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Duke A.D. White Pushes for Diversity
1/23/2012 7:00:00 AM | Athletics
DURHAM, N.C. - Duke University boasts one of the nation's most diverse student bodies.
Shouldn't that diversity be reflected by the school's athletic administration?
That's a question that Kevin White asked himself a little over three years ago when he came to Duke as Vice President and Director of Athletics. Since his arrival in Durham on May 31, 2008, White has taken steps to make his department reflect the diversity of the university as a whole.
"We are deeply committed to pluralism," White said. "I would like to think that would be relatively obvious per the appointments we've been able to make on the administrative side and through the various staff positions throughout the department."
Indeed, Duke currently includes 37 minorities among the 238 employees in the athletic department. Of those 37, 30 were hired during White's tenure. Of the 20 members of what is listed as the "senior administration" of the athletic department (deputy/associate/assistant athletic directors), six are women and four are minorities (Nina King, an associate director of athletics / chief of staff, and Felicia Tittle, the executive director of Recreation of and Physical education, fit both categories).
Of those eight minority/women senior administrators, seven were either hired by White or promoted by him to that status.
"I think the number of high-quality ethnic minorities and women that we've been able to recruit to Duke speaks for itself," White said. "For me, it's very simple. We have [659] student-athletes in 26 sports. Just about 50 percent of them happen to be female. And we have a whole bunch of highly talented people who are ethnic minorities."
Duke's student body is divided between white (47 percent), Asian-American (22 percent), African-American (10 percent), Hispanic (seven percent) and mixed (14 percent). The school's athletic population reflects a similar diversity – it includes 465 whites (70.6 percent), 92 African-Americans (14.0 percent), 30 Asian-Americans (4.6 percent), 20 Hispanics (3.0 percent), plus three American Indians and 44 who list two or more racial components (6.7 percent).
CORRECTING THE PASTÂ Â Â
Duke was, of course, founded as a segregated school in a segregated state.
But the school has always been ahead of its community when it comes to change – especially in athletics.
Duke was just the second school in North Carolina (and one of the first in the South) to break the so-called "gentleman's agreement" that forced integrated Northern teams to hold out their African American players when playing Southern teams. Blue Devil football coach Wallace Wade agreed to play Syracuse in 1938 with its full complement of players. Wade was especially sensitive to the issue, having played on the line at Brown with Fritz Pollard, the first African-American to win All-America honors.
On Sept. 28, 1950, Duke beat Pittsburgh in Wallace Wade Stadium – the first time a major college team in North Carolina played an integrated football team at home. Just over a year later on Dec. 1, 1951, the Duke basketball team faced Temple in what was the first integrated basketball game in North Carolina. The events surrounding that game were significant in that Duke students protested the refusal of a Durham hotel to allow African American Sam Sylvester to stay with the rest of his team, then gave him a cordial welcome before the game.
"They had this announcement before the game – that Sam was the first black to play in that stadium," teammate Bill Mlkvy recalled. "He ran out alone and got a standing ovation. Everybody was clapping and cheering. It lasted more than a minute. He was overwhelmed. It was a heart-warming experience. The people at Duke were exemplary. They should be commended."
It was more than another decade before Duke integrated its own basketball team, but even that was ahead of the regional curve. C.B. Claiborne of Danville, Va., played freshman basketball for Duke in 1965-66 (freshmen were ineligible for the varsity at that time), then joined Vic Bubas' varsity team for the 1966-67 season. Claiborne was the first African-American to play for a major college team in North Carolina and just the second to play in the ACC, one year after Billy Jones broke the color line at Maryland and a year before Charlie Scott and Norwood Todmann integrated UNC and Wake Forest, respectively.
But Duke's progressive record in the struggle to end segregation was not reflected in the makeup of the athletic department that White inherited just over three years ago.
MAKING THE CHANGE
White's career in athletic administration demonstrates – and explains – his strong commitment to pluralism. His background is in track and field, which is a sport with strong minority participation. He not only ran track in college, but started as a track and field coach. When he was acting head track coach at Central Michigan, he got to know assistant football coach Tyrone Willingham, who he would later hire as head football coach at Notre Dame.
At the University of Maine, White hired the first minority head coaches in men's and women's basketball at that school (and in that state). As the athletic director at Tulane, he extended the contract of basketball coach Perry Clark, who was rebuilding that program from scratch after a five-year hiatus. At Arizona State, he replaced Bill Frieder with Rob Evans, who guided the Sun Devils to four postseason appearances in Tempe.
He's currently on the board of directors for the Black Coaches and Administrators.
"I think it's pretty simple," White said. "I'm a product of my environment and my past experiences. And I think the senior team here feels the same way. I've had a strong interest in providing pluralistic opportunities for student-athletes. If we really think seriously about this entire education hypothesis behind college athletics, this is really an educational experience. To provide an artificial representation in terms of race and gender, rather than a real-life eclectic representation is for me, something I couldn't support."
At the same time, White made it clear that he's not trying to install a quota system at Duke or to make exclusively minority hires.
"For every Rob Evans we hired, we hired 10 guys who weren't ethnic minorities," he said. "You track the very best pool you can and if you do a very good job, you're going to find that really good ethnic minority or you're going to find that really good female. We've got to be really diligent in that regard."
To that end, he lured Gerald Harrison from Coach David Cutcliffe's Duke football staff to help him develop a pool of qualified candidates.
"We have Gerald now, our associate AD for human resources," White explained. "We've got him on the point, so that when we have a search, we want to make sure we turn over every rock. That's all I can promise to do. We're never going to go in with a perceived idea of let's do x, y, or z. We've going to hire the best person, but if we do a good job building the pool, there will be some candidates … and a lot of them. That's what my 30 years tells me – it will happen. It will happen with some reasonable frequency. When and where does not really matter. We're not going to put somebody who is unqualified there."
Harrison was serving as assistant athletic director for football development under Cutcliffe when he was approach by White's deputy athletics director Stan Wilcox.
"One day Stan called me and said, 'Let's go to lunch,'" Harrison recalled. "He told me they were interviewing candidates for compliance director and human resources. I thought he was just making conversation – then he told me they wanted me to apply for the human resources position.
"I said no the first time. I was always a football guy. My Dad had been a coach for 40 years. I worked on the football staff at Tennessee. I had been with Coach Cutcliffe for 18 months. I didn't want to leave. But I realized that it would be a great step professionally. And it offered a chance to learn from the best in the business."
Harrison's job is to develop candidates for potential job openings.
"Basically, my job is to get the best candidates we can get for any job opening," he said. "If I can get a great pool, there's a better chance we can achieve diversity. We explore a lot of ways, more than just putting ads in the paper. We have to use different venues."
One of the strategies is to use internships to test and develop candidates.
"We started going younger," Harrison said. "Kevin White calls it 'building our bench' when we get a chance to audition and train them. Then when a position opens up, we can plug them in."
FINDING THE RIGHT COACH
So far, the greatest limiting factor for Duke's efforts to diversify has been the stability of the Blue Devil athletic program. White inherited a strong lineup of coaches and administrators and he's not about to shove anybody out the door to improve diversity.
"We just haven't had as many positions to fill," Harrison said.
That stability is most evident in the school's lineup of head coaches. Critics have complained that Duke is the only school in the ACC that has never had a minority as a head coach. That's not exactly true – Asian American Liz Tchou coached the Duke field hockey team from 1996 to 2002. But it is true that Duke has never had an African American head coach.Â
That's something White would like to change, but so far he hasn't had the chance. In the three years since he arrived from Notre Dame, he's only been called on to fill two head coaching vacancies – in men's golf and women's field hockey.
"Those were sports where there were not a lot of minority candidates available," White said.
Harrison said Duke tried to find qualified minority candidates in those sports.
"For instance, for field hockey we scoured the country," he said. "I called every source. It was just not there. We're not going to hire a minority just to hire a minority. I could make myself the field hockey coach, but that's not going to get us in the playoffs. We're going to pursue quality whenever we make a hire."
White said that is a responsibility he owes Duke's student-athletes.
"These kids who come here with the highest aspirations, they deserve to have the very best coaching we can provide," he said. "You've got to make darn sure, first and foremost, that they're the very best coaches we can recruit here. Because that's what we promised.
"I feel a real sense of responsibility to deliver."
The quality of Duke's coaching is reflected in the school's strong performance in the most recent Directors' Cup, which measures overall athletic performance. The Blue Devils finished fifth nationally (and first in the ACC) in 2010-11. At the same time, Duke posted one of the strongest performances in the NCAA's Academic Performance Report with 15 sports listed among the top 10 percent in the nation.
It's that combination of success on the field and in the classroom that White believes needs to be maintained.
"The kids who make the 'Duke Decision,' they come here to double-major – that's my little expression and I've used it in front of the faculty and others," he said. "They come here because they can garner a world-class experience academically and can compete at the highest level athletically. I don't want either one to marginalize the other. I meet with all the captains every year and when I ask them, why Duke? And in their own syntax, they tell me it's so they can come to Duke and double major."
But White wants to make sure that while Duke does that, its athletic leadership mirrors the rest of the university.
"I would hope we can continue to push this agenda forward, so that we have an appropriate representation of talented women and minorities within the department and on the coaching staffs," he said. "Duke will always be in position to recruit the best in class in any sport. I think we've got a phenomenal institution – arguably one of the best schools in the country, if not in the world – and an intriguing culture and environment to recruit just about anybody we want to."
Shouldn't that diversity be reflected by the school's athletic administration?
That's a question that Kevin White asked himself a little over three years ago when he came to Duke as Vice President and Director of Athletics. Since his arrival in Durham on May 31, 2008, White has taken steps to make his department reflect the diversity of the university as a whole.
"We are deeply committed to pluralism," White said. "I would like to think that would be relatively obvious per the appointments we've been able to make on the administrative side and through the various staff positions throughout the department."
Indeed, Duke currently includes 37 minorities among the 238 employees in the athletic department. Of those 37, 30 were hired during White's tenure. Of the 20 members of what is listed as the "senior administration" of the athletic department (deputy/associate/assistant athletic directors), six are women and four are minorities (Nina King, an associate director of athletics / chief of staff, and Felicia Tittle, the executive director of Recreation of and Physical education, fit both categories).
Of those eight minority/women senior administrators, seven were either hired by White or promoted by him to that status.
"I think the number of high-quality ethnic minorities and women that we've been able to recruit to Duke speaks for itself," White said. "For me, it's very simple. We have [659] student-athletes in 26 sports. Just about 50 percent of them happen to be female. And we have a whole bunch of highly talented people who are ethnic minorities."
Duke's student body is divided between white (47 percent), Asian-American (22 percent), African-American (10 percent), Hispanic (seven percent) and mixed (14 percent). The school's athletic population reflects a similar diversity – it includes 465 whites (70.6 percent), 92 African-Americans (14.0 percent), 30 Asian-Americans (4.6 percent), 20 Hispanics (3.0 percent), plus three American Indians and 44 who list two or more racial components (6.7 percent).
CORRECTING THE PASTÂ Â Â
Duke was, of course, founded as a segregated school in a segregated state.
But the school has always been ahead of its community when it comes to change – especially in athletics.
Duke was just the second school in North Carolina (and one of the first in the South) to break the so-called "gentleman's agreement" that forced integrated Northern teams to hold out their African American players when playing Southern teams. Blue Devil football coach Wallace Wade agreed to play Syracuse in 1938 with its full complement of players. Wade was especially sensitive to the issue, having played on the line at Brown with Fritz Pollard, the first African-American to win All-America honors.
On Sept. 28, 1950, Duke beat Pittsburgh in Wallace Wade Stadium – the first time a major college team in North Carolina played an integrated football team at home. Just over a year later on Dec. 1, 1951, the Duke basketball team faced Temple in what was the first integrated basketball game in North Carolina. The events surrounding that game were significant in that Duke students protested the refusal of a Durham hotel to allow African American Sam Sylvester to stay with the rest of his team, then gave him a cordial welcome before the game.
"They had this announcement before the game – that Sam was the first black to play in that stadium," teammate Bill Mlkvy recalled. "He ran out alone and got a standing ovation. Everybody was clapping and cheering. It lasted more than a minute. He was overwhelmed. It was a heart-warming experience. The people at Duke were exemplary. They should be commended."
It was more than another decade before Duke integrated its own basketball team, but even that was ahead of the regional curve. C.B. Claiborne of Danville, Va., played freshman basketball for Duke in 1965-66 (freshmen were ineligible for the varsity at that time), then joined Vic Bubas' varsity team for the 1966-67 season. Claiborne was the first African-American to play for a major college team in North Carolina and just the second to play in the ACC, one year after Billy Jones broke the color line at Maryland and a year before Charlie Scott and Norwood Todmann integrated UNC and Wake Forest, respectively.
But Duke's progressive record in the struggle to end segregation was not reflected in the makeup of the athletic department that White inherited just over three years ago.
MAKING THE CHANGE
White's career in athletic administration demonstrates – and explains – his strong commitment to pluralism. His background is in track and field, which is a sport with strong minority participation. He not only ran track in college, but started as a track and field coach. When he was acting head track coach at Central Michigan, he got to know assistant football coach Tyrone Willingham, who he would later hire as head football coach at Notre Dame.
At the University of Maine, White hired the first minority head coaches in men's and women's basketball at that school (and in that state). As the athletic director at Tulane, he extended the contract of basketball coach Perry Clark, who was rebuilding that program from scratch after a five-year hiatus. At Arizona State, he replaced Bill Frieder with Rob Evans, who guided the Sun Devils to four postseason appearances in Tempe.
He's currently on the board of directors for the Black Coaches and Administrators.
"I think it's pretty simple," White said. "I'm a product of my environment and my past experiences. And I think the senior team here feels the same way. I've had a strong interest in providing pluralistic opportunities for student-athletes. If we really think seriously about this entire education hypothesis behind college athletics, this is really an educational experience. To provide an artificial representation in terms of race and gender, rather than a real-life eclectic representation is for me, something I couldn't support."
At the same time, White made it clear that he's not trying to install a quota system at Duke or to make exclusively minority hires.
"For every Rob Evans we hired, we hired 10 guys who weren't ethnic minorities," he said. "You track the very best pool you can and if you do a very good job, you're going to find that really good ethnic minority or you're going to find that really good female. We've got to be really diligent in that regard."
To that end, he lured Gerald Harrison from Coach David Cutcliffe's Duke football staff to help him develop a pool of qualified candidates.
"We have Gerald now, our associate AD for human resources," White explained. "We've got him on the point, so that when we have a search, we want to make sure we turn over every rock. That's all I can promise to do. We're never going to go in with a perceived idea of let's do x, y, or z. We've going to hire the best person, but if we do a good job building the pool, there will be some candidates … and a lot of them. That's what my 30 years tells me – it will happen. It will happen with some reasonable frequency. When and where does not really matter. We're not going to put somebody who is unqualified there."
Harrison was serving as assistant athletic director for football development under Cutcliffe when he was approach by White's deputy athletics director Stan Wilcox.
"One day Stan called me and said, 'Let's go to lunch,'" Harrison recalled. "He told me they were interviewing candidates for compliance director and human resources. I thought he was just making conversation – then he told me they wanted me to apply for the human resources position.
"I said no the first time. I was always a football guy. My Dad had been a coach for 40 years. I worked on the football staff at Tennessee. I had been with Coach Cutcliffe for 18 months. I didn't want to leave. But I realized that it would be a great step professionally. And it offered a chance to learn from the best in the business."
Harrison's job is to develop candidates for potential job openings.
"Basically, my job is to get the best candidates we can get for any job opening," he said. "If I can get a great pool, there's a better chance we can achieve diversity. We explore a lot of ways, more than just putting ads in the paper. We have to use different venues."
One of the strategies is to use internships to test and develop candidates.
"We started going younger," Harrison said. "Kevin White calls it 'building our bench' when we get a chance to audition and train them. Then when a position opens up, we can plug them in."
FINDING THE RIGHT COACH
So far, the greatest limiting factor for Duke's efforts to diversify has been the stability of the Blue Devil athletic program. White inherited a strong lineup of coaches and administrators and he's not about to shove anybody out the door to improve diversity.
"We just haven't had as many positions to fill," Harrison said.
That stability is most evident in the school's lineup of head coaches. Critics have complained that Duke is the only school in the ACC that has never had a minority as a head coach. That's not exactly true – Asian American Liz Tchou coached the Duke field hockey team from 1996 to 2002. But it is true that Duke has never had an African American head coach.Â
That's something White would like to change, but so far he hasn't had the chance. In the three years since he arrived from Notre Dame, he's only been called on to fill two head coaching vacancies – in men's golf and women's field hockey.
"Those were sports where there were not a lot of minority candidates available," White said.
Harrison said Duke tried to find qualified minority candidates in those sports.
"For instance, for field hockey we scoured the country," he said. "I called every source. It was just not there. We're not going to hire a minority just to hire a minority. I could make myself the field hockey coach, but that's not going to get us in the playoffs. We're going to pursue quality whenever we make a hire."
White said that is a responsibility he owes Duke's student-athletes.
"These kids who come here with the highest aspirations, they deserve to have the very best coaching we can provide," he said. "You've got to make darn sure, first and foremost, that they're the very best coaches we can recruit here. Because that's what we promised.
"I feel a real sense of responsibility to deliver."
The quality of Duke's coaching is reflected in the school's strong performance in the most recent Directors' Cup, which measures overall athletic performance. The Blue Devils finished fifth nationally (and first in the ACC) in 2010-11. At the same time, Duke posted one of the strongest performances in the NCAA's Academic Performance Report with 15 sports listed among the top 10 percent in the nation.
It's that combination of success on the field and in the classroom that White believes needs to be maintained.
"The kids who make the 'Duke Decision,' they come here to double-major – that's my little expression and I've used it in front of the faculty and others," he said. "They come here because they can garner a world-class experience academically and can compete at the highest level athletically. I don't want either one to marginalize the other. I meet with all the captains every year and when I ask them, why Duke? And in their own syntax, they tell me it's so they can come to Duke and double major."
But White wants to make sure that while Duke does that, its athletic leadership mirrors the rest of the university.
"I would hope we can continue to push this agenda forward, so that we have an appropriate representation of talented women and minorities within the department and on the coaching staffs," he said. "Duke will always be in position to recruit the best in class in any sport. I think we've got a phenomenal institution – arguably one of the best schools in the country, if not in the world – and an intriguing culture and environment to recruit just about anybody we want to."
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