I told Walsh that I didn’t need one of sports’ greatest legends quitting five games into the season. I implored him to stay on, saying we’d do a proper search as soon as the season was over. In the end he stayed until the end of the season. We then launched a search for Bill’s successor. Tyrone Willingham, who’d been an assistant at Stanford and was now with the Minnesota Vikings, emerged as a top candidate. “We are going to be criticized for his inexperience,” I told Gerhard. “But everyone says he was great when he was here, and we all believe he’ll be a fabulous recruiter.”
“Do it,” Gerhard said. Then he added with a chuckle, “I don’t worry too much about being criticized for appointing inexperienced people.”
The press conference announcing Ty’s appointment was set for the next day. I woke up that morning and went down to get the paper. In the sports section I saw that Glenn Dickey of the San Francisco Chronicle had written that Stanford was about to hire an inexperienced coach because I’d insisted on bringing on a black person. I was furious and called Glenn. “You didn’t say that the University of Colorado hired Rick Neuheisel [who had also not been a coordinator] because he was blond,” I told him.
I also called Ty, who said that it wasn’t the first time he’d been underestimated. Willingham would go on to be one of Stanford’s most successful coaches, returning the Cardinal to the Rose Bowl in 2000 for the first time in twenty-eight years. Glenn Dickey later apologized, admitting that he’d been wrong about Willingham.
The truth is, issues of affirmative action are tricky in a university, whether in admissions, in faculty hiring and tenure, or in selecting a football coach. There is probably no single issue on which I’ve felt more misunderstood. For instance, I have been called an opponent of affirmative action. In fact, I’m a supporter of affirmative action—if done in what I consider to be the right way. No one can doubt that years of racial prejudice produced underrepresentation of minorities and women in all aspects of American life. Corporate boardrooms, management suites, and elite university faculties and student bodies have for our entire history failed to reflect even roughly the ethnic mix of the country. That is not acceptable in America, which is the world’s greatest multiethnic democracy.
Yet the question of how to remedy that situation is a delicate one. I’ve always believed that there are plenty of qualified minorities for these roles—even some who are “twice as good.” But the processes of selection, the networks through which people are identified, can very easily be insular and produce the same outcomes over and over. The answer lies in looking outside established networks and patterns of hiring. I consistently told the Stanford community quite openly that affirmative action had figured in my own case. Stanford traditionally found its faculty at peer institutions such as Harvard or Yale or perhaps the University of California—not at the University of Denver. But when, through the Ford Fellowship, I appeared on the radar screen, Stanford took a chance on me as an assistant professor. I always closed by saying that it had worked out just fine for me and for the university.
Unfortunately, very few minorities—particularly blacks, Latinos, and Native Americans—go to graduate school, the pool from which assistant professors are selected. I had to make this somewhat unpopular point frequently to defend the relatively meager number of minorities we hired onto the faculty in any given year, though those numbers increased during my tenure. When pressed by minority students, I’d ask for a show of hands regarding how many were going on to graduate school. Few hands would go up. I’d then tell them that I couldn’t create assistant professors out of whole cloth and that they should consider going to graduate school. And we tried vigorously to recruit good minority students to our graduate programs. Very often, though, we found ourselves competing for the same few black or Latino students who’d been identified by our peers, Harvard, Yale, and so on.
It is also true that in student admissions it is necessary to take race into account. I don’t know why, but minorities continue to score lower on standardized tests. Even after we adjust for socioeconomic status, this disparity holds. But as my own story about the results of my PSAT in high school shows, these tests are not fully predictive of a student’s success or failure. Over the years I have had students with perfect records at entry fail and students who were thought to have been marginal succeed. Yet the idea that minority students are getting a break at the expense of white students is one of the most toxic issues of our time.
The key to affirmative action, I believe, is not to lower standards but to look for good prospects where you would not ordinarily find them. Yet there are pitfalls with the whole concept of affirmative action. There is the stigma that is easily attached to minorities simply because there is a widespread belief that affirmative action figured heavily in every case. This leads to what President George W. Bush called (in the context of elementary and secondary education) the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” Many times, well-meaning faculty would say that they were taking extra time with their “remedial students” to help them catch up. A little investigation would typically reveal that these professors equated “remedial” with “minority.” When I attended my first Phi Beta Kappa ceremony in 1994, I was surprised to see only two black inductees. I suspected that minority students were internalizing the message of inferiority and living down to the expectations that were being set for them.
I decided to start a program for freshman called Partners in Academic Excellence. Minority faculty and graduate students agreed to take fifteen or so minority freshmen to dinner once a week. The graduate students also mentored the freshman—for instance, by reading their class papers. My suspicions were confirmed when the black graduate students reported that the freshman were being given “courtesy” grades, higher than warranted so as not to affect their self-esteem. The problem, of course, was that easier grading early on left the students unprepared for the tougher subject matter that was coming.
Gerhard supported the program but worried that I was setting up a miniature “segregated” academic system within Stanford. Ironically, that was exactly what I was doing—trying to reproduce elements of my segregated childhood, when teachers did not worry about being called racists for their high expectations and “no victims” approach.
In time, we reworked the program to broaden its participation. We learned that student athletes suffered from the same prejudices, as did women students in math and the sciences. I was reminded again how difficult it is to overcome preconceptions and stereotypes—particularly for people who want so desperately to do the right thing for “those poor minorities and women.”
I loved the regular rhythm of the provost’s job, which gave me time to spend with Daddy. We continued to work together on the Center for a New Generation and saw it grow and prosper. I visited him at least twice a week, always going over after church on Sunday to watch sports, as we’d done so many years before. He and Clara and I went to Stanford football and basketball games together. Daddy loved my friends and became close to several of them. One day, standing on the practice field while watching spring football together, he turned to me and said, “I’m so glad I came here. Palo Alto is such a nice village. And it is awfully nice to be the father of one of the most important people in the village.”