Protect Title IX

TITLE IX, which mandates equal allotment of college and university athletic funds to men and women on a per capita basis, poses a threat to big revenue sports. The schools that count on that revenue plan to water the law down.

The Rev. Edmund Joyce, vice president of the University of Notre Dame, a school that invests heavily in football and basketball for top National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) rankings, has started a costly and powerful lobbying effort to persuade Congress to exempt intercollegiate sports from Title IX. If Joyce's initiative succeeds, women's sports will receive the same monetary considerations from most schools that it has in the past: virtually none.

At Harvard, however, the results would not be quite as dramatic. Most colleges and universities provide an average of ten sports for men and six for women, according to a recent Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW) report. Harvard now has 19 sports for men and 17 for women.

Although Joyce and Congressional supporters of such big revenue sports as football and basketball attempted to exempt revenue-producing sports from the legislation in 1974, failure seems to have intensified the fight against Title IX. Joyce wants his colleagues to stop Title IX, break away from the NCAA and form their own athletic association. In this way, the big sports revenue schools, which have already flaunted the legislation, could ignore HEW rules, pay the fine and compete under their own auspices.

IF THE EXEMPTION effort fails, the lobbyists will try to bar HEW from using its funds to enforce the legislation. This would mean that colleges and universities could disobey the legislation without fear of federal scrutiny. There is reason to suspect that such disobedience would be widespread: since the three-year transition period for compliance with Title IX ended last July, HEW has received more than 100 allegations of sex discrimination in athletic programs.

The exemption of college and university compliance would clearly darken the future of women's athletics. More important, it would hurt the colleges and universities these women attend. Schools would be denying all students the right to compete as a school representative. John P. Reardon Jr. '60, director of athletics, said last week that if Title IX does exempt intercollegiate athletics. Harvard plans to encourage the wealthy programs for men to help women's sports, to continue to develop women's athletics here and to allocate athletic department money to women when compliance becomes necessary.

As it stands Title IX is a major step toward achieving a goal that should have been reached a long time ago. Harvard and other NCAA schools should support the legislation in its present form. Because sports should provide for teamwork, create pride in accomplishment as well as build character, it is not the universities' right to apply these principles to only part of society.