Athletic Directors Take Steps to Boost Minority Hiring

Thanks to the Kept-Up Academic Librarian for pointing out an article in USA Today about college athletic directors’ efforts to boost minority hiring.

At a meeting in Grapevine, Tex., last week, members of the Division I-A Athletic Directors’ Association finally decided to adopt guidelines resembling the National Football League’s “Rooney Rule,” which requires teams to interview minority candidates for coaching positions or face a fine, the reporter, Steve Wieberg, writes. But “unlike the five-year-old Rooney Rule” — which is named after the Pittsburgh Steelers owner and chair of the NFL’s workplace-diversity committee, Dan Rooney — the association’s guidelines won’t make colleges that fail to bring in at least one minority candidate pay up. They will merely be “encouraged to adhere to what association executive director Dutch Baughman calls ‘specified, acceptable standards’ that are likely to include the one-minority-candidate minimum,” he writes.

Wieberg notes — as The Chronicle has, too — that the dearth of minority college-football coaches is “a longtime sore spot.” Currently, there are but seven, “less than 6 percent in a sport in which 54 percent of the players are black or other minorities,” he writes.

The association hopes to have guidelines in effect by the start of the annual hiring season, in November, Wieberg concludes.