By Mike Pearson
FightingIllini.com
During the course of its vigorous and sometimes contentious battle with the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW), the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) experienced a dramatic shift in its stance toward the historic 1972 Title IX legislation between its annual conventions of 1979 and 1981.
From its inclusion in 1974 as a member of the University of Illinois' Athletic Association until its adoption by the NCAA in January 1981, the Illini women's varsity program aligned its championship events with the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women. The AIAW, however, barely survived on a shoestring budget and was a far cry from the highly commercialized model of the NCAA.
In July of 1978, federal courts forced universities to formally comply with the equal opportunity laws and that necessitated the AIAW and the NCAA to coexist. That's when the NCAA's position shifted from a stance of indifference to one of antagonism.
Said the NCAA News in its Feb. 9, 1979 issue that reviewed the previous month's assembly: "To most delegates at the NCAA's 73rd annual convention, the proposals that were voted upon seemed less significant that an item which did not have a place on the agenda for the business sessions. That one item—Title IX—was the subject of countless hours of discussion and question-and-answer periods."
Then-Rutgers coach Theresa Grentz led the Scarlet Knights to the 1982 AIAW championship.
As a player, Grentz's Immaculata team won the 1972, '73 and '74 titles.
The NCAA argued that, in recent years, "this Association's member institutions have made massive new allocations of resources to their women's intercollegiate programs, on the average more than doubling the number of sports and participants. This Association is seeking a judicial determination that as a matter of law, HEW does not have regulatory authority over intercollegiate sports programs which are not federally assisted."
Wrote the Associated Press in its review of the 1979 convention: "As expected, the representatives of more than 800 colleges and universities went on record as opposing efforts by HEW 'to dictate uniform federal program goals and standards for the diversified membership of this association.' The adopted resolution encourages institutions to voice their complaints to their congressional representatives. It termed the open-ended provisions in the proposed policy which potentially create excessive and unreasonable financial obligations unrelated to the achievement of equality and opportunity. The NCAA resolution said the HEW mandates would impose a per capita expenditure requirement that fails to include 'reasonable provisions considering the nature of particular sports.'"
Charged with discrimination, NCAA President William Flynn of Boston College flatly denied those allegations.
"In our view," Flynn said, "the proposed policy interpretation is based on faulty factual premises—the most important of which is the apparent assumption that the pattern of intercollegiate sports programs which now exists is the product of sex discrimination. In the strongest possible terms, we contest the truth of this undocumented and erroneous assumption."
In May of 1979, the chief administrators of three major institutions—including University of Illinois Chancellor William Gerberding—acknowledged that the NCAA's membership's views were not accepted by HEW. Their clarifying statement reflected a softening stance to the NCAA's previous position of three months earlier: "We wish to state our full support for the continued and overdue growth in intercollegiate athletics for women and we endorse the Title IX principle of nondiscrimination on the basis of sex in intercollegiate athletics."
Centered on compromise, myriad counterproposals bounced back and forth between the NCAA and HEW in its attempt to settle the dispute.
On Dec. 4, 1979, HEW issued its final policy interpretation to provide the framework for enforcement of the athletics requirements of Title IX. Part A addressed financial proportionality. Part B centered around compliance as it related to travel allowances, compensation of coaches and the availability of equipment.
Predictably, the January 1980 NCAA Convention attracted more than 1,000 delegates and visitors to discuss the effects of the previous month's interpretations. Legal analysts sided with the NCAA and concluded that HEW's actions and public statements were ambiguous and, at times, conflicting.
"Press accounts generally have treated the policy interpretation as the definitive statement of standards which universities must meet in order to comply with Title IX", the NCAA News wrote. "In fact, it is something much less. It is not binding on colleges and universities and can create no new requirements."
Confusion among the NCAA membership spiraled throughout the balance of the 1980 calendar year. Did HEW's interpretation of "equivalent" mean "identical"? Material distributed in February of 1980 by the AIAW caused additional chaos and a power struggle ensued.
In April of 1980, a Federal appeals court ruling reversed a district court decision in NCAA vs. Califano, the suit in which the NCAA challenged HEW's Title IX implementation regulation.
Said the court's ruling, "In our view, it is clear that the members of the NCAA would have standing to sue on their own under the Administrative Procedure Act. The members of the NCAA own established education businesses; they have made substantial investments in facilities for sports and have operated sports programs as they wished, all under protection of state law."
Throughout 1980, due to the effects of fierce inflation and the dictates of Title IX, intercollegiate athletic department from coast to coast faced an ongoing financial crisis, forcing them to eliminate non-revenue varsity sports and face mounting deficits.
Meanwhile, sex discrimination lawsuits continued to be filed and the federal government's Department of Education tackled seemingly endless investigations.
Prior to the January 1981 NCAA Convention in Miami, an overwhelming call to improve women's sports programs dominated the agenda. Would the association's membership vote for a major restructuring plan to accommodate women's interests?
More than 1,300 delegates—160 of whom were women—were on hand at Miami's Fontainebleau Hilton Hotel. Proposal No. 51, the first part of the NCAA Council-sponsored women's governance legislation that was designed to expand the number of females to join the NCAA Council and Executive Committee, needed two-thirds approval on the first vote. It passed comfortably with 69.6 percent and Michigan State University's Gwendolyn Norrell became the first woman from a Big Ten institution to join the Council.
It took three votes, but on Jan. 14, 1981, the NCAA became the administrator of women's Division I sports championships.
That set the stage for the consideration of Division I women's championships to be administered by the NCAA. A majority vote was all that was needed for passage. After a lengthy period of debate, Division I delegates cast their votes, but it ended in a 124-124 deadlock. An ensuing recount was 127-128 against. That prompted delegates to request an historic third vote. This time it passed by a favorable 137-117 count, ensuring that NCAA women's championships would debut in the 1981-82 academic year.
Shortly afterwards, the AIAW sued the NCAA for "unlawfully using its monopoly power in men's college sports to facilitate its entry into women's college sports and to force the AIAW out of existence." Federal judges ultimately ruled in favor of the NCAA, and the AIAW folded in June 1982.
Seven months later, Illinois and eight other Big Ten schools voted to affiliate their women's athletic programs with the conference. The University of Minnesota, a school that had close ties with the AIAW, held out for two additional months, but eventually joined its counterparts.
