Something is rotten in Weightman Hall.
Penn athletic director Steve Bilsky is refusing to talk about the search for a new men's basketball coach. He won't even discuss the process he plans on using to pick Fran Dunphy's successor.
Sources close to the program have said that, unlike in previous searches for a new men's basketball coach, there will be no search committee this time around.
That means Bilsky will be vetting candidates pretty much by himself, though I am sure he will get a lot of help from other high-ranking athletic department officials.
President Amy Gutmann's office confirmed yesterday that she will be interviewing the final candidates, though it's unclear whether she'll actually have a say in the matter or whether she'll simply rubber stamp the top choice of the athletic department.
Either way, this process is simply wrong.
Penn is about to hire its most prominent employee. The men's basketball coach brings more attention to the University than any all-star professor or award-winning researcher.
At Penn, along with the president of the University, the men's basketball coach is the face of the school.
He speaks to the media more than any other Penn employee. He is one of the University's chief fund-raisers.
In the case of Fran Dunphy, the men's basketball coach was also a civic leader in Philadelphia. Dunphy led the city's Coaches vs. Cancer effort and was active in the Big Brothers Big Sisters program, acting on Penn's behalf.
Coaching basketball is just a fraction of what a basketball coach does at Penn.
So it's absolutely ridiculous that only a small cadre of athletic department administrators are involved in the search process.
When Dunphy was named Penn's head coach in 1989, then-athletic director Paul Rubincam put together a committee that included all sorts of University employees -- from professors to academic administrators.
The same was true just recently at Temple, which even brought in consultants from outside the university to make sure the best candidate was hired.
And such committees are commonplace at Penn well beyond the athletic department, even with smaller profile hires.
In 2003, 13 people were on a committee to pick the new director of libraries. Several years ago, eight people convened to pick a general manager for WXPN, Penn's public radio station. In 1996, six people were on the search committee to pick a university chaplain.
The absence of a committee in this case means that there won't be a diversity of opinion. Bilsky can simply hire his favorite man, even if that candidate is not the best for the job.
Moreover, there's no reason for Bilsky to be so tight-lipped about the type of candidate he's looking for, especially if he's not going to use a search committee.
How can we trust that the best candidate is hired? Well, Bilsky can publicly declare what sort of candidate he would like to hire.
He should say, "We're looking for someone who: a) can recruit top players in a non-scholarship situation, b) has a proven history of winning and c) would be a fantastic representative of the University."
Then, when Bilsky announces a new coach, everyone can judge him based on those qualifications.
It's a pretty standard hiring practice, even at Penn.
While he hasn't hired one for a revenue sport, this is far from the first time Bilsky has hired a coach. His selection of Zeke Jones to be the new wrestling coach this past summer is an excellent example of the type of talent he can lure to Penn.
But this is the biggest decision he'll make in his tenure at the University. And the decision he will make will affect many outside of the athletic department.
Hopefully, Bilsky will hire the best man for the job, but with the way he's going about the search, we'll never know.
We'll just have to take his word for it. And that's not good enough.
David Burrick is a senior urban studies major from Short Hills, N.J., and former Senior Sports Editor and Executive Editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian. His e-mail address is dburrick@sas.upenn.edu
