NEW JERSEY WEAL SENATOR WILLIAMS N.J. "WOMEN'S EQUITY ACTION LEAGUE PH 75 National Advisory Board Rep. Bella S. Abzug Elizabeth Athanasakos Daryl J. Rem Sandra L. Bem Lucy Wilson Benson Rep. Corrine C. Boggs Eleanor Dolan Nancy E. Dowding Thomas I. Emerson Cynthia Fuchs Epstein Frances Tarlton Farenthold Daisy B. Fields Laurine Fitzgerald Ruth Bader Ginsburg Vera Glasser Rep. Edith Green Rep. Martha W. Griffiths Ruth Church Gupta Rep. Julia Dutler Hansen La Donna Harris Viola Hymes Elizabeth Janeway Mildred M. Jeffrey Geri Joseph Leo Kanowitz Herma Hill Kay Roberta Kilberg Elizabeth Koonta Olga Madar Abigail McCarthy Rep. Robert McClory Rep. Patsy T. Mink Betty Southard Murphy Pauli Murray Estelle Ramey Marguerite Rawalt Helen J. Roig Alice S. Rossi Jill Ruckelshaus Bernice Sandler Rep. Patricia Schroeder Anne Firor Scott Althea T. L. Simmons Gloria Steinem Mary Lou Thompson Bettina Weary Ruth Weyand 14 Tunica Ct. Old Bridge, NJ 08857 The Honorable Harrison Williams United States Senate Dear Serator Williams: It is my understanding that Senator Pell's subcommittee of As you know, women's groups such as WEAL and NOW worked long and That the groups of professional educators--AA UP, NEA, AFT--are similarly not invited has a ready explanation. The NCAA. which New Jersey Advisory Board is pushing for the exemption of intercollegiate athletics, has Clara L. Allen Dr. Edward J. Bloustein Katharine Elkus White forgotten that they were organized initially to protect the educational, not the commercial, aspects of college sports. If it is not too late, I would urge you to intervene and see Equal Opportunity vs. Intercollegiate Football Phyllis Zatlin Boring Past President, NJ WEAL Discrimination against women in intercollegiate athletics has been so blatant that there should be no need to convince anyone of its existence. Until quite recently many institutions allocated 100 times as much budget for the men's program as for the women's; one major mid-Western university, for example, reputedly had a $2,400,000 budget for men and $4,500 for women in 1973--or a program 99.8% male. Because our colleges and universities offered no meaningful competition for female athletes, even Olympic goldmedal winners were forced into retirement at age 17. While countless thousands of young men have been able to receive their college educations thanks to athletic scholarship funds, women were completely shut out of that opportunity. Rutgers University, where I teach, has a very progressive attitude about women's sports and, due to the efforts of a number of concerned individuals, our women's intercollegiate athletic program is off to a promising start. But we, like everyone else, have enormous inequities to overcome. For example: in 1972-73 our intercollegiate program served over 800 men and only 5 women; in 1973-74, the participants in women's softball, tennis and track found when they went for practice and games at the stadium that all of the stadium locker rooms were for men only; in 1974-75, when the official women's intercollegiate athletic program for the university was launched with seven sports, only one woman was awarded an athletic scholarship. In other words, we still have a long way to go to reach anything even remotely resembling equality of opportunity--but the NCAA would like to go back to the good old days pre-Title IX when sex discrimination was legal. Apparently, in the land of freedom and opportunity," we must choose between equal opportunity and intercollegiate football. In its origins, the NCAA was founded to protect intercollegiate sports from over-commercialism--in other words, to retain the educational aspects of athletics in the educational setting. It is quite ironic that the major argument presented for barring women from full participation in intercollegiate athletics is a purely commercial one--it would cost too much to include women and we're having enough trouble making ends meet as it is. Such an argument raises serious concerns on at least two grounds. In the industrial setting, would we allow a company to ignore the Equal Pay Act because raising the salaries of their women employees to parity would cut into their profits? Probably not. We would say that a commercial enterprise was not within its legal rights to enhance its earnings by exploiting a particular class of workers. Why then should we allow the sports programs of educational institutions to discriminate? We might also note that if the primary concern and function of an intercollegiate sports program is to make money, such a -2 program is to make money, such a program is a professional one, not an educational one. On campus, whenever anyone criticizes intercollegiate athletics for alleged over-commercialism, exploitation, corruption, antiintellectualism, or whatever, the defense is always (1) that intercollegiate athletics provides an educational opportunity at the skill level of the interested students in the same way that the glee club, orchestra, or theater group does in other areas of activity, (2) that the program exists to serve the student body, and (3) that the recipients of athletic scholarship funds are scholar-athletes. The NCAA and the athletic establishment cannot have it both ways. Either the sports program is educational, existing to serve our scholar-athletes, in which case the program must provide equal educational opportunity for both sexes, or the program is primarily commercial, not educational, and has no place on the college campus. In amendments previously introduced in Congress, two approaches have been taken to exempt intercollegiate athletics from the coverage of Title IX. They were the proposed exclusion of revenue-producing sports and the proposed exclusion of profit-making sports. Both of these approaches also raise interesting questions. If intercollegiate golf, tennis, swimming and track--so-called minor sports--produce no revenue, there will be no discrimination in those areas. Women can have access to these limited funds and facilities, but not a crack at the enormous budget allocated to the major sports. But what if the men's teams begin to sell tickets for golf, tennis, swimming and track? If the minor-sports begin to produce revenue, however limited, can we then deny women access to all athletic programs? If the glee club, the orchestra, and the theater group also sell tickets and produce revenue can we not also logically exempt those activities from equal opportunity legislation on the grounds that they make money? Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of the revenue-producing argument is that it · presupposes the inability of women's sports to attract a paying audience. If we put some money into women's sports to develop them, is it not possible that people would come to watch women's basketball, for example? We do, in fact, already have ample evidence that such is the case, given the thousands of people who paid to see women's intercollegiate teams compete in Madison Square Garden last spring. The profit-making argument is equally interesting. Only a handful of intercollegiate athletic programs in this country actually make a profit. Most sports programs are deficit-producing. Even the NCAA finally had to admit this and call an emergency meeting to discuss ways of cutting costs; quite predictably, they could not agree to very effective ways of cutting football costs, although that's where the majority of the budget goes, so they cheerfully sliced off the minor sports. (Women, of course, are to have a crack at the minor-sports piece of the pie, which is now smaller than ever, while being exempted from the major-sports budget, which is almost as fat as before.) But even if we were to. grant that certain sports at certain universities apparently produce a profit, we would have to examine the athletic budget very carefully to determine if this is actually so. I invite you to consider the following questions: 1) Is the athletic program subsidized through mandatory.student fees? Such fees are paid by women as -3 well as men. At. Rutgers the amount women students pay in mandatory fees still exceeds the total budget for the women's intercollegiate athletic program. I have served on two university committees that have discussed elimination of the mandatory fee, replacing it with a voluntary purchase of a student pass to games; such suggestions put fear and trembling into the hearts of even the most ardent football enthusiasts, because deep down they are not sure that students would back the program if they had the choice. I would propose that all mandatory student fees be eliminated before anyone starts calculating alleged profit. 2) Who paid for the football stadium and other capital expenses? If the facilities were subsidized by the taxpayers--and taxpayers do come in both sexes--then, to determine the profit of a particular sport, one must consider the fair return on capital investment to be subtracted from the gross receipts. 3) How are the coaches' salaries calculated for budgetary purposes? If the coach teaches half-time and half his salary is debited to the instructional budget of the university, the true cost of the intercollegiate athletic program is not reflected in the figures. In other words, if the coach is much higher paid than the average physical education instructor, the only part of the coach's salary that can validly be carried on the instructional budget is half the average instructor's pay, not half the coach's inflated salary. 4) Is the maintenance of the athletic facility paid for by the intercollegiate budget or by the general instructional budget? Again, this may be a hidden cost. 5) What other hidden subsidies are there which must be taken into consideration? At Rutgers, for example, I discovered that the student's mandatory insurance fee is slightly inflated to cover the higher-risk premiums of the intercollegiate athletes--a supplement worth thousands of dollars annually. In short, the profit-producing approach is even more nebulous than the revenue-producing approach. But I suspect that either of these wordings is really a euphemism for football. In that football often costs more than all of the other sports combined, it is the football budget that NCAA would like to protect from the encroachment of women. The fact that women are forced to subsidize that budget is irrelevant, as is the fact that that budget could be cut without damaging the sport. The issue in its bluntest terms is this: which is more important to the United States, the principle of equal educational opportunity, for all or the commercial interests of intercollegiate football? One would hope that the choice would be clear. 64-223 O 76 18 |