“In my opinion it (Title IX) was the single most important piece of federal legislation in the last 32 years,” said Marcy Weston, CMU’s senior associate athletics director.

Title IX prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender in both public and private educational institutions receiving federal financial assistance.

As assistant athletics director for compliance at CMU, Derek Van der Merwe is familiar with NCAA educational and athletic issues of equality and opportunity.

“Title IX was a benchmark piece of legislation,” Van der Merwe said. “It helped in propelling women’s athletics and insuring equity between men and women in education.”

The origin of Title IX lies in the 1965 presidential Executive Order 11246 which prohibits federal contractors from discrimination in employment based on race, color, religion and national origin.

The order was amended by president Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967 to include discrimination based on sex and was renamed Executive Order 11246 as amended by Executive Order 11375.

Playing field hockey at Ohio State University in the late 1970s made CMU field hockey coach Cristy Freese appreciate Title IX.

“Once Title IX opened opportunity, there was a really big boom in women’s athletics,” Freese said. “Before Title IX had an effect, it would be really foreign to see a woman even outside running, but now women are working out all over the place.”

Bernice R. Sandler, a professor at the University of Maryland in 1967, was the first person to use the new executive order for the benefit of women, and on March 9, 1970, U.S. Rep. Martha Griffiths made the first speech in the U.S. Congress about discrimination toward women in education.

In June and July of 1970, U.S. Rep. Edith Green, then chair of the subcommittee that dealt with higher education, made the first legislative step toward the enactment of Title IX by holding hearings on the education and employment of women.

Weston said she appreciates the time and effort that these three women put into Title IX.

“They were monumental forerunners and pioneers,” Weston said. “They had a lot of foresight to be able to get that bill through Congress.”

When Green’s hearings were finished, she appointed Sandler to become the first person in U.S. history on a congressional committee to work specifically in the area of women’s rights.

The bill formed by the committee was first supposed to be part of an amended Title 6 of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in any program receiving federal assistance.

However, African American leaders thought their coverage would be weakened by an amended Title 6, so Green proposed a new title, Title IX.

The proposed bill would apply to both public and private schools and would protect women from discrimination in education.

Congress passed the bill on June 8, 1972, and on June 23, 1972, President Richard Nixon signed Title IX into law.

CMU Athletics Director Herb Deromedi praised Title IX for its revolutionary measures to insure women’s equality in education.

“When Title IX was passed, there was an increase in the number of female participants in athletics,” Deromedi said. “There was also an increase in sports offered for females, scholarships for females and the staff size for female sports.”

The U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare spent three more years finalizing Title IX into specific regulations, and President Gerald Ford signed the new regulations into law on May 27, 1975.

These regulations designate special Title IX coordinators to oversee education, make school systems perform Title IX self-evaluations and make public issues of sex discrimination.

“Title IX really set the base and opened the doors for female opportunities in education,” Weston said.

Van der Merwe stressed that Title IX is more than just equality for college athletics.

“Many people are so consumed with revenue and marketability of college sports that people forget that academics is the main priority,” he said.

Title IX information taken from http://www.edc.org/WomensEquity/pubs/digests/digest-title9.html