The Tower Amendment was a 1974 proposed amendment to the United States Securities Exchange Act of 1934, named after Texas Republican Senator John Tower, who introduced it. [1] The Tower Amendment was intended to modify Title IX.
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The Tower Amendment was a 1974 proposed amendment to the United States Securities Exchange Act of 1934, named after Texas Republican Senator John Tower, who introduced it. [1] The Tower Amendment was intended to modify Title IX.
The Tower Amendment, introduced in the United States Senate in 1974, was a bill meant to restrict the power of Title IX, which was signed into law by former President Richard Nixon on June 23, 1972. Title IX states that "No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance" and was signed into law by former President Richard Nixon on June 23, 1972. The amendment, however, was never passed. [2] Senator John Tower, a Republican from Texas, sought to exempt revenue-producing sports from Title IX. It was meant to "provide equal access for male and female students to the educational process and the extracurricular activities in a school, where there is not a unique facet such as football involved". [3]
The amendment, however, was rejected by the Senate, so John Tower started a movement along with several other senators to pass the bill. [1] They felt that requiring equal federal funding for both girls and boys sports would curtail the profits made by revenue-producing sports. [1] For example, a male sport such as football, which requires more money for gear and events, as well as produces more revenue, than a sport like girls volleyball, might suffer if their funding was significantly decreased. They firmly believed that this mandate would hurt the schools and that the federal government was overstepping its constitutional powers, and that the only "reasonable solution [was] to allow revenue producing sports to support themselves while making excess funds available to other sports for men and women". [3]
Despite the rejection by the Senate, other senators who supported Tower's proposal joined forces, creating the Javits Amendment one month after the Tower Amendment's rejection. The Javits Amendment was similar to the Tower Amendment, and was proposed by Senator Javits, a Republican from New York. He requested that the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (HEW) issue regulations on Title IX regarding intercollegiate athletic activities. [1] He, like Tower, believed that revenue-producing sports should not be taken into account when considering Title IX compliance. However, his proposal was also rejected, and the HEW instead required that schools provide equal opportunity to men and women in athletics. Still, the growing group of senators and representatives continued to push for restrictions on Title IX. In 1975, Representative O’Hara, a Democrat from Michigan, introduced House Bill 8394, which proposed the usage of revenue produced by a certain sport to pay for that sport's extra cost, then use the excess to pay for additional costs in other sports. [4] However, his bill died in committee. [5]
In 1977, Senators Tower, Bartlett, and Hruska introduced Senate Bill 2106, which would exclude revenue-producing sports from Title IX. Though the fight continued, the Senate rejected this last attempt at passing the amendment. In the 1984 ruling of Grove City v Bell , the Supreme Court stated that Title IX did not apply to sports, except in the case of scholarship opportunities. [4] This ruling was reversed by the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987, which required equality in federal funding for sports. Still, opponents of Title IX did not give up, and the National Wrestling Association, the College Gymnastics Association, and the US Track Coaches Association, representing male sports, filed suit against Title IX, saying that the regulations were unconstitutional. The Department of Justice dismissed the suit of narrow grounds, and the government continued to enforce equal spending in sports. The Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act was passed in 1994 to reinforce equality in federal funding for schools, and required that coeducational colleges and universities that used federal funds for student financial aid programs needed to submit annual reports with information about intercollegiate athletics programs. [4]
The Tower Amendment would have ended the rule that both men and women's intercollegiate sports, taking place in federal financially funded institutions, needed to allocate the same amount of revenue. Many senators disagreed with the Tower Amendment and their reasoning stemmed from arguments made by former Democratic Senator, Birch Bayh, that it would create a "blanket exemption from Title IX" and propositions from the Subcommittee on Education that "all athletic scholarships should be limited to men". [7] Some senators thought this would nullify the progress made through the passage of Title IX in 1972. [7]
The efforts to limit the regulations around revenue producing sports under Title IX led to a pattern of amendments being proposed and rejected by the Senate. For example, The Javits Amendment, proposed after the Tower Amendment was dismissed by the Senate, suggested regulations on intercollegiate sports from the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1974. [1] Additionally, House Bill 8394 in 1975 faced a similar fate. [8] As journalist Karen Blumenthal wrote, "These sports, mainly football and basketball, had huge budgets already established for men, which coaches wanted untouched by other programs, especially women's programs. But, as Blumenthal added, "How could the balance even be if the 105 spots on a football team at the time--and the 105 athletic scholarships that went along with them--didn't count at all"? [9]
Some senators believed that the passage of the Tower Amendment would not affect title IX, which would continue to apply appropriately to the rest of intercollegiate athletics, including the generation of money to sustain sports producing less revenue. Other senators thought that the amendment was diluted. The Tower Amendment called for sports to split the revenue of their major revenue producing sports and apply it to other less revenue producing sports. [7] The Republican Senator from Nebraska, Roman Hruska drew attention towards Nebraska football that made $800,000 in one season. [7] He questioned how much money the government would make him give to women's athletics. He also questioned what would happen if the football program declined and there was no more money because it had to be shared. He believed that the enactment of the law would get rid of confusion and the complicated measures of Title IX. The Tower Amendment was believed to help protect the revenues of major producing sports at each college. Other colleges such as Southern Methodist University voiced similar concerns about the controlling of revenues through Title IX. [7]
The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) is a nonprofit organization that regulates student athletics among about 1,100 schools in the United States, and Canada. It also organizes the athletic programs of colleges and helps over 500,000 college student athletes who compete annually in college sports. The organization is headquartered in Indianapolis, Indiana.
Title IX is the most commonly used name for the federal civil rights law in the United States that was enacted as part of the Education Amendments of 1972. It prohibits sex-based discrimination in any school or any other education program that receives funding from the federal government. This is Public Law No. 92‑318, 86 Stat. 235, codified at 20 U.S.C. §§ 1681–1688.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 is a landmark civil rights and labor law in the United States that outlaws discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, and national origin. It prohibits unequal application of voter registration requirements, racial segregation in schools and public accommodations, and employment discrimination. The act "remains one of the most significant legislative achievements in American history".
The Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) was a college athletics organization in the United States, founded in 1971 to govern women's college competitions in the country and to administer national championships. It evolved out of the "Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics for Women" (CIAW), founded in 1967. The association was one of the biggest advancements for women's athletics on the collegiate level. Throughout the 1970s, the AIAW grew rapidly in membership and influence, in parallel with the national growth of women's sports following the enactment of Title IX.
The Children's Health Insurance Program (CHIP) – formerly known as the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) – is a program administered by the United States Department of Health and Human Services that provides matching funds to states for health insurance to families with children. The program was designed to cover uninsured children in families with incomes that are modest but too high to qualify for Medicaid. The program was passed into law as part of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, and the statutory authority for CHIP is under title XXI of the Social Security Act.
Birch Evans Bayh Jr. was an American Democratic Party politician who served as U.S. Senator from Indiana from 1963 to 1981. He was first elected to office in 1954, when he won election to the Indiana House of Representatives; in 1958, he was elected Speaker, the youngest person to hold that office in the state's history. In 1962, he ran for the U.S. Senate, narrowly defeating incumbent Republican Homer E. Capehart. Shortly after entering the Senate, he became Chairman of the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments, and in that role authored two constitutional amendments: the Twenty-fifth—which establishes procedures for an orderly transition of power in the case of the death, disability, or resignation of the President of the United States—and the Twenty-sixth, which lowered the voting age to 18 throughout the United States. He is the first person since James Madison and only non–Founding Father to have authored more than one constitutional amendment. Bayh also led unsuccessful efforts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment and eliminate the Electoral College.
Jacob Koppel Javits was an American lawyer and politician. During his time in politics, he represented the state of New York in both houses of the United States Congress. A member of the Republican Party, he also served as the state's Attorney General. Generally considered a liberal Republican, he was often at odds with his own party. A supporter of labor unions, Great Society and civil rights, he played a key role in the passing of civil rights legislation. An opponent of the War in Vietnam, he drafted the War Powers Resolution in 1973.
The Women's Educational Equity Act (WEEA) of 1974 is one of the several landmark laws passed by the United States Congress outlining federal protections against the gender discrimination of women in education. WEEA was enacted as Section 513 of P.L. 93-380. Introduced in the United States House of Representatives by Congresswoman Patsy Mink of Hawaiʻi, the legislation was conceived and drafted by Arlene Horowitz, a staff assistant to the education subcommittee on which Mink served. WEEA was intended to combat sex-role stereotyping in elementary and secondary schools.
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Christine Grant was a Scottish-born American athlete, coach, administrator, and advocate for women's college athletics. Dr. Grant served as the athletic director at the University of Iowa from 1973 until 2000. She was inducted into the University of Iowa Athletics Hall of Fame in 2006. Grant was also inducted into the Women's Basketball Hall of Fame in 2017.
Student athlete is a term used principally in the United States to describe students enrolled at postsecondary educational institutions, principally colleges and universities, but also at secondary schools, who participate in an organized competitive sport sponsored by that educational institution or school. The term student-athlete was coined in 1964 by Walter Byers, the first executive director of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). The term is also interchangeable with the synonymous term “varsity athlete”.
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Bernice Resnick Sandler was an American women's rights activist. She is best known for being instrumental in the creation of Title IX, a portion of the Education Amendments of 1972, in conjunction with representatives Edith Green and Patsy Mink and Senator Birch Bayh in the 1970s. She has been called "the Godmother of Title IX" by The New York Times. Sandler wrote extensively about sexual and peer harassment towards women on campus, coining the phrase "the chilly campus climate".
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The case of Cohen v. Brown University challenged cost-cutting efforts Brown University made in 1991 that targeted women's sports and women's interest in sports. Women's volleyball and gymnastics teams were demoted from university-funded varsity status to donor-funded club varsity status, along with the men's water polo and golf teams. Even though both men's and women's teams were moved down to donor-funded teams, the plaintiffs in this case allege that this action maintained Brown's history of discriminatory treatments of women in their intercollegiate athletics program and as such was violating Title IX legislation.
