License to Thrive

"Happy Anniversary, Title IX"

As we celebrate the 36th anniversary of the passage of the Title IX legislation, we reflect on a critical lawsuit that challenged unequal treatment of some female athletes on one of the most elite college campuses in the country – Brown University in Providence, RI.

Cohen v. Brown University, a class action lawsuit, was filed in April 1992, close to 20 years after Title IX was passed.  The suit was filed after Brown terminated funding for its women’s gymnastics and volleyball teams, indicating that these actions violated Title IX.   The school noted that the actions were required as part of cost-cutting measures and that men’s teams were also being cut as part of the effort.  A preliminary injunction requiring Brown to reinstate the sports was won in December of 1992 and in April 1993, a year-after the lawsuit was originally filed, the First Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals supported the injunction pending trial.  Almost three years later, in March 1995, Federal Judge Raymond Pettine ruled that Brown University was in violation of Title IX and ordered the university to submit a proposal to demonstrate how it would come into compliance with the law.  The proposal was deemed unacceptable and the university was ordered to upgrade four women’s teams – gymnastics, skiing, water polo and fencing – to university-funded varsity status.  In late 1996, Brown was given the chance to submit a new proposal. Five (5) years after the lawsuit was originally filed, the U.S. Supreme Court denied the university’s petition to review the case and in June 1998, more than six (6) years after the original lawsuit was filed, Brown University agreed to a settlement to resolve the remaining Title IX complaints.  

Lead counsel in the lawsuit was Lynette Labinger, currently a celebrated and successful lawyer in Providence.  Labinger has noted that the case is one of the highlights of her career with her personally logging over 3,000 hours of work on it.  The litigation team also included Amato DeLuca, Ray Marcaccio, Sandra Duggan, and Arthur Bryant and Leslie Brueckner, of Public Justice, PC, which supported the litigation. 
   

Below is a reflection from Jen Hsu, a gymnast who attended Brown University during the period when the lawsuit was originally filed:

“At the age of 16, and committed to attending Brown University, I recall feeling somewhat like I was floating on top of the world.  Optimistic, wide-eyed, and excited to break out of my suburban comfort zone, I was set to move a couple of hours away from home, to Providence, and find out what everyone meant when they said “college will be the best four years of your life”.  Then a letter arrived to initiate a series of events that would change my perspective on it all – although I wouldn’t have any idea of that at the time.

The letter was from my neighbor, Patty.  I had always looked up to her - she was a sophomore at Brown – and she would occasionally send me letters to tell me how she was doing and describe all that I had to look forward to.  I recall that this letter was different though – not too many words, just a quick note attached to an article clipped from the Brown Daily Herald detailing the elimination of the women’s gymnastics and volleyball teams. I don’t remember if the article mentioned Title IX; in retrospect, I’m guessing it would only have done so as part of an explanation for why men’s water polo and golf were cut too.  Either way, I thought, it sounded like gymnastics would remain an opportunity for me, even if on a “club varsity” level.  And since this was the first I was hearing of this – from Patty - I figured I’d keep an open mind about what was to come.

I would soon realize however that club varsity wasn’t all that the article, or the administration, had been described to be; perhaps the biggest epiphany being that a wide-eyed, optimistic young girl couldn’t necessarily have everything she wanted, no matter how hard she worked or wanted to have it.  Club varsity meant varsity with no budget and curiously, we wondered how we were supposed to, as college students, raise our own funds to compete.  In addition, the privileges that were given to us as varsity athletes at the beginning of the year were slowly taken away: we were locked out of our locker room one day without any prior notice or explanation (and our things locked inside), we had no dedicated athletic trainers, and eventually we were asked to stop using the varsity weight room.  Already without our school-issued budget, we had spent time doing flips on the main campus for travel funds (the President of Brown at the time generously handed us $20) and making our own warm-up leotards. The toll of all this effort and change would be equal parts frustration, confusion, fatigue, and embarrassment – did the administration hope we would fail?  Why our team?  And, is this the way college was supposed to be?

One day, after several unproductive discussions with the head of the Athletic Department, our team jointly concluded that we weren’t getting – and weren’t going to get - the support we needed to be competitive.  Just the year before, Brown Gymnastics had won the Ivy League title – this year, we were struggling to even exist.  Shortly thereafter, our captain, Amy Cohen, mentioned that she had contacted a law firm in Washington DC to discuss our dilemma. The lawyers had explained that they believed Brown had violated an educational amendment called Title IX.  They offered to take our case pro-bono.  Keep in mind, these were days when the words Title IX remained a bit of a mystery to young athletes, their parents, and the sports community in general, a phrase not uttered nearly as often as it seems to be now.  I dare say, we thought Brown would see our point –  in particular, that if you’re not achieving 50:50 proportionality of opportunities to start then you can’t cut back two sports on each side and remain lopsided in the end - and that this lawsuit would be over before it started. 

Most of the time, when I recall the story of Cohen v. Brown, I can be heard saying one thing consistently: you don’t go to college thinking that as a freshman, you’re going to file a lawsuit against your school.  I can confidently tell you that most of my freshman year was a daze at it was, I was just trying to keep my head above water, and certainly, all that optimism I had started with had turned into the hard reality of balancing a challenging academic course load with gymnastics.  It used to be in high school that I could get everything done fairly easily, including a 3+ hour daily workout, and still be in bed by 11pm or midnight.  In contrast, I remember many an all-nighter my first year at college, having no idea how to juggle all that was being thrown at me.  Needless to say, a lawsuit wasn’t going to make life easier.

And in fact, it made life even more difficult. I walked into the dining hall every day to another front-page article in the Brown Daily Herald about the progress of our suit.  We reworked our schedules to meet with our lawyers in downtown Providence, or for the occasional press conference.  Eventually, for most of my sophomore year, we would be sitting in court watching legal testimony afternoon after excruciating afternoon.  Over the course of the next year or so, I found myself constantly defending my position to everyone important in my life – to friends, to my boyfriend (who happened to be a walk-on on the lacrosse team, a position that he initially felt could have been threatened by our suit had he tried to walk on in a different year), to my parents.  Generally, part of me felt a huge amount of loyalty to Brown – outside of what was going on with gymnastics, I was enjoying college.  In this way, I suppose, I was a bit oblivious - I had little idea the scope of our case until much later, and I didn’t know how to balance my affection for the school with my need to stand up for what I thought was right.

About a year later, I came home to marker scrawled across my dorm room door from my teammate with the words “WE WON!” written in huge black letters.  But the case wasn’t over.  Brown appealed, and after another year of deliberation in the 1st Circuit, we won the appeal.  Brown then applied for certiorari from the Supreme Court, but their second appeal was denied.  Meaning, in short, that Brown would have a pre-determined amount of time to come into compliance with Title IX.  By the time the second appeal was denied, I had already graduated from Brown and was living in New York.

Some might find it ironic that none of the plaintiffs on Cohen v. Brown were there to witness the changes that the lawsuit brought to the Brown athletic program.  Though if there is one thing I learned, legal changes, and even more so, changes in mentality, typically happen quite slowly.  Of note though: a few years later, the gymnastics team had grown from just eight gymnasts to a team of twenty-five or so.   By all reports, many other women’s teams who had joined our class-action lawsuit were also thriving. Even today, there are reminders that what we did continues to have an impact: I can proudly say that just this weekend I watched Alicia Sacramone, a Brown gymnast (I believe she is taking the year off to train and plans to return) compete in the US National Gymnastics Championships, likely on her way to the Olympics.

It is hard for me to believe that it has now been almost 17 years since I started college – and 16 years since we filed Cohen v. Brown.  In that time, Title IX has undoubtedly achieved heightened awareness, most often in reference to athletics but also frequently impacting the classroom and beyond.  Separately, in those 16 years, I personally have had many chances to reflect on how it all turned out, and how I changed as a result.  Certainly, I am more aware of, and passionate about, women’s rights than I might have been otherwise.  Moreover, I came to see the world as one where I need not accept things the way they are, but instead one where I feel compelled to stand up for how I believe they should be.  It is possible that we all learn this lesson – not to always accept what is given to us - one way or another, though it is safe to say that even so, we may be afraid to speak up.   I can only speak for myself, but in the process of shedding my innocence about the way the world works, I also found a voice.

Since leaving Brown, I have spent time in strategy consulting and in sports marketing, I have earned an MBA, and most recently, took off 18 months to travel the world with my husband.  I feel strongly that I still have a lot to learn about life, and how the world works, but that I have to educate and challenge myself to make my own place in it.  I am a huge sports fan, of both men’s and women’s sports. I am also expecting my first child this October – a girl – and it is not lost on me that she will grow up in a world very different from the one I grew up in.  I would like to think that what we did at Brown in some small way changed the world she will discover, for the better.”