The athletic department’s recent hiring of Chip Kelly and Paul Westhead, for football and women’s basketball respectively, narrowly escaped the potential effect of a bill in the state legislature that would require Oregon universities to interview at least one minority candidate for head coach positions.
Men’s basketball coach Ernie Kent is the University’s only head coach who belongs to an ethnic or racial minority.
House Bill 3118 will be introduced before the House of Representatives on Friday. It originally specified only football coaches, but was expanded April 17 to include head coaches for all sports.
The bill was designed to mimic the National Football League’s Rooney Rule from 2003, which requires teams to interview at least one minority candidate for every head coaching position.
“I co-sponsored the bill because I want to make sure Oregon’s universities are casting a wide net during their coaching searches,” Rep. Tobias Read, D-Beaverton, wrote in an e-mail. “The ‘Rooney Rule,’ after which this legislation is patterned has helped the NFL diversify its coaching ranks, and it’s my hope that this legislation will do the same for Oregon.”
The bill has received mainly positive feedback across the University, although some question its wording.
Penny Daugherty, director of affirmative action, said the University currently has “no rule that in a search would specify by personal characteristic who must be interviewed.” And she doesn’t think there should be one.
When people start interviewing based on characteristics such as race, ethnicity or gender, she said, they run the risk of interviewing someone less qualified simply because they fit a desired characteristic. Interview selections should be based on merit, Daugherty said.
Diversity in candidates does come into play, however, even in the highest ranks of the University. Nearly half of the final candidates to be the University’s next president were minority candidates, according to a member of the search committee who wished to remain anonymous when discussing the committee’s work. One of the three finalists for the spot was female.
Daugherty said the athletic department has overall done a good job of reaching out to minority candidates.
Former head football coach Mike Bellotti agreed. He said he has offered several positions to minorities, all of whom turned him down.
None of those positions were head coaches.
He said the new rule would not have affected the University’s decision to hire Kelly and Westhead, but it might have required those doingProxy-Connection: keep-alive
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he hiring to explore more options.
Bellotti said he doesn’t think a minority head coach affects the atmosphere of a team, but acknowledged that on teams that are 35- to 50- percent minorities, it is “almost required” that coaches be as well.
Economics professor Bill Harbaugh agreed. “We have a lot of minority athletes working very hard and receiving much less than the value of their work. Meanwhile we have overpaid coaches who use the NCAA to prevent the players (from) bargaining or even from moving freely from one university to another,” Harbaugh wrote in an e-mail. “The least we can do is make sure the minority athletes have every chance to get into the coaching racket too, so I’m all for this law.”