By NANCY CLARK and NANCY CLARK
REGISTER COLUMNIST
NANCY CLARK
It’s high time to be done with Title IX.
The Title IX label, that is.
It comes with too much baggage.
Let’s drop the incendiary Title IX tag and call this federal guideline what it is: a guarantee of fair access to athletics.
A lighter, more descriptive identity could go a long way toward softening the chest-beating opposition to Title IX – a policy that deserves to be embraced as a reaffirmation of a basic tenet in this land, that all people are created equal.
All Title IX says, after all, is that federally supported schools that offer athletics must open them to all students.
That’s patriotism at work.
But there are men who have fought to protect fundamental rights – who revere the Declaration of Independence and consider the U.S. Constitution to be sacrosanct – who have relentlessly attempted to undermine Title IX.
They don’t see the contradiction.
They just see red.
They see a threat.
Title IX became part of the lexicon at a time when the country was emerging from a decade of civil rights violence, when it was still aflame with opposition to the Vietnam War, when the counterculture was tuning out authority, when newly empowered women were demanding their rights.
It was an era, in other words, when white male supremacy was challenged and, to an extent, marginalized.
For a country that some 30 years later is still struggling to find itself, regain equilibrium and move on, Title IX has become a symbolic scab that some men can’t resist picking at until it bleeds.
The U.S. Department of Education was picking again this spring when it issued a clarification that said e-mail surveys could be used to determine interest among college women in athletic participation.
If only a few women responded – a distinct possibility, considering the amount of spam that is routinely deleted sight unseen by e-mail users – a school would be able to get away with curbing athletic opportunities for women and still be considered to be in compliance with Title IX.
Those surveys are not likely to ever be used.
They don’t reflect the mission of the NCAA, which has passed a resolution encouraging members to ignore the new clarification. It’s flawed, the NCAA board of directors said, and it doesn’t reflect the intent of Title IX or other federal laws.
The surveys don’t reflect the spirit of colleges and universities – certainly not those in Iowa – that consider all their athletic teams to be assets and proudly support them.
They are not the will of the people, who cover their hearts when they recite a pledge to be “one nation, “not many unequal nations.
The surveys are just another way to pick at the scab, to try to recapture a small piece of the vanishing white male authority.
What is it going to take for the wound to heal, for the country to refocus and move on?
How many more generations will pass before universal acceptance, or better yet full admiration, is extended to this curiously controversial guarantee of fundamental rights?
If dropping the Title IX label will speed up the process, let’s do it. Let’s start right here, right now.
Title IX is history.
A guarantee of fair access to athletics for every child in America – that’s the fruit of our collective history.
It’s time to celebrate the harvest.
Wrestling Gear
