Among those who oppose race preferences, you think you’d find coaches of sports teams. But according to this story, coaches at the University of Colorado (UC), Colorado State University, and the University of Northern Colorado say the proposed ban on race preferences is a “threat to college students.”
The article quotes Jeff Bzdelik, former NBA coach and current basketball coach at UC, who says Colorado should be increasing “opportunities” for blacks students, and he believes Amendment 46 would eliminate those opportunities.
First, if “opportunities” means being admitted under less rigorous standards because of skin color, Bzdelik is right. Amendment 46 seeks to eliminate double standards, discrimination, and preferences.
Second, I wonder how Bzdelik feels about race preferences as applied to athletics? I’m almost certain CU’s basketball team is predominantly black, with a few white tokens thrown in. What if all college sports teams in Colorado had to maintain a balance of colors, as it were, to comply with politically correct notions of diversity? Bzdelik would have to eliminate black players to make room for whites and Asians.
I’ll go out on a limb to say Bzdelik would not like it, nor would any other basketball or football coach in Colorado’s universities. There’s a reason blacks tend to dominate sports teams like basketball and football, and it’s performance-based. Imagine a college telling the coach he must reduce the number of blacks on the team, regardless of performance, for the sake of diversity, and increase the number of whites and Asians, regardless of performance.
Ridiculous? In a way, but why shouldn’t Jeff Bzdelik and other college coaches be held to the same standards as admissions offices? After all, diversity is a noble thing to which we all should strive to acquire, is it not?
(By the way, I couldn’t find a group photo of the basketball or football teams on any university’s web site.)
Comments on this entry are closed.