President Clinton long ago promised to mend, not end, affirmative action. Naturally, he has been extending it ever since.
He announced his most recent spurious effort in late October, when he published in the Federal Register a proposed regulation that would expand the coverage of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.
Title IX, in the hands of Clinton’s civil rights enforcers, has become infamous as a slayer of men’s college sports. Congress passed Title IX in 1972 to ensure 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 subject to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance."
Former Vice President Hubert Humphrey, a principal sponsor of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, promised it would never lead to preferential treatment or quotas based on race. So, too, did then-Senator Birch Bayh (D-IN) give such assurances about Title IX.
"The thrust of the amendment is to do away with every quota," Bayh told his colleagues, claiming that gender quotas are "exactly what this amendment intends to prohibit."
In 1997, Representative Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) was of a different opinion. Waters gloated in a congressional hearing that Title IX is "the biggest quota you’ve ever seen."
And Waters was right.
In 1979, in contradiction to the direct language of Title IX, the Department of Health, Education and Welfare issued its final interpretation of Title IX for college athletics.
A school, it deemed, could prove it wasn’t discriminating against women in athletics by showing one of the following: 1.) It was meeting the athletic needs of its female students; 2.) It had a history of expanding to meet these needs; or 3.) Women and men played organized sports in rough proportion to the percentages in which they appeared in the student body.
The first element of this three-prong test is impossible to prove. The second is simply the slow march to the third. In practice, it is but a single-prong test, a spear really, and one that has impaled, and continues to impale, many worthy men’s teams.
The only way schools can prove compliance, and thus protect themselves from lawsuits, is to achieve a rough proportionality. And since women don’t choose to play sports in the same numbers as men, achieving the quota has meant killing men’s teams.
Though basketball has escaped without scars, wrestling, track and field, and tennis have been particularly hard hit. Even producing Olympic champions provides no insurance: the University of California at Los Angeles cut both its men’s swimming and gymnastics programs.
According to data compiled by the Independent Women’s Forum, from 1992 to 1997, more than 20,000 men’s positions were cut, while women’s positions increased by 5,800. But sports are sports. There should not be women’s sports and men’s sports.
So much male pain for so little female gain, yet the Clinton administration is seeking to make this model universal. Currently Title IX covers educational institutions that receive federal funding. The proposed rule would extend its reach to all institutions, public and private, that receive any federal funding for any educational program.
These include, to quote the Federal Register, "education and training programs conducted by noneducational institutions including but not limited to prisons, museums, job training institutes, and for profit and non-profit institutions."
This much is clear: Title IX is a perverse power grab by Clinton and his bureaucrats, who hope to extend their destructive reach long after Clinton has returned to private life. Congress shouldn’t let them.
—Sally C. Pipes
President and CEO
