Required diversity instead of focusing on the best qualified.

Scott Jaschik reports at Inside Higher Ed.

Requiring Diverse Pools

The National Football League has a requirement that a minority candidate be interviewed for every head coaching position. The requirement is known as the Rooney rule, for Dan Rooney, owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, who pushed the idea.

On Thursday, the new chancellor of the University of Texas System, William H. McRaven, announced that he plans to apply the rule to every administrative search for dean and higher in the 14-institution system.

While many colleges pledge to interview more minority or female candidates for a range of positions, making it a requirement to interview such candidates at the finalist step of searches is not common — especially for a large university system.

“We are going to implement a Rooney rule similar to what exists in the NFL for hiring head coaches, except ours will be for higher education and health care,” said McRaven in a speech announcing the new requirement and also a series of other goals for the system. “This so-called Rooney rule will ensure that qualified women and minorities have an opportunity to be considered for every senior-level position from dean and above. We will write it into UT policy that no senior position can be filled without allowing a qualified woman or minority candidate to be interviewed all the way to the last round of the process.”

McRaven added, “While this will not guarantee women or minority hires — nor should it if a candidate is not qualified — it will put more women and minorities in a position for the selection committee to recognize the great talents that may have heretofore gone unnoticed.”

While the rule will apply only to searches for administrators, McRaven also called for substantial new efforts to recruit minority faculty members. He didn’t cite (and UT officials said late Thursday that they didn’t have available) statistics on the racial and ethnic makeup of administrators in the system and its universities. But he did cite figures about the faculty.