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Is that a racist leprechaun?
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You have to hand it to the Fighting Irish. Anyone even remotely associated with the University of Notre Dame chirps pretty loud that the school is a different place. They say at Notre Dame academics are more valued than athletics, and that there is no substitute for individual integrity. The alumni talk at great lengths about how the top-notch education you receive there extends far beyond the classroom into life.
Yet for all the talking, the only education the great UND has been giving lately is a lesson in institutional racism. The school recently awarded its new head football coach Charlie Weis a 10-year contract extension worth millions of dollars after compiling a 5-2 record midway through his first season. While this may not seem that odd at first glance, a look at Notre Dame’s recent history paints a different story.
Weis, a white coach, replaced a fired Ty Willingham, who was the first African American head coach in any sport in the history of Notre Dame. Willingham spent three years at UND in which he won more games than he lost, including the year he was let go.
Up until the firing of Willingham, Notre Dame had prided itself on letting coaches finish out any remaining years they had on their contracts.
However, in Willingham’s case, he
was let go with two years remaining on his contract.
In addition to all of this, Willingham started his first year with an 8-0 record, compared to Weis’ 5-2 start. Yet Willingham was not offered any sort of contract extension. A common argument for Weis’ extension is that he has energized the school in a way that Willingham did not, but that’s really not true. Willingham was featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated that year with a headline that read, “What a difference a coach makes.” If you’re making the cover of the most prestigious sports magazine in America, you have a lot of people pretty energized about you.
So if Willingham had more initial success then Weis, and the only thing that much different about the two coaches is the color of their skin, why the 10-year extension for Weis and not Willingham?
Are Notre Dame officials really sitting around a fire in a dark room having secret meetings about dumping the black coaches as some have suggested? Could there really be that much blatant racism at one of America’s top private schools?
Probably not.
What seems more likely is even places like Notre Dame suffer from a system of institutional racism. Notre Dame, like everywhere else, is systematically set up to reproduce ethnic and racial inequalities.
The people hiring and firing the likes of Charlie Weis and Ty Willingham do not have to be racist themselves or even have racist intentions to produce a racist result. You don’t need racist people if the system itself is racist. Willingham was not fired simply because he is black.
He was fired because he did not reach the expectation level Notre Dame had for him. Unfortunately for him, the system only gave him three years to reach those expectations, whereas it gives somebody like Weis an extra decade.
DREW MAYES
Opinion Editor
