As a head coach of an Olympic sport (fencing) for 28 years, I applaud the efforts of the joint NCAA/USOC task force to address the decline in sponsorship of Olympic sports on the NCAA level — and the group’s understanding that collegiate athletes are an important part of the U.S. Olympic movement.

I appreciate the creative efforts to find ways to maintain and increase the institutional sponsorship of these sports. However, while those efforts may benefit women’s Olympic sports, none of the task force’s ideas have any meaningful impact on increasing the sponsorship of men’s Olympic sport teams as long as Title IX’s proportionality plank remains virtually the sole measure of compliance.

The cold reality is that as long as we measure Title IX compliance based on absolute numbers of males and females — while having no female equivalent to football — institutions will find it hard to add men’s programs regardless of the incentives. In the past 10 years, for example, my institution, Northwestern University, has added four women's sports, dropped men’s fencing, and done everything in its power to make sure that issues such as equitable salaries, facilities and support staff have been addressed for our women’s programs.

We have complied with the intent and spirit of Title IX in every way. Yet, despite that, the very existence of our Division I football program with its roster of roughly 100 players — even with dropping a men’s sport and capping the rosters of all the rest — makes it difficult for institutions such as Northwestern to comply with the strict quota system of the proportionality plank.

Far from being able to add men’s Olympic sports, we are in danger of having to drop more men’s programs, and the incentives offered by the task force will not change that. It is neither football’s nor Title IX’s fault, but rather the fault of those who insist on a quota interpretation of proportionality.

The original Title IX legislation was designed to open opportunities for women in all areas of education, not just athletics. Yet it is only in athletics where we interpret the legislation in such a quota fashion. No academic program at our institutions is forced to have an equal proportion of male and female majors, and yet that is what we are doing in athletics, without regard to the relative roster size of sports or even real interest by the different genders. Title IX was never intended to limit opportunities for men, and that has been an unfortunate consequence of how the legislation has been interpreted.

If the task force is to create a program that will really benefit Olympic programs — and that is a very necessary thing — then it will have to get the NCAA and Office for Civil Rights to consider moving away from the emphasis on strict proportionality to a real consideration of how institutions have acted to satisfy women’s interests.

Then and only then will we be able to measure the real progress, or lack thereof, that institutions have made and, concurrently, be able to re-establish men’s Olympic sports programs at the NCAA level.

Laurence (Laurie) D. Schiller is the head women’s fencing coach at Northwestern University.