Should The NCAA Become Socially Active?

Even though the National Collegiate Athletic Association is technically classified as an amateur sports organization, it is still one of the biggest "leagues" within the USA. Hundreds of thousands play sports for their college or universities, but none are bigger than college football and basketball. It is extremely popular today for professional teams and athletes within these sports to take a stand against social injustice in order to bring attention to social issues that unfortunately plague our nation, but the NCAA is on the outside looking in. An article from ESPN took a look at the diversity within college's hiring tendencies in terms of gender and race and this can correlate to their stance on social issues.

The article shows that the NCAA has done a good job in terms of hiring and maintaining an equal number of women to men and white's to minorities when it comes to certain positions. However, these positive trends only go so far. When it comes to conferences and not just the NCAA offices, there is a drastic difference that is extremely noticeable. Actually, saying it is extremely noticeable doesn't even do it justice. 28 out of 30 conference commissioners in D1 college athletics are white. If we look at the NCAA as a whole, where we take into account D1, D2, and D3 schools, 84%, 90%, and 93% of the athletic directors are white, respectively. One last thing that is worthy of noting is that within women's athletics 59% of their coaches are male. None of this seems fair to me and it most certainly does not show that the NCAA cares about giving everyone of all backgrounds a fair chance at securing a certain job. There are a ton of colleges that pride themselves on providing a liberal arts education. Well, a part of that is teaching students how to give everyone a fair shot and to accept people of every race, gender, class, background, and so on. These numbers make it seem that even though they teach their students this, the administration of these colleges do not embody it. So, it does not appear that the NCAA is ready to tackle issues of social justice just yet, but if they would like to in the future, then they must give jobs to minorities who are more than capable of assuming those positions.

It is never a bad idea to voice your own opinion on a matter that is of importance to you; I actually implore you to take advantage of that right as a citizen of the United States. Colleges need to keep teaching their students these skills in order to better our society as a whole. It is unfortunate that in the year 2019 we are still talking about racism and acts of social injustice against minorities, but we cannot stop doing so until our nation is finally united.