Northwestern University’s Wildcat women have outperformed on the playing field in the last few years, bringing home national championships in field hockey and lacrosse as well as conference championships in softball. On the medal podiums, in the trophy cases and at the upcoming Paris Olympics, Northwestern sportswomen are everywhere. As a professor here, I’m particularly proud that our female student-athletes are simultaneously crushing it in the classroom.
But when it comes to athletics administration and oversight, where are the women? On that scoreboard, Northwestern is mediocre at best. The current search for a new athletic director— our third in just over three years — presents an opportunity to do better. Unfortunately, we’re already missing the mark.
Change is certainly necessary. Even setting aside conference realignment and new rules over the rights of athletes to control their name, image and likeness, which are transforming college sports across the country, Northwestern stands at a pivotal crossroads. It has spent the past three years reeling from self-inflicted athletics scandals involving accusations of racism, hazing, bullying and sexual harassment. (The university is also on track to spend more than $100 million in associated legal fees, according to an estimate from Sports Illustrated.)
But change looks unlikely, given the search process that the university announced recently. For starters, the process is dominated by men, beginning with the search firm’s leadership. According to its website, TurnkeyZRG’s CEO is a man, as are six of its seven managing directors. The athletic director searches led by this firm that these men manage seem to yield overwhelmingly male hires. Northwestern’s own announcement explains that TurnkeyZRG has placed athletic directors at seven Big Ten schools, along with the current Big Ten commissioner. What the announcement doesn’t mention is that seven of those eight searches led to the appointment of men. The only one that yielded a woman, Iowa’s Beth Goetz, was overseen by a female president and a female search committee chair.
It’s therefore all the more concerning that women are underrepresented on Northwestern’s search committee, which includes just two women and four men, one of whom is chair. The paucity of women partially reflects the paucity of faculty members: Four of the six search committee members, including the chair, are trustees. Their dominance might suggest that Northwestern sees this role as primarily about business strategy, an approach that has repeatedly endangered our students, and damaged our university’s reputation, in recent years.
Indeed, Northwestern likes to cast athletics as complementary to our educational mission. But if that’s true, then why do trustees outnumber faculty members on the athletic director search committee by a 4-to-1 ratio?
The committee’s composition augurs continuity, not progress. All but one of the current members also served on the search committee for Northwestern’s disastrous 2021 athletic director search. That search resulted in then-President Morton Schapiro’s selection of an inside candidate who was also a named defendant in a sexual harassment lawsuit brought by one of our own cheerleaders. In the process, Northwestern bypassed several highly qualified female finalists, one of whom became Duke’s athletic director later that month. Northwestern’s athletic director, for his part, lasted just nine days before resigning amid widespread protests.
It’s noteworthy, then, that the only new face on this year’s athletic director search committee is Pat Ryan Jr., who has substituted in for his own father, former Northwestern board chair Patrick G. Ryan.
Northwestern has only ever had male athletic directors. That history reflects a broader institutional pattern: Men overwhelmingly appoint other men to the highest positions of leadership, in athletics and beyond. All the chairs of our board of trustees have been men, along with 75% of all trustees, including charter, national and life trustees. All of our presidents have been men, though the trustees deserve credit for the appointment of the late Rebecca Blank.
By these collective metrics, Northwestern is decades behind its peers. Women have served as faculty athletics representatives to the NCAA at other Big Ten schools since 1979. Women have presided over other Big Ten universities since 1988. Iowa’s Christine Grant was a trailblazing national advocate for gender equity in college sports from the 1970s through her death in 2021. Sandy Barbour, who earned her Master of Business Administration at Northwestern in 1991, was assistant director of athletics at Northwestern in the 1980s and went on to serve as Penn State’s athletic director from 2014 through 2022, in the aftermath of a child sex abuse scandal that roiled the football program.
When key decisions get made, it matters who’s in the room, and it’s clear that the status quo at Northwestern isn’t working. Just two years after the ignominious athletic director search of 2021, dozens of former student-athletes sued the university over their alleged experiences of hazing. Our cheerleaders continue to make allegations about racism, sexual harassment, body shaming and safety concerns. Meanwhile, our current athletic director (and soon-to-be vice president of athletic strategy) has publicly called women “man’s greatest distraction” and “booty-shaking sex-kittens.”
Money talks, too. Women are 54% of our undergraduates but only 49% of our athletes and 46% of recipients of athlete-related student aid, raising questions about Title IX compliance. Meanwhile, while Title IX doesn’t outlaw unequal expenditures, it’s also worth observing that Northwestern spends 4.5 times more on average salaries for head coaches of men’s teams than it does for women’s; three times more on recruiting male prospects; and 2.4 times more on men’s sports generally. That doesn’t include our in-progress $800 million football field, which will deepen the spending gap by orders of magnitude.
Appointing more women won’t solve Northwestern’s problems, of course, but it would be a start. While our student-athletes are leaders in the classroom and on the playing field, our university is behind when it comes to promoting women to positions of athletics governance. As Washington Post columnist Kevin Blackistone concluded in 2021, Northwestern offers further proof that “women remain disrespected in sports by the men who run them.” Northwestern touts the leadership skills that women gain through athletics, only to deny women leadership of athletics.
Great teams win on the field by harnessing the talents of every player. We need to apply that same mindset to athletics governance at Northwestern, ensuring that we consider the full roster of talent.
Caitlin Fitz is associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in Northwestern University’s History Department. She will teach a class next winter on the global history of women’s sports.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email letters@chicagotribune.com.
