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The year is 1974. In the predawn darkness
of her bedroom, Nancy Hogshead’s alarm insistently beeps
her awake. Half-asleep, the twelve-year-old rolls out of bed already
wearing her Speedo swimsuit and warm-up clothes. With the rest
of the household still fast asleep, she eats breakfast (six eggs,
a half-pound of bacon, two English muffins, and a large glass of
milk) before heading out the door. Outside, in the already humid
Florida morning, she waits to catch a ride to swim practice with
a few of her older teammates. After two intense workouts that bracket
her school day, she heads home to eat dinner and tackle her homework,
turning in at 8:30. At 4:45 a.m., she wakes up and does it all
over again, six days a week.
On a warm July afternoon that same year, more than a thousand miles
northeast of Hogshead’s Jacksonville home, Barbara Krause
spends the waning weeks of her summer break at basketball camp.
Encouraged by her high-school English teacher to develop and hone
her athletic skills, Krause has a natural competitive streak. In
grade school, she would use the heel of her tennis shoe to draw
two lines several dozen yards apart in the dirt driveway of her
family’s Freeport, Maine, house. “Time me, time me!” she
would beg her mother, who glanced between the second hand of her
watch and her spunky daughter’s endless attempts to break
her own sprinting record. “You’re so fast!” her
mother would exclaim. I must be one of the fastest kids ever! Krause
would tell herself, smiling between gulps of air.
In Welcome, North Carolina, Debbie Leonard, a dairy farmer’s
daughter, has just earned her bachelor’s degree from High
Point College, where she played point guard for the women’s
basketball team. Realizing a dream she’s had since elementary
school, Leonard lands a coaching job, teaching seventh-graders
the basics of playing competitive basketball at North Davidson
Junior High, just up the road from Charlotte.
Flush with the adrenaline thrill of physical exertion and the sheer
joy of play, these three young athletes have no way of knowing
that a piece of legislation passed two years earlier will have
a profound impact on their lives.
Today, thirty-five years after Title IX of the Education Amendments
of 1972 was made law, its remarkable legacy is manifest in the
Olympic achievements and respected legal scholarship of Hogshead ’86
(now Hogshead-Makar); in the influence that Krause ’81 has
brought to bear as a senior administrator to two college presidents;
and in the wistful pride that runs deep in Leonard’s soul
when she remembers the fifteen years she spent building a fledgling
Duke women’s basketball team into a respectable program,
despite broken promises and meager resources.
An outgrowth of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, Title IX was signed
into law by President Richard M. Nixon LL.B. ’37. It states
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.” While
the law applies to ten broad categories—including access
to health care and housing, and equitable recruitment and admissions
standards—equity issues in athletics have garnered the highest
visibility, the greatest numbers of lawsuits, and the most rancorous
debate.
From the start, Title IX was challenged by opponents and skeptics
whose arguments ranged from practical—the logistics and costs
of implementation, for example—to misguided—that women
weren’t as interested in sports as men, or that the law would
force schools to cut men’s sports. Yet the backlash against
Title IX has not abated, despite the fact that female students
outnumber male students in higher education overall; that female
participation rates in intercollegiate sports have exploded; that
women now have access to locker rooms and paid coaches and other
amenities that were budgeted only for male athletes for decades;
and that the value-added benefit of leadership, ambition, and teamwork
learned through sports has translated into success and confidence
for women in their professional pursuits. If anything, the drumbeat
of criticism against the law has steadily increased.
For example, in late September last year, James Madison University
announced it would cut ten athletic teams, blaming Title IX compliance
as the culprit. About 100 student-athletes and supporters of the
teams that had been cut gathered in front of the Department of
Education to cheer on speakers who called Title IX out of date.
(Title IX advocates, noting that JMU’s development arm had
been able to raise $10 million for a new athletics center, countered
by saying that, had JMU been working toward compliance all along,
such cuts would not have been necessary.) In January, Ohio University
eliminated four varsity sports, blaming lack of Title IX compliance.
(To cover a projected shortfall in the athletics budget of $10
million by 2010, cuts were made in men’s indoor and outdoor
track, men’s diving and swimming, and women’s lacrosse.)
Title IX and gender equity, along with recruiting, was the focus
of the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics meeting in
January. Created in 1989, the commission monitors and reports on
maintaining academic and financial integrity in college sports.
Although it is an independent organization with no regulatory authority,
the commission’s high-profile membership—including
current and past university presidents and senior faculty members,
sports industry analysts, and journalists such as Judy Woodruff ’68—ensures
that its work carries weight in sports, academe, politics, and
the media.
At the commission’s January meeting, Christine Grant, former
president of both the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics
for Women and the National Association of Collegiate Women Athletic
Administrators, spoke about trends in college athletics that bode
ill for men and women alike. Between 1985 and 2005 (the most recent
years for which data are available), the average budget for NCAA
Division I-A football teams more than tripled, she said, and for
men’s basketball, more than quadrupled. Because those two
sports constitute three-quarters of institutional budgets for men’s
sports (up from one-half in 1985), cutting other programs has become
a way to “save” money.
“It’s not Title IX that’s causing this problem,” Grant
said. “It’s the insatiable appetites of football and
basketball.”
For advocates and beneficiaries of Title IX like Hogshead-Makar,
blaming the law—rather than budgetary mismanagement or refusing
to rein in the escalating costs of running million-dollar football
and basketball programs—is beyond the pale.
“If you had told me ten years ago, when I graduated from
law school, that the majority of my advocacy and pro bono work
would focus on making sure girls had the same opportunity as boys
to play sports, I would have thought you were nuts,” she
says. “At the time, I really thought the battle for gender
equity in sports would be over.”
Now an associate professor at Florida Coastal School of Law (FCSL)
in her hometown of Jacksonville, Hogshead-Makar acknowledges that
she was oblivious to Title IX when she arrived at Duke. She figured
that, given her credentials, she was entitled to whatever Duke
could offer. After all, by the time she was fourteen years old,
she was ranked number one in the world in the 200-meter butterfly.
She had broken numerous records, garnered international acclaim,
and grown accustomed to the robust patronage she’d received
through an intense training program and a full-time coach dedicated
to developing her athletic talents.
“When I was in junior high school, I thought women’s
bodies peaked around the age of eighteen, but that men continued
to get better athletically,” she says. “What I didn’t
realize was that the reason I didn’t know of any women who
competed at the college level wasn’t because of physical
ability. It was due to lack of opportunity. I didn’t know
a single woman who had a scholarship to swim in college.”
Hogshead-Makar was the exception at Duke, which did not offer men
or women swimmers athletic scholarships at the time (and still
doesn’t). Recruiting, such as it was, was piecemeal. Urged
by a high-school swimming buddy, Greg Anderson ’81, to come
for a campus visit, Hogshead-Makar paid her own way to Durham.
Anderson introduced her to swim coach Bob Thompson, who was so
impressed by her that he offered her a scholarship before he’d
gained clearance from the athletics department to do so. Noting
the exception made for Hogshead-Makar, former athletics director
Tom Butters says, “I would have offered a scholarship to
Mozart, too, if I thought he could write a little music for me.”
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