A Place on the Team: The Triumph and Tragedy of Title IX (review)

The popular literature related to Title IX reflects the heat and duration of the contest over gender equity in athletics. Welch Suggs, who covered college sports for the Chronicle of Higher Education from 1998 until he was appointed associate director of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics in July 2005, offers refreshing balance in this in-depth analysis of the political, legal, economic, and cultural context producing and produced by the application of Title IX to athletics.

Providing a "primer" regarding the law itself (supplemented by the actual documents in appendices), Suggs recounts some of the delays that deferred full attention to gender equity in athletics for nearly a generation. Upon its passage in 1972, Title IX impacted arenas far more pervasive than athletics removing barriers and quotas for women in academic areas in higher education and K-12 schools. Yet, controversy related to athletics created delays both in issuing regulations and through legal challenges. It took the implementation of the Civil Rights Restoration Act in 1988 and subsequent court rulings before Title IX began to fully impact to intercollegiate athletics. Current generations, however, identify Title IX with its more recent and complex impact on sports, resulting in the higher participation of girls and women in athletics each year—hence, Suggs's reference to the triumph of Title IX as "a place on the team."

Suggs delves into the separate histories of men's and women's intercollegiate sports. Dispelling the myth that women's sports originated with Title IX, he documents the 19th-century roots of men's sports in a commercial and competitive model and women's in an educational model. Over time, men's intercollegiate sports flourished in the public eye, sometimes amid controversy. Women's sports, on the other hand, governed by physical educators, evolved and changed from emphasizing only the joy of participation to a greater appreciation for the challenges of competition. This evolution in women's sports occurred mostly in obscurity until the appearance of Title IX, which forced an intersection with men's sports and with a "new paradigm for civil rights" emerging from the 1950s and 1960s.

That paradigm shift marked the effort to break down, finally, the barriers separating Blacks and Whites in much of the country. Suggs argues that the statutory and case law emerging from the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the regulations implementing it, marked a shift in evaluating equality. In implementing the Civil Rights Act (1964), federal regulatory agencies began to use specific standards and statistical formulae to assess and resolve problems of discrimination. That logic, in turn, was used in the U.S. Office of Civil Rights regulations that applied Title IX to scholastic and collegiate sports, including the proportionality standard for evaluating female and male athletic participation opportunities.

The resulting tragedy, referenced in Suggs's title, is the use of men's sports as the yardstick for equity, ultimately molding women's intercollegiate sports into the already problematic male model. As one vehicle, Suggs dispassionately describes the NCAA's takeover of the governance of women's sports from the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women after the NCAA failed to block passage of Title IX.

Taking on the controversies spawned by Title IX, Suggs devotes a full chapter to the response of wrestlers to Title IX. Even while college athletics budgets snowballed during the 1980s and 1990s, and the number of male football players increased, many institutions, especially at the Division I level, cut such sports such as men's wrestling and gymnastics. The chapter documenting the wrestlers' response weaves together presidential politics, interest groups, the law, and ultimately the ill-conceived Commission on Opportunity in Athletics, established by Rod Paige, the U.S. Secretary of Education, charged with "examining ways of strengthening enforcement [of Title IX] and expanding opportunities to ensure fairness for all athletes" (U.S. Dept. of Education, 2002). The...