Ivy League Sports

As executive director of the Council of Ivy Group Presidents, and thus “commissioner” of Ivy League athletics, since 1984, Jeff Orleans has been actively involved in the development of Ivy women’s athletics. A graduate of Yale College (’67) and Yale Law School (’71), Orleans was an attorney in the civil rights division of the Office of General Counsel at the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in the early 1970s — the time that Title IX was passed. When a small group was assembled to write the regulation that would implement Title IX, Orleans calls himself “lucky enough” to have become the chief draftsperson. “One of the first things that we did,” he recalls, “was to go into the legislative history and try to find out what the framers of Title IX thought was intended for athletics. The answer is that they did not think anything. There is one piece of legislative history in which a senator … asked Birch Bayh of Indiana, who was the sponsor of Title IX, whether Title IX would mean that women would have to be allowed in the football locker rooms. Senator Bayh said, ‘No; that is not what Title IX meant.’ That is all the legislative history about athletics there is in Title IX.”

Absent legislative guidance, Orleans and his colleagues had to decide first if the law applied to athletics — which it clearly did, for a statute does apply to all activities within its obvious scope unless it contains an explicit exclusion. Then, they had to figure out how it applied, because while the usual purpose of civil rights legislation is to break down barriers between groups, intercollegiate athletics appeared to require keeping groups separate: there are a limited number of opportunities on any athletic team, and allocating them between women and men on a performance basis ordinarily will not provide equal opportunity. So the drafters had to develop both a rationale and a structure for single-sex yet equal teams.

In addition, Orleans remembers, his group was “working with a set of high-level administrators at HEW who were not very favorably inclined to addressing women’s athletics.” Those administrators, he says, “were under heavy pressure not to let football be attacked, as they saw it, by the prospect of diverting funds or efforts into women’s athletics.” Orleans left his government position in 1974 and, all these years later, says the biggest issue the government still faces is that “it has not found the political will to actually enforce Title IX. Virtually all the enforcement of Title IX in athletics has come from outside groups and lawsuits. The department … has been essentially silent on the issue of the disproportionate number of participants and athletic scholarships that go into major college football.”

Yet Orleans points to his early experience with Title IX as a key stepping-stone for his current job. “I was able to see at the very beginning a set of difficulties that have remained constant in the 26 years that Title IX has been a statute,” he says. “I think one of the things that has helped me in the Ivy League is that I have seen that progression from the very beginning and I feel like I understand it intuitively and that I am comfortable and confident when I deal with it. I hope I have contributed to what so many others in our League have done.”