The U.S. Department of Education is getting little love over its new rules on Title IX.
Last month the department issued a policy clarification for its regulations on sports under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, the law that bans sex discrimination at institutions that get federal funds.
Advocates for women’s sports were furious. Proponents of men’s sports were cautiously optimistic but still had their concerns. Messing with Title IX is a tricky political issue, particularly when the Education Department does not even have an assistant secretary to lead its Office for Civil Rights.
The change involves how many female athletes a college needs on its varsity teams to comply with the law. One path to compliance is for a college to demonstrate that it is “fully and effectively accommodating the interests and abilities” of female students.
In 1996 the department said a college could look for evidence of interests and abilities that were not being met.
The evidence could include petitions, the existence of viable club teams, interviews with students and coaches, and assessments of sports participation in the college’s recruitment area.
The new policy says a college can do all of that -- or can simply e-mail a survey to students.
Either the civil-rights office or students filing a complaint would have to prove that a college was not accommodating women’s interests and abilities; otherwise it would be presumed to be in compliance with the law.
Even if a college already had more male than female athletes, it could still add men’s teams, as long as a survey showed no unmet interests.
The change removes pressure on colleges to expand their sports programs. On most campuses, only about 40 percent of athletes but well over half of undergraduates are female.
Advocates for men’s sports say the law does no good for athletes when a college limits rosters of men’s teams to meet another option for compliance: having the same percentage of women among varsity athletes and among undergraduates as a whole.
Eric Pearson, director of the College Sports Council, an advocacy group for men’s sports, says he doesn’t expect the clarification to lead many colleges to resurrect men’s teams that they had killed off to comply with the percentage-based requirement.
Female elected officials have released statements harshly critical of the new policy, and women’s groups are rallying their constituents.
But they have few options available. The Republican-controlled Congress appears unlikely to force a change, and the courts typically give federal agencies wide latitude to write their own rules.
http://chronicle.com Section: Athletics Volume 51, Issue 31, Page A34