Leaving Well-Rounded Men in the Dust
By William Tucker
“At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust,” said the New York Times front-page headline last week. And it seems to be true.
The statistics are well known by now. Males currently make up only 42 percent of college students and the number is steadily declining. Women get 60 percent of the honors degrees. Boys drop out more frequently and far fewer finish their four years.
Does this surprise anyone? I went to college a long time ago, so I don’t have much first-hand experience, but for the last twenty years all I’ve read is how every freshman class starts off with an “orientation” program in which boys are put through prisoner-of-war-type interrogations and made to “confess” their sins of being sexist, racist, and all the rest. Usually it’s some battleaxe from the women’s studies department running the show. Anyone who dares speak up is in danger of being blackballed. “Just go along and get it over with,” male students whisper to each other—which is exactly what POWs tell each other during “re-education” programs.
Then there’s Title IX. In 1972 Congress passed a Civil Rights Act that said everybody had to be equal at everything. The Carter administration decided this should apply to college sports. By the time the Clinton administration came along, the rule became that the percentage of women participating in sports on campus had to equal the percentage of men. But women don’t like to play sports as much as men. After a series of failed recruiting drives, schools finally decided the only way to comply was to start eliminating men’s sports.
The carnage has been appalling. Criticism of college athletics usually concentrates on Division I football players majoring in “psychology of sports” and graduating without knowing how to read. (Another Times story this week unmasked a group of Auburn first-stringers whose entire course work consisted in “private readings” with one professor.) But those are precisely the sacrosanct sports programs that have been untouched by Title IX. Instead, the “equalizing” has concentrated on minor, “I-just-like-to-play” sports that only attract non-scholarship athletes. College boys who play in these sports do it out of sheer love of the game, aren’t afforded special treatment, and often testify that playing sports helps focus their studies because it takes up all their free time. Those are the athletes who are being punished.
West Virginia University recently cut men’s tennis, indoor track, outdoor track, and cross-country, plus a co-ed rifle team that had won eight NCAA championships but unfortunately attracted more men than women. Rutgers is cutting men’s crew, fencing, swimming, and tennis. Iowa State eliminated swimming and baseball. Both Colorado and Colorado State have dropped baseball. Oregon tried to reinstate baseball after neighboring Oregon State won the College World Series but found the way blocked by Title IX. Providence College cut a popular 80-year-old baseball team along with tennis and track. Syracuse cut gymnastics and wrestling. Both UCLA and the University of Miami have been forced to drop swimming programs that produced dozens of Olympic medalists. Altogether, more than 170 wrestling programs, 80 men’s tennis teams, 70 men’s gymnastic teams and 45 men’s track and field teams have been eliminated.
Yet that’s only half the damage. Even more devastating is the alternative strategy of eliminating “walk-ons.” Big colleges stock their major sports teams with scholarship athletes, but the dream of many young men is to make the squad as a walk-on, even if it means sitting on the bench all season in the hope of taking the field at score 50-0. Such visions were memorialized in the movie “Rudy” about a legendary walk-on at Notre Dame who finally got to play one down at the end of his four-year career and sacked the quarterback.
Well, walk-ons are Public Enemy #1 to Title IX. In a 2002 front-page New York Times article entitled “Want to Try Out for College Sports? Forget It,” Bill Pennington documented the grim logic:
At many colleges nationwide, it has become commonplace in recent years to turn away walk-ons in men’s sports like soccer, baseball, tennis, gymnastics, and track and field. As another school year began in the past few weeks, the doors at athletic departments were slamming shut to thousands of men seeking a tryout.
“It’s like they’re taking away whatever hopes and dreams you might have, which is pretty hard to take,” said Jason Lindberg, a 19-year-old high school athlete who was told he couldn’t try out for gymnastics at the University of Oklahoma. “Because you get into sports believing you’ll always at least get the chance to prove yourself.”
The reason, of course, is Title IX. For every scrub who sits at the end of the bench on the football team, some female student has to be persuaded to play field hockey. As John Tierney pointed out last week, even when the University of Maryland’s girls’ lacrosse team won the national championship last year, it was unable to fill its 40-player roster. It’s much simpler to kick all non-scholarship male athletes off the football team.
“I hated the movie ‘Rudy,’” Marilyn McNeil, athletic director of Monmouth University in West Long Branch, N.J, told Pennington.
“If you’re not going to get your uniform dirty during games, you shouldn’t be on the team,” said McNeil, who is also the chairwoman of the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s committee on women’s athletics. “I believe there is still an opportunity for a walk-on to bloom on our teams, but there has to be a cutoff date for those who just want to hang around. We can’t afford it. It’s time to tell these students: ‘You’ve got other talents. Go write about sports at the school newspaper, join the debate team, or maybe you’ve got a nice voice and belong on the stage.’
McNeil added that “some guys just like to be part of the group. Then 10 years later they will talk about being on their college team, when the fact is they never played.”
This kind of bitter, scolding feminism is now national policy.
The Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative group, surveyed sports at Smith College and Mt. Holyoke College—both all-girl schools—and found that athletic participation ranged around 10 to 15 percent. Among male students it is usually twice as high. Do the math and you’ll find that colleges won’t reach equilibrium until men make up only 27 percent of the student population. As more sports are cut, the percentage of female enrollment will grow, which will necessitate even further reductions in male programs. Is it any wonder that male enrollments are declining?
The nation’s college wrestling coaches—who have been particularly hard-hit by this pattern—point out an obvious inequality. Choir, orchestra, theater, debate clubs, student governments are all dominated by women. Why doesn’t Title IX apply to them?
To the ancient Greeks, who started this whole thing, educating the body was considered equally important to educating the mind. That’s why schools were called “gymnasiums.” Today’s ultra-sensitive bureaucrats seem to have forgotten that.
The day after the “left-in-the-dust” story, the Times ran another front-pager about Shenandoah University in Virginia. The small private school has managed to increase male enrollment from 18 to 43 percent in five years by starting a football team.
What a great idea.
William Tucker is a weekly columnist for The American Enterprise Online.
