Most advocates of racial preferences claim, and I believe sincerely, that such policies are not “quotas,” that they in fact do not support quotas (although I’m not quite sure why), and that critics are disingenuous or even dishonest in calling them quotas.
Someone should tell the feminists, for they continue to define equality as demanding strict numerical proportionality. According to an article in the Washington Post, one of the Title IX reform recommendations
being considered by the 15-member commission, co-chaired by former Women’s National Basketball Association star Cynthia Cooper and Stanford University Athletic Director Ted Leland, would require schools to conduct regular surveys of female and male students’ interest in competing in sports. Athletic opportunities would be pegged to the survey results.
This proposal resulted from the widespread complaint that the proportionality requirement of current Title IX regulations (athletic opportunities must be closely pegged to the proportion of men and women students in the total student body) has resulted in the necessity to eliminate various men’s teams even in the absence of demonstrated women’s interest in greater participation.
Tying offered opportunities more closely to interest may seem reasonable, but that idea “has drawn sharp opposition.”
“What interest surveys tend to reflect is the amount of past discrimination, not the interest that would be manifested if women had been given more opportunities in the past,” [Jocelyn] Samuels [vice president of the National Women’s Law Center] said. “It is somewhat akin to saying women should be given the right to vote only if they were asked and said they wanted it.”
In other words, there is a fundamental right to proportional representation.
As the father of both a teenage boy and a teenage girl, each of whom likes sports, the existing Title IX rules seem to me ridiculous and horribly unfair. The proportionality rule is based on the premise that boys and girls are equally interested in participating in competitive athletics by the time they get to college. Where are the studies supporting this premise? It’s backed by no evidence of any kind whatsoever, nothing more than a radical feminist ideology that, as any parent can testify, does not comport with the facts. I think the proposals to conduct surveys to establish interest of coeds in participating in intercollegiate sports or to benchmark against the rates at which girls actually participate in competitive sports in local high schools both make sense. I would also suggest benchmarking against all-girls colleges where there is no possibility of any kind of discrimination against girl student atheletes against boy student athletes. Let’s hope the day will soon come when colleges stop dropping boys sports because not enough girls want to come out for girls sports.
I find both Jocelyn Samuels’s “false consciousness” argument and her voting rights analogy obscene. First, she’s historically off base: we didn’t just foist voting rights on unwilling women for their own good, but waited until society had progressed to the point where women demanded that right for themselves. Second, what good is a right to vote if you can’t trusted to look out for yourself? By Samuels’s reasoning, women probably should not have been permitted to vote for at least for a generation. Instead, they should have had votes cast on their behalf, automatically, for the leading candidate most sympathetic to the feminist cause. We wouldn’t want those ladies wasting their votes on candidates they actually support instead of the ones they would support if not for past oppression, now would we?