Look, Title IX was needed in 1972. And it worked brilliantly. But the world has changed. I was a junior in college when it was passed. Now my son is a senior in college. A generation has elapsed, and women's sports are here to stay. Thank God and Title IX.

But because of Title IX's unintended consequences, in 2006 the law is causing more harm than good. Women's sports are no longer on life support. They are vibrant, popular, well-funded and growing. They can be taken off the endangered-species list.

Meanwhile, the percentage of women attending college relative to men continues to increase -- enrollment nationally is approximately 57 percent women to 43 percent men today. If "proportionality" continues to be adhered to by school administrators, the number of men's collegiate sports programs will continue to shrink.

That wasn't the idea behind Title IX. It was designed to create, not eliminate, opportunity. But since its enactment more than 170 men's wrestling teams have disappeared. Eighty men's tennis teams, 45 track teams and 106 men's gymnastics teams have been axed.

UCLA's men's swimming team, which boasted 22 Olympic medals, is gone, along with some 30 other men's swimming and diving programs. Forty schools have dropped football. Walk-on male athletes in all sports are routinely turned away to keep rosters at a minimum so the male/female ratios in college sports programs don't get thrown off.

It's social engineering, and it's wrong. If you believe that being on a team, practicing, learning discipline through sports is beneficial to the development of the individual, as I do, then as a society we are poorer every time a school eliminates any athletic program -- male or female. School administrators don't enforce gender proportionality for chemistry, economics or English-lit classes. Why should they try to engineer gender ratios in sports?

There is a wealth of data that shows that young males, as a whole, are more inclined toward athletic competition than young females. That doesn't mean the female athletes are any less committed or driven than men. It means that -- surprise! -- men and women are different, creatures of Mars and Venus, and that a higher percentage of men like, and perhaps need, to compete.

They crave being on teams, even if they don't start. It adds to their self-esteem and channels their energy in a constructive fashion. While many women's collegiate teams must actively recruit participants in order to fill their rosters, men's teams turn away walk-ons in droves.

Over a 15-year period between 1980 and '94, the National Center for Educational Statistics polled high school seniors and found that 20 percent of males were more interested in participating in sports than females, and more than twice as many exercised vigorously on a daily basis.

In collegiate intramural sports, whose numbers are largely determined on the basis of interest, 78 percent of participants are male, 22 percent female. Put another way, most guys have a more difficult time adapting to life without sports than most girls do.

Yet there are some 580 more women's teams at NCAA schools today than men's teams, a disparity that is likely to continue to grow. Faced with budgetary cuts last summer, the board at Rutgers University elected to eliminate six teams, five of which were men's: lightweight and heavyweight crew, tennis, swimming and diving, and fencing.

"The minute you start cuts, you have to meet the proportionality test," said athletic director Robert E. Mulcahy III.

Shame on the proportionality test. Shame on the budgetary cuts. And shame on administrators at Rutgers and James Madison for allowing Title IX to become a dirty word to advocates of men's sports such as wrestling, cross-country and track. The law was never intended to be a zero-sum game, the right hand welcoming a female athlete as the left hand shoves a male out the door.

After word reached members of the James Madison cross-country team that the men's team would be eliminated in '07 while the women's team would continue, runners on both squads shared a tearful four-hour bus ride home from a meet in Pennsylvania.

"Fourteen guys and 19 girls, all crying together," Jennifer Chapman, a senior on the women's team, told The New York Times. "How is that supposed to have been Title IX's intent?"