By Malcolm A. Kline

If President Bush or his father tried playing baseball in college today anywhere but Yale, they might not find a team to bat for thanks to a 30-something year-old federal law.

"Boys playing baseball since the age of five cannot get athletic scholarships," Jessica Gavora, the author of Tilting the Playing Field: Schools, Sports, Sex and Title IX (Encounter Books), recently pointed out. Gavora spoke to a mid-August luncheon sponsored by Accuracy In Media

The lack of scholarships for baseball players, wrestlers and gymnasts results from federal government enforcement of a provision of the Civil Rights Act designed to remove barriers female athletes faced three decades ago, Gavora says. The federal government enforces this law by demanding that colleges offer sports scholarships to female athletes in proportion to the distaff side of the student body, Gavora explains.

"Title IX of the Civil Rights Act mandates equal participation in sports for women even though women participate in sports at a lower rate than men," Gavora says. Gavora herself played basketball in high school.

To comply with the law, colleges routinely cut men's sports teams and offer scholarships in every conceivable women's sport, according to Gavora. Gavora currently works as a speechwriter and advisor to U. S. attorney general John Ashcroft.

"Female athletes today receive more scholarship aid per capita than men, " Gavora points out. Three decades of compliance with Title IX have left male athletes across the country with 60,000 fewer opportunities, Gavora points out. The NCAA records 500 more ladies teams than men's, Gavora says.

"There are only 20 gymnastics programs left in U. S. colleges," Gavora says. "College wrestling's been cut in half and baseball has nearly disappeared." Enforced by the U. S. Department of Education, the 1972 law leaves colleges and universities denying scholarship aid to wrestlers, baseball players and gymnasts while scrounging for female athletes.

"Athletic directors are trolling campuses looking for tall, broad shouldered women," Gavora reports. Most female teams, in turn, are offering open tryouts with a no cut guarantee.

Although colleges and universities plead financial constraints when they drop mens' teams, Gavora says this is not the case. When both Providence College and Marquette University offered this explanation for dropping the men's wrestling program, alumni from both institutions came forward and offered to raise money to cover not just the operating expenses for the team but the scholarships that came with being on it. Gavora graduated from Marquette.

College administrators from both schools said no. Running afoul of Title IX puts colleges and universities at the risk of losing federal aid. Thus, says Gavora, "Although they use cost as an excuse, they want to even the body count."

The effect on Title IX on college athletics has generated some publicity due to coverage on newspaper sports pages and television networks such as ESPN that do not normally cover federal regulations. Still, the legal provision' s impact stretches beyond stadiums and gymns. "The PSAT has been normed to bring up girls scores," Gavora points out.

Precursor to the College Board, the test now features fewer math questions, where, traditionally women's scores ran lower than men's . "If you ask feminists, as I have, if they want proportionality for women in engineering school too, they don't have an answer because it is their goal," Gavora relates.

Republican adminstrations generally don't enforce the controversial law as rigidly as Democratic presidents do, Gavora recounts. Gavora has worked as a speechwriter for Senator John McCain.

The federal government issued its first regulation defining Title IX in 1979 during the Carter Administration. The latest 1996 "proportionality rule" was the brainchild of Norma Cantu, President Clinton's appointee to head the Office of Civil Rights at the Department of Education.

This Administration has moved in both directions. In the same summer that Gavora received her Justice posting, after the May 2002 publication of her book, Education Department Secretary Roderick Paige appointed a commission to study Title IX regulations and their effects. That commission, in turn, consisted mostly of female athletic directors and other proponents of the law.

Nonetheless, Gavora says, the commission found the law "fatally flawed." The commission, moreover, found that both the law's advocates and critics agree that enforcement of Title IX resulted in fewer men's teams and a corresponding drop in scholarships and opportunities for male athletes.

Where proponents and opponents of Title IX disagree is on the number of scholarships for male athletes and mens' teams lost.

Jessica Gavora signs a copy of her book Tilting The Playing Field: Schools, Sports, Sex and Title IX at Accuracy In Academia's Conservative University conference at Georgetown. Ms. Gavora's book is available for purchase at the AIM store.