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This is a really good comment. One thing that this program missed is the fact that head coaching jobs in big-time college athletics jobs are as much fundraising positions as they are coaching positions. When the guests were talking about the old-boy network in college athletics and referencing boosters, they were pointing to part of the reason that the proportion of racial minority head coaches is so out of sync with the proportion of racial minority football and basketball players. The number of minority head coaches reflects the racial makeup of university trustees a lot more than it reflects the makeup of athletes. I attended a number of trustee functions when I was a student at the UO at the beginning of the decade, and at that time the football team was mostly black men, the basketball team was mostly black men, and the trustees and major donors were entirely white. I know that having white trustees is not equivalent to having racist trustees, but again, I bet that the racial makeup of public university trustees at the big NCAA public schools is closer to the racial makeup of head coaches than the racial makeup of football and men's basketball players.

I support the idea of interviewing a minority candidate because it did make a difference in the NFL, but I'm afraid it might not have the same effect (or at least not as fast-acting an effect) in the NCAA. In the NFL, head coaching jobs are almost exclusively about understanding football, and since a majority of NFL players are black, there is a huge pool of qualified candidates for coaching jobs. But in the NCAA the head coaching jobs involve entry into the old boy network at least as much as they involve understanding football, which, sadly, in a lot of cases probably puts minority candidates at a disadvantage. There are hiring cases in the NCAA that just seem to reflect overt racism in the hiring and contract process or donor relations, particularly in the case of Notre Dame football and Kentucky men's basketball, but a lot of times it's a deep and often unrecognized institutional issue that determines how many minority candidates get interviews or jobs.

posted 3 years, 11 months ago
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The fact that this issue revolves around sports may make it seem like college athletics is not worth worrying about, but the fact that football coaches are, in many states, the highest-paid state employees does make it worth worrying about. I don't have the exact numbers in front of me, but I guarantee that Chip Kelly and Mike Riley have higher salaries than Dave Frohnmayer, Ed Ray, or Ted Kulongoski. The same could easily be true for Ernie Kent and Craig Robinson.

posted 3 years, 11 months ago
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I suggest either Ehud Havazelet, a world-class fiction writer who also either teaches or taught at the University of Oregon's MFA program, or Tracy Daugherty, who's won a couple of Oregon Book Awards for novels and recently got a mention in Time for Hiding Man, his new biography of Donald Barthelme.

posted 3 years, 11 months ago
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