Monday, December 7, 2015
Some animals are more equal than others
As you may have noticed the football team has changed coaches again. It did so in the same manner as the last time--the athletic director announced his name. Now, please understand that the reason for this post is not to blast the athletic department nor the new coach. I'm a season ticket holder and enjoy football. I often have athletes from various teams in class. However, for those of us who have been on or chaired search committees, the process seemed a bit truncated. We are charged with doing a proper search, having a diverse group of candidates and having a diverse committee. None of this seems to have occurred for a position that is one of the highest paid on campus. So here we are in a time when many positions are frozen, the enrollment is down and rumors have it we may be eleven million in the hole. This past fall we were all required to go to Title IX training this and a new position was created to help further diversity at our institution. An excellent goal. But I must pose the question, are we really all in this together? Don't panic, I have been in higher education for over thirty-six years, so I know the answer to that question.
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7 comments:
If you have been in higher ed long enough, here at UT or anywhere else, you would know that searches and appointments of coaches never follow the standard process required for staff, faculty or administrative positions. That should surprise no one. Not a new process and same at every college, and I have no idea what a job search has to do with Title IX?
Why, if everyone is required to follow a process do some get exempted from it? The Title IX reference was that we were all required to attend an "educational meeting" so we would understand the law. We were all there signing in. It was used as an example of all the peasants being told what to do. It was not meant to equate Title IX with hiring a football coach. However, my understanding is that civil rights laws require equal opportunity for those interested in applying for work. This should especially be true of state run, tax payer supported universities such as ours. This job was never advertised and is an incredibly high paying opportunity. I am bright enough to know how univerities hire coaches, but I am just old enough and crusty enough to say it's wrong.
With appropriate credit to Robert Maynard Hutchins, faculty involvement has the same relation to hiring football coaches that bullfighting has to agriculture.
My understanding is that in the case (perhaps a common situation) is that the AD received a large number of applications for the head football coach position, so it was an open search. I have no idea if equity and other HR procedures are followed, but again what happened here is the usual practice at college football programs across the country.
May not be right, but is common and frankly not an issue worthy of considerable focus and debate considering the many other more important and critical issues facing UT and higher ed.
Go to the U.S. News & World Report website and review where UT stacks up academically with other universities and you will quickly understand how trivial this whole football discussion really is.
As long as we are an open enrollment school accepting students with Ohio high school diplomas and 2.0 GPA (hundreds of these students each year enter UT), UT will continue to have low scores on any major college ranking system as they all include measures such as GPA, retention and graduation rates - all of which are directly correlated to HS GPAs and very difficult to overcome at the college level. Many other colleges in Ohio, and other states, benefit by sending such students to regional campus (for example at Kent State) and thus rankings of main campus are not impacted by performance of that portion of the undergraduate population.
The real problem with the sports situation at UT is that these operations get significant support from mandatory student fees. Do our students really have hundreds of dollars per semester to give to sports teams they don't care about?
Let football do whatever it wants, but don't fund it out of the pockets of the students -- unless they're paying admission to go to a game they actually want to see.
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