Nickerson Field hasn't hosted an NCAA football game since the Boston University (BU) Terriers battled Commonwealth rival UMass in November of 1997. More than five years after BU dismantled the visiting Minutemen by 25 (33-8) on a chilly fall afternoon, sparse crowds survey professional women's soccer action at Nickerson (which borders the eastbound Mass Pike en route to downtown Boston). The field has been converted from astroturf to grass. The athletes now leaving their imprints on the turf are members of the Boston Breakers, one of eight franchises in the two-year-old Women's United Soccer Association (WUSA). So why did BU, a Division I-AA football stalwart, so swiftly drop its gridiron program? BU, which gave out 63 football scholarships per year prior to '95, could not consistently sell out Nickerson Field: subsequently, the football program was losing money at a rate of $3 million per year.

Then Boston UniversityPresident John Silber, however, announced that the program was disbanded primarily because of NCAA Title IX pressures to address the needs of women's athletics.

Title IX was placed in the Education Amendments of 1972. Its objective upon implementation was to prohibit gender discrimination in programs that receive federal funding. In 1979, the law was clarified when a new "three-prong" test was introduced as a barometer for the degree of effort schools were exherting in an attempt to level the playing field between men's and women's NCAA athletics.

To be in compliance with Title IX and avoid NCAA sanctions, institutions had to meet any one of the following three elements: The school's male-female athlete ratio would be "substantially proportionate" to its overall male-female enrollment figures, the school had displayed an ongoing history of "broadening opportunities" for women, and the school had "fully and effectively" accomodated the interests and abilities of women.

The impact of Title IX on the intercollegiate sports landscape has been profound. From 1971 to 1987, the number of women college athletes increased a whopping 125 percent. By the 1995-96 season, roughly 39 percent of college athletes were women.

Critics of Title IX, however, point to the proportionality statute as the major problem with Title IX. While the 2000 U.S. Census revealed that 56 percent of college students are women, an aforementioned 40 percent compete in NCAA sports. And while participation has vastly improved over the past three decades, many strict proponents of Title IX insist that there is more work to be done.

A number of NCAA Athletic Directors, however, strongly disagree, and are even pushing for more explicit limitations to Title IX. On Wednesday and Thursday, a 15-member commission organized by President Bush and Education Secretary Rod Paige met in Washington, DC to discuss potential alterations to Title IX legislation. Commission participants included WUSA player and US national team star Julie Foudy and University of Maryland Athletic Director Debbie Yow. Yow proposed the most dramatic overhaul to Title IX: she recommended that schools be allowed to have a 50-50 split of male and female athletes, regardless of the makeup of the student body.

The commission, which concluded its debate on Friday, was formed in response to a lawsuit filed by the National Wrestling Coaches Association (NWCA). According to Paige, Title IX's proportionality standard has had an adverse effect on an overwhelming number of NCAA wrestling and football programs.

Those teams, said Paige, are usually the first to fold, because there are no comparable women's sports.

While Yow's proposal failed to pass and a number of other changes that would have altered or altogether eliminated Title IX's fundamental proportionality standard were shot down, the commission voted to tinker with the wording of the law. Paige, who cannot change the law (that would take an act of Congress), has instead been granted the power to change the manner in students and/or athletes are counted to measure compliance. Framingham State Athletic Director Tom Kelley doesn't buy the reasoning that Title IX is the sole reason many men's wrestling and football teams have been dropped. "The thing people need to realize is that Title IX is not telling you to cut men's programs," he said. "I think a lot of people are blaming Title IX for their problems when that may not be the case. When you start dropping sports, that's when things get ugly."

Kelley, however, agrees that football and Title IX will always be a delicate issue. "On the national level, the NCAA wants everything to be equal, and we try hard to do that," he continued, "For us, though, the biggest problem is football. There is just no female equivalent in numbers to football, and it's always going to be tilted."

According to Damian Vega of The Milford Daily News (Milford, Mass.), institutions that do not field a football team have been able to comply most effectively with Title IX. "Neither Wellesley's Babson nor Waltham's Brandeis, which compete in Division III, have a football team, and both institutions are on the cusp of proportionality."

According to Athletic Director Jeff Cohen, Brandeis is perfectly split at 50 percent for both men's and women's teams. "We have not added sports for women," he said, "but all of our facilities and expenditures are equivalent. I can tell you that we spend more money on the women's programs than we do on our men's."

Linda Chavez, former director of the United States Commission on Civil Rights and current President of the Center for Equal Opportunity, believes Title IX has been abused by radical feminists seeking a misguided result.

"Some feminist extremists have tried to hijack the law in recent years to limit choices for both girls and boys to participate in school-sponsored teams," she said in a Feb. 1 column.

"If more boys than girls sign up for college sports, feminists cry foul," she said, "If schools expand the sports offered to encourage more female participation -- and no female who has an interest in playing a particular sport has been denied opportunity to do so -- these gender-equity radicals claim schools are discriminating. They don't believe girls should have a choice in the matter -- or more accurately, if girls choose not to play, then neither can the boys."

Brandeis softball player Evie Ullman '03 takes a pragmatic view. "I don't think it's necessarily fair to eliminate a strong men's team that benefits the athletic program at a college or university just because an equivalent women's team cannot be fielded," she said, "However, in order to uphold the ideals of Title IX in this type of situation, a concerted effort should be made by every school to give equal funding to both men's and women's athletics."

"I've heard a lot of arguments that since football and the major men's sports bring in more cash, they should receive more funding," said Brandeis fencer Jessica Lewis Turner '04, "This is a problem because of the amount of publicity and attention they receive. Women's sports are just as interesting as men's, but female athletes generally receive less attention than men do. I think there is also a general problem with how we treat male athletes, particularly at the Division I level."

"The problem with legislation like Title IX is that it can never be one hundred percent effective or perfectly fit every situation," said Lewis-Turner, "The question to ask is whether it was necessary and useful at the time. I think it was, and I believe that a revised version would be useful, particularly in Division I schools that still have problems funding women's teams."

All this comes as little consolation to football-starved BU fans. Unless, of course, they want to see the Breakers play that other game some call football.