On one front, there has been incredibly positive change. At the beginning of the 2011 college football season, 19 head coaches of color, including 17 African-Americans, led teams at the Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) schools. This includes six new hires for this season.
Not long ago, there were only six coaches of color and very real threats of Title VII lawsuits by the Black Coaches and Administrators (BCA), which issues an annual hiring report card.
A report released Tuesday by The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) titled “Mild Progress Continues: Assessing Diversity Among Campus and Conference Leaders for Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) Schools in the 2011-12 Academic Year” addresses the fact that other positions, such as athletic director and conference commissioner, reflect little if any progress.
At the 120 FBS campuses, Whites held 91.2 percent of the 365 campus leadership positions. White men held 84.2 percent of the athletic director positions. Fourteen men of color held athletic director positions. There were no African-American, Latina, Asian or Native American women serving as athletic directors at FBS schools. Of 120 college president positions, 75 percent were held by White males.
“The reason we do this leadership study is because the hiring process in football is something that the president and the athletic director are very involved with. As long as they are overwhelmingly White and male, then progress is going to be slow,” said Dr. Richard Lapchick, director of TIDES and principal author of the report.
Lapchick said he finds the comparison between professional sports—where diversity has skyrocketed over the past five or six years—and college sports embarrassing.
“College sport is the only place diversity has been left behind,” Lapchick noted. “It just doesn’t happen on college campuses the way it should.”
