For a decade, Brown’s Title IX news has followed Amy Cohen ’92

This year marks the 30th anniversary of Title IX, the law that prohibits gender discrimination at educational institutions, and a decade since a group of Brown athletes turned to the justice system to uphold the statute they believed the University had violated.

by Kristen Cole

Ten years after Amy Cohen and teammates sought reinstatement of full funding for their varsity gymnastics team by filing a Title IX class-action lawsuit, she still receives regular reminders of the case.

Cohen testified only once in the gender discrimination case that sought equal representation of female and male undergraduates on varsity teams at the University – just before she graduated in 1992. But she was continuously updated on the progress of the suit over the years as the Cohen of Cohen v. Brown.

“Because my name was on [the suit], anytime anything happened, people contacted me,” said Cohen, 31. “I didn’t follow it in the news, the news followed me. People would contact me and I’d find out what happened.”

This year marks the 30th anniversary of Title IX, the law that prohibits gender discrimination at educational institutions, and a decade since a group of Brown athletes turned to the justice system to uphold the statute they believed the University had violated.

Cohen is now a public school teacher in New York City, removed from the courtrooms in Providence and Boston, where rulings in the case were cited as Cohen I, Cohen II, Cohen III (the trial decision from 1995 that found for the plaintiffs) and Cohen IV, Brown’s appeal.

“My dad is a judge so I had a pretty good sense of how the legal system works,” said Cohen, who testified only during the preliminary injunction that required Brown to fund the women’s teams and refrain from further reductions until the case could be heard. “I knew ahead of time it would take a long time.”

Cohen was in her junior year when the University announced it would cut regular funding for four varsity teams: women’s gymnastics, women’s volleyball, men’s golf and men’s water polo. The change was part of campus-wide budget reductions and required those teams to raise their own operating funds if they were to continue to exist.

At first, the women gymnasts raised money to continue to compete as a varsity club team, said Cohen. But, she said, the athletes repeatedly encountered new funding needs and decided to seek change through the legal system.

Initially, Cohen had no idea the process would lead to a protracted lawsuit; the intent of the athletes was to file a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights, she said.

It became a challenge to explain the lawsuit to other male and female athletes at Brown who feared it would hurt funding for their own teams, she said.

Because of that situation, Cohen said, she strives hard to understand both sides of any debate. “It changed me a lot in who I am. It was a real eye-opener.”

After graduating from Brown with a concentration in political science, Cohen worked in Baltimore and Costa Rica. She now teaches third grade in a school with a bilingual curriculum. On alternate days she teaches in Spanish and English.

The school in which she teaches lacks a gymnastics team. But it also lacks its own building. Instead, it is housed in classrooms within a middle school, said Cohen.

“While I’d like my students to have athletic opportunities, before I got my girls a team, I’d like them to have a classroom,” said Cohen. “There are other more important things my kids need … nutritious food, safe streets, a school.”

Cohen stays in contact with teammates and travels to gymnastics meets when Brown is competing, but these days she focuses her own athletic ability on Capoeira, a form of Brazilian martial arts.

As an anniversary year of Title IX, Cohen has been sought for comment by various media, even as she made plans to return to Brown for her reunion during Commencement Weekend.

But the interest in the case rarely flagged throughout the past decade. As recently as 1998 there was a legal decision: Brown and attorneys for plaintiffs received U.S. District Court approval of a joint agreement that resolved all remaining legal issues.

Under terms of the agreement, Brown ensures that the proportion of women among varsity athletes will vary by no more than 3.5 percent from the percentage of women in the undergraduate student body. It also provides funding assurances for certain teams for a specified period of time.

When her family members remind her of Title IX, they talk about some seminal events in her life leading up to that legal challenge.

When she in grade school, Cohen challenged the gender differences in activities included in the Presidential Fitness Challenge.

Later, in high school, Cohen challenged the decision by the school’s athletic director not to allow her teammates to leave school to attend a meet in which she competed, while allowing students to leave school to attend a football game.

“My parents say, ‘You had been building for this all your life,’” said Cohen.