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Ripples of Impact

Two Alumni Create Advocates and Allies by Saying No to the Status Quo

by Mike Barone

This February, a new high mark was established in the National Football League (NFL): a record nine men of color now hold the title of head coach. While that represents just 28% of the 32 teams preparing for the 2024 season — versus the 66% of NFL players who identify as minorities* — it was an occasion that one Hartwick alumnus allowed himself to enjoy, if only for a moment.

Cyrus Mehri, ’83, H’21 is a civil rights attorney and champion for the disadvantaged and overlooked. A staunch advocate for diversity and inclusion, he has litigated some of the largest and most significant race and gender cases in U.S. history, earning multimillion-dollar verdicts against the likes of Texaco, The Coca Cola Company, Morgan Stanley and dozens of others. The hallmark of these settlements has been to create innovative reforms.

Yet, he’s best known for developing the NFL’s well-known Rooney Rule with fellow civil rights attorney Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr. In essence, they guided the league to make it mandatory for teams to interview at least one minority candidate during a head coach hiring process. Launched in 2003, it is considered the genesis for much of the diversity progress the NFL and other sports leagues have made in recent years. Moreover, it’s become an overarching model that much of corporate America now follows.

To support the rule, Mehri brought together 100-plus NFL coaches, scouts and front office personnel to create a group focused on fueling equal employment opportunities throughout the league. That group became the Fritz Pollard Alliance, a not-for-profit named in honor of the NFL’s first African American head coach and a Hall of Fame player.

 

Watch Mehri in the NFL 360 documentary, “A Forgotten Man,” for his role with the Fritz Pollard Alliance.

Cyrus Mehri, ’83, H’21 (second from right) holds a press conference with (from left) former NFL players Kellen Winslow Sr. and Warren Moon, along with attorney Johnnie Cochran, with whom he developed the NFL’s Rooney Rule. Photo courtesy of The L.A. Sentinel

Cyrus Mehri, ’83, H’21 (second from right) holds a press conference in 2002 with (from left) former NFL players Kellen Winslow Sr. and Warren Moon, along with attorney Johnnie Cochran, with whom he developed the NFL’s Rooney Rule.
Photo courtesy of The L.A. Sentinel

WHERE PASSIONS IGNITE

For nearly a century, Hartwick has instilled in students a sense of social responsibility — a key component to preparing lifelong learners. The goal has never been to simply produce workers and dole out degrees. To be a Hartwick graduate is to understand and accept a greater challenge: to create a meaningful, positive impact on the world around you.

Few have taken that to heart more than Mehri. A native of Danbury, Conn., he selected Hartwick on the advice of his high school English teacher. Though undecided on a major, Mehri knew he wanted a broad, liberal arts education.

“My Hartwick years were formative years,” he explained. “I was able to find myself at Hartwick.”

He explored philosophy but was also drawn to the sciences due to his interest in environmental causes. However, it was a course in political philosophy that really struck a chord.

“That combination of taking what I liked about philosophy and moving to a more concrete context of political systems sold me on becoming a political science major,” Mehri said. “I realized I didn’t want to study the action. I wanted to be in the action.”

His off-campus experiences made an even greater impression, including J Terms in the Bahamas and Caribbean, where he studied humpback whales. Yet, his “most-defining moment” was a semester with the National Audubon Society in Washington, D.C., where he learned what it takes to impact society.

Cyrus Mehri, ’83, H’21

“I came to Hartwick as a so-so student, but I came back from D.C. as a real one. After that, I was determined to become the best advocate I could be.”

Cyrus Mehri, ’83, H’21

Civil Rights Attorney/Advocate

ADVOCATING FOR COMMUNITIES

Mehri’s journey paralleled that of Daniel Marsh III, ’74, president and CEO of Grow America, an economic development nonprofit committed to ending racial and economic inequality. Grow America works with small businesses and communities nationwide by directing capital to support the development and preservation of affordable housing and small business entrepreneurship. It creates jobs and advances livable communities with social infrastructure investment.

In his youth, Marsh had no idea that his career even existed. He came to Hartwick from Newburgh, N.Y., a Hudson River town impacted by “urban renewal.” A series of policies and initiatives had eradicated entire neighborhoods, displacing thousands of families as their historic fabrics were destroyed. Many of those communities had large minority populations, and Marsh witnessed the poverty, health issues, and sadness these policies wrought. Instinctively, he knew it was wrong.

Then, he got a closer look.

“My family home — where my grandparents still lived — was in the direct path of Interstate 84, which government officials wanted to extend across the Hudson, into Massachusetts,” he explained. “Our house was taken by eminent domain. I saw our family’s history — which dated to the 1850s — lost. It planted a seed in me.”

Marsh chose Hartwick initially for the chance to play college basketball. While that never materialized, he soon embraced the college for a host of other reasons. He was particularly well-suited to its smaller student body, as well as the politically active environment it fostered during the era of race riots and Vietnam War protests.

However, it was when he connected these life lessons to the classroom that his path was cemented.

“There was a history professor, Robert Weckman, who really piqued my interest,” Marsh recalled. “He was on the forefront of these topics and suddenly, it all clicked.”

Weckman inspired Marsh to learn about demographics, social issues and the politics and policies behind them. Also, there was an emerging field — community economic development — which he decided to explore further while adding some economics courses.

After graduating, he returned home — only to find that Newburgh’s urban renewal agency was hiring.

“My first reaction was, ‘Urban renewal? I want nothing to do with it!’” he exclaimed.

Yet, as he looked closer, he realized he could help with the rebuilding and revitalizing of his city, so he accepted the position. A few years later he took a job with Newburgh’s Community Development Agency, gaining inspiration from perhaps a surprising source.

“Many don’t realize it, but Richard Nixon had one of the best domestic policy agendas of any president, because it was focused on community development,” Marsh explained.

In the early 1970s, Nixon passed legislation that emphasized the need to build communities by including residents in the decision-making. Using their knowledge to build from the bottom up (versus previous federal top-down dictates) appealed to Marsh. It has since become the preferred approach to economic investment in the U.S.

Marsh began as a rehabilitation specialist, helping people who owned older homes obtain low-interest federal refurbishment loans. He rose through the ranks and was soon tapped to lead Newburgh’s new economic development office in the early 1980s. There, he hired the National Development Council (NDC), a consulting firm that helped remove Newburgh’s most-distressed community in America moniker.

NDC soon recognized Marsh’s potential and hired him. He worked with communities across New York state — Buffalo, Rochester, Syracuse, Binghamton and others — helping each to foster development and obtain various forms of financing. He shifted to management roles in the 2000s, steadily rising to the role of president & CEO in 2017. Currently, he and his colleagues at NDC — which recently rebranded itself as Grow America — work in roughly 130 different municipalities across the U.S. They provide small business lending, equity investments, training, research and advisory services. Grow America also serves as an active real estate developer with a portfolio that exceeds $2 billion.

Daniel Marsh III speaking

Dan Marsh ’74 speaks at a press event in Seattle to announce a recent Grow America economic development initiative.
Photo courtesy of Grow America

A waitress at Nuevo Acapulco, in the Cleveland suburb of Fairview Park, shows off some of her restaurant’s offerings. Its owners received a low-interest federal loan, with the help of Grow America, to acquire the property they had leased since 2018. Photo courtesy of Grow America

A waitress at Nuevo Acapulco, in the Cleveland suburb of Fairview Park, shows off some of her restaurant’s offerings. Its owners received a low-interest federal loan, with the help of Grow America, to acquire the property they had leased since 2018.
Photo courtesy of Grow America

ADVOCATING FOR EQUITY

Like Marsh, Mehri’s inspiration came from witnessing injustices that struck a nerve. Mehri’s moment came in January 2002. An avid football fan since childhood, he opened the morning paper to see that Tony Dungy had been fired from the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Dungy, one of just three black NFL head coaches at the time, had turned around a franchise which had been largely inept since its inception in 1974. Prior to Dungy’s arrival, the Bucs had just two winning campaigns in 20 full seasons.

Mehri realized that Dungy — despite earning four playoff appearances in the last five years — was literally packing his bags on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.

He was incensed.

This was after watching Dennis Green meet a similar fate two weeks earlier. Green coached the Minnesota Vikings for 10 seasons, taking them to the playoffs eight times — including a remarkable 15-1 campaign and five-straight playoff appearances before a down year in 2001.

Merhi began to look at the performance and fate of the league’s other black coaches of that era. His hypothesis was that the bar was set unfairly higher than that of their white counterparts.

“I said to Johnnie (Cochran), ‘What if we looked at their track record and stacked it against the white coaches?’” he proposed. “What would it show?”

They decided to commission a report from Janice Madden, a University of Pennsylvania labor economist. It reviewed the win-loss records of all NFL head coaches over the previous 15 years. The data showed that white coaches got their teams into the playoffs one-third of the time. Black coaches, in contrast, made it two-thirds of the time — meaning they were twice as likely to succeed.

“That is a massive difference,” Mehri said. “Yet, they were the last hired and first fired.”

Even more damning, the black coaches’ margins of victory were larger. They also averaged 2.7 more wins than their Caucasian counterparts in their first seasons, and 1.3 more wins in the season before they were terminated.

“No matter how we look at success, black coaches are performing better,” the report concluded. “These data are consistent with blacks having to be better coaches than the whites in order to get a job as head coach in the NFL.”

Mehri’s team spent the summer of 2002 creating a report titled, “Black Coaches in the NFL: Superior Performance, Inferior Opportunities.” He and Cochran, who died in 2005, released it with true media relations savvy. They held a press conference at the restaurant of Don Shula — the winningest head coach in NFL history — prior to a Monday Night Football game in Miami.

“The media instantly recognized the report’s importance, and it took on a life of its own,” said Mehri.

Its key to success, Mehri noted, was that they didn’t just highlight problems; they also offered a solution. Two months later, Mehri found himself in the NFL’s offices, discussing his “Fair Competition Proposal.” All along, NFL beat writers had joked with Mehri, telling him he had “zero chance” of enacting change.

“These are 32 billionaires,” Mehri remembers being told. “No one’s going to tell them what to do.”

To their credit, Pittsburgh Steelers owner Dan Rooney read the report with an open mind, as did then-Commissioner Paul Tagliabue. Rooney, in particular, was struck by the data and felt a sincere sense of disappointment and empathy. He even wrote a letter to Tagliabue, assuring him that this injustice was not his fault; it was the owners’ responsibility.

Rooney’s influence was enormous. His franchise had won more Super Bowls than any team at the time – and done so with just two coaches since 1972. (They’ve since added one: African American Mike Tomlin, the longest-tenured current NFL coach, who won Super Bowl XLIII.) Thus, as owners came around to the concept, Mehri knew that setting his ego aside was the best way forward. So, when a Washington Post reporter suggested the Mehri-Cochran Rule as a possible name for the new policy, Cyrus countered.

“No, let’s call it the ‘Rooney Rule,’” Mehri said. “It just came to me, but I knew from my advocacy experience, the more that a reform can come from within, the more the institution will defend it.”

Its significance cannot be overstated. In addition to head coaches, there have been as many as eight general managers of color in a season. Ten Super Bowl teams have had either a head coach or general manager of color — including Super Bowl XLI, the first to feature two

African American head coaches. Ironically, it was Dungy’s Indianapolis Colts who earned victory that day, ensuring his place in the Pro Football Hall of Fame, where his bust “stares” directly across from Pollard’s as the only black head coaches currently enshrined. Defensive coordinators of color have done especially well, exceeding 50% on multiple occasions, although offensive coordinators have seen less success.

“It’s not a panacea,” he acknowledged. “There needs to be other things around it, things to hold people accountable.”

And the NFL has done that, fining teams who skirt the rule while rewarding those who foster minority opportunities with compensatory draft picks. In 2020, they extended the Rooney Rule to include coordinator coaches and non-football positions (e.g., club presidents). They’ve also focused on gender diversity, adding women to coaching, officiating and front office roles. As of spring 2024, 51% of NFL front office jobs were held by people of color and women, including five black club presidents. This includes the Raiders’ Sandra Douglass Morgan, the first woman of color.

An even bigger impact was outlined in a January 2024 New York Times article,^ which cited the Rooney Rule and its impact on corporate America. According to a 2022 study of talent development efforts at Fortune 500 companies, 85% used diverse slates when hiring senior leaders (i.e., feeder positions to the C-suite).

Those with accountability tools tied to those slates saw more than 65% of roles held by women and people of color — which comprised just 39% of executives among companies without diverse slates.

“If women and minorities make up only 39% of your senior leaders, you’re definitely missing out on talent,” Mehri advised, “but if you do it the right way [use diverse slates], you’re going to leverage talent.”

PREPARING FUTURE GENERATIONS

While Marsh and Mehri have spent their careers supporting disadvantaged populations, they also share a deep commitment to their alma mater. It stems, they say, from the pervasive ethos of mentorship which defines the Hartwick experience.

Daniel Marsh, president and CEO of Grow America

“One of my goals is to get more young people interested in what we do. Too often, the best and brightest (in our field) wind up going into corporate banking. But community economic development offers a double bottom line: you can earn a decent salary, but also see the fruits of your labor blossom into homes, jobs and revitalized communities.”

Daniel Marsh III, ’74

President and CEO of Grow America

Grow America group portrait.

In 2019, with the help of Hartwick Economics Professor Carlena Ficano and Planned Giving Director Pat Dopazo, Marsh established a paid J Term fellowship for students focused on economic development finance. To date, it has had 20 participants who have gained remarkable experiences.

One is Logan Hoffman ’25, a business administration and economics major from Port Jervis, N.Y. He completed the fellowship this past January, and he’s exactly the type of student Marsh hopes to reach.

“I want to help others be a better version of themselves, and I also love financials and analyzing numbers,” Hoffman shared. “During the internship, I met someone who basically had my dream job. Each day he would reach out to clients, help them get the support they needed, and make sure their companies could grow and sustain themselves by looking at their financials.”

The fellowship developed deliberately, with input from multiple areas of the college and Grow America. Students take a class beforehand, ensuring they know how to prepare various documents and other functions. Hoffman found his previous accounting courses were especially helpful, and the program served to raise his confidence and cement his professional goals.

“I learned that my dream is possible, and it’s made me work even harder to reach it,” he confirmed. “Now that I know what I want is attainable, I plan to pursue it wholeheartedly!”

It had a similar impact on Jodi Johnson ’24, even if his career plans aren’t quite as linear as Hoffman’s.

Jodi Johnson

“My Grow America experience was surreal and eye-opening. I was trusted to work on something completely out of my comfort zone. I learned a lot about economic development, finance, community development, communication, and attention to detail — which all helped my professional development.”

Jodi Johnson ’24

Psychology Major

Johnson, who’s also been a goalkeeper on the men’s soccer team, plans to pursue a master’s degree in counseling and community psychology. Still, the Grow America experience broadened his world views and understanding of finance, and he hopes to maintain his ties to the organization.

“I would love to continue networking with them, using the knowledge and insight I gained to help the communities I will serve,” he added.

It has been equally rewarding for Ficano, whose passions align with Marsh’s. Her early career included community development work in a low-income region of Boston. Ficano’s graduate research focused on public policy impacts on childcare availability and labor market participation. At Hartwick, she has researched agricultural impacts on rural communities, while supporting efforts to create sustainable food systems.

“Since I’ve been here, I’ve always wanted to bridge Hartwick students to the community,” she said.

Thus, she’s invigorated when she talks with students about the opportunities the program offers — and even more excited after she hears about the experiences they gained. “It’s been amazing to have Dan as such an incredible partner,” she added. “The Grow America program is the highest-touch internship I’m aware of on campus. He’s doing the work we all talk about at Hartwick. He’s an inspiration to us all.”

FOSTERING SYSTEMS FOR SUCCESS

Mehri, a Hartwick board trustee, is naturally inclined to support diversity and equity initiatives on campus. He assists the College in its admissions and retention efforts, provides counsel to cultural projects, and gives substantially of his time and other resources — which include his wife, Sarju, a native of Nepal.

A few years ago, the couple began exploring ways to recruit Nepali students to Hartwick. Today they’ve done that, by helping to create a support system that allows those students to feel comfortable on campus.

Cyrus and his wife, Sarju, returned to Nepal in the spring of 2024 to continue their outreach and recruiting efforts.

“It’s important to create a sense of belonging for these new students,” Mehri advised. “Sarju has met with them to see how they’re doing and what they’re lacking. It’s critical to attracting and retaining them.”

These efforts, done in collaboration with Hartwick’s Center for Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Belonging, have resulted in a new international pipeline.

With a desire to foster equity at his core, Mehri wants all Hartwick graduates to understand the power they have to impact the world — even at their relatively young age. He knows the lessons Hartwick instills, as well as the mindset it creates for alumni to truly make a difference once they leave Oyaron Hill.

“My advice to our graduates,” he said, “is that it’s important to never underestimate your ability to have an impact on the people around you — as well as organizations and the country — in a really good way.”

References:
* 2023 NFL player race composition per Statista.com
^“In the N.F.L. and at Big Companies, Diversity Playbooks Face Hurdles,” New York Times, Jan. 9, 2024.

The Together, We Soar campaign is expected to conclude in fall 2026. To learn more about the campaign and to participate, visit hartwick.edu/togetherwesoar.

Hartwick College Together, We Soar Campaign Logo

June 12, 2024
From The Wick Magazine, Wick Mag Spring 24

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