on racial proportions of students in the district. A similar argument might be made against apportioning male and female athletes. Reform may be as simple as a better definition of what it means to meet the needs of varsity female athletes on campus and a greater emphasis on the use of this criterion by colleges. In keeping with its spirit, Title IX needs to be used to ensure fair opportunities in varsity collegiate athletics exist for both sexes.