Penn St. coach should be packing
Penn State practically let women’s basketball coach Rene Portland off the hook, even after an investigation found evidence to support former player Jennifer Harris’ claim that Portland harassed her and ultimately drove her away from the institution, simply because the coach thought Harris was gay. (She isn’t.) The school hit Portland with a $10,000 fine and required her to attend some diversity sessions. And instead of expressing appreciation for a remarkably light sentence, or simply shutting up and slinking home, silently grateful that she still had a job at a school funded by the taxpayers of Pennsylvania, Portland issued a defiant statement, saying the conclusions of the investigation were “flawed” and she disagreed with the ruling.
If there were any justice in this world, Rene Portland would be packing her office and getting her resume in order. She should be looking for a job; after all, if you or I did what Portland did, we’d be out on our asses…and we’d richly deserve it.
Women’s college athletics is thought by some to be the playgrounds of lesbians. Of course, there is nothing but prejudice to back up this belief (a friend of mine refers to female soccer players not so charitably as “dykes in spikes”), but the prejudice is strong enough that some female coaches feel honor-bound to protect the honor of their gender by “purifying” their rosters of real or suspected lesbians. Such was the fate of Jennifer Harris- nevermind that Harris isn’t a lesbian…like that even matters.
No reasonable person will deny that their are lesbians in college and indeed professional sports. Here in Houston, Sheryl Swoopes of the WNBA Comets came out as a lesbian last year to rousing cries of…well, not much of anything, really. Most Americans now have been down this road often enough that a female athlete coming out of the closet is something of an anti-climax. It just simply doesn’t matter, and it shouldn’t.
Penn State found that Rene Portland created a “hostile, intimidating and offensive environment” for Harris, for the simple reason that she thought Harris was gay. Why does the (non)issue of Harris’ sexual orientation have to even come into play? What happened to worrying about Harris’ ability to play basketball at the Division I level? If she can do that, why would it matter if she were sleeping with the Swedish Bikini Team?
And why isn’t Portland applying for unemployment? Unless, of course, those who run Penn State’s athletic department have no real problem with condoning Portland’s behavior. Or perhaps they even approve of it, but know that public opinion demanded that something be done. A slap on the wrist? Jennifer Harris deserves better.
This is hardly the only time Portland has dealt with issues of homosexuality. She gave voice to her views on the subject in an article in the Chicago Sun-Times in 1986. And Jere Longman profiled Portland’s views through quotes from former players in a 1991 article for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
The stereotype that women’s basketball, whether in college or the WNBA, is entirely composed of lesbians is as inaccurate as it is prevalent among critics who somehow find nothing wrong with using that perception as a means to denigrate the sport. It’s an easy laugh at the sports bar, or an implied insult on talk radio. Just one more example of how homophobia is the last stronghold of acceptable hate.
Women’s basketball is not synonymous with homosexuality. But there is no denying that the athletic world is one area of life in which some gay women have been able to find a culture that isn’t inherently hostile. A place where they can be themselves without the fear of people defining their entire existence by their sexuality.
Frankly, Portland is lucky to still have a job, and if the troglodytes who run the athletic department at Penn State had a functional set of cojones, she would be burning up the phone lines trying to line up another coaching job- perhaps at some place more amenable to her prehistoric mindset…like Bob Jones University, perhaps?
If any of us had engaged in the sort of egregious harrassment that Penn State found Portland to be guilty of, we would be summarily (and justifiably) fired. Portland, though, gets a slap on the wrist and a warning to never do it again. All this really demonstrates is that the cowardly lions who run Penn State’s athletic really don’t get it. Jennifer Harris had the perfect right to expect that her coach, and by extension the university, would treat her with the dignity and respect she deserves- and that’s exact what she didn’t get.
Replace “gay” with any religion or race and ask yourself whether Portland still deserves her job.
So now, in addition to being taught to hate people for their sexual orientation, players (and students in general) at Penn State can learn that you can put a price on intolerance ‚Äö√Ѭ∂ and it’s $10,000.
Portland’s defenders will talk about all the work she’s done at the school and in the community during her tenure. Good for her - hopefully she managed to help some people while mentally poisoning others.
No matter how much good Portland has done, it cannot wipe away the stain on her character that her oppression of and discrimination towards Jennifer Harris has created. An old high school coach used to tell me that “Twenty attaboys will be erased by one f—-up”. Portland would do well to heed this advice, because she has a lot of work ahead of her if she wants to convince people that she’s not a hate-filled troll.
Portland has made very little effort to conceal her feelings on the issue of tolerance. And the administration was most likely right, or at least not at fault, in not acting on those reports. Portland shouldn’t be punished for her thoughts, no matter how hateful they seem to many.
But those same viewpoints should have been fair game as evidence when Portland was found to have acted on those views to harass Harris. Penn State has more than two decades of Portland’s tenure to know this wasn’t an isolated incident or misunderstanding.
Portland is a homophobe.
And in this country, she has every right to be.
But that doesn’t mean the citizens of Pennsylvania should be obligated to pay her to spread those views among current students or discriminate against prospective students at the state’s land-grant university.
It’s sad that Portland views the world through such myopic lenses; it’s reprehensible that, knowing that, the school still wants her as its coach.
Indeed. As reprehensible as Portland’s behavior has been, what’s even worse is that Penn State has condoned her behavior by allowing her to continue as coach of their women’s basketball team. The people responsible for this decision, and the school as a whole, ought to be ashamed of themselves.
THEY DESERVE BETTER.
