What with a drunken lacrosse guy at U Va just convicted of beating his girlfriend to death, you’ve now got a lot of people looking at the lovely culture of many university sports and noticing that even if this culture doesn’t produce a lot of murders, it certainly produces a whole lotta off-field violence.
So much that, as UD has noted on this blog before, a certain overly-familiar dance is danced by coaches and universities post-DUI, assault, rape, riot, etc. Boston University, whose hockey story has just jumped to the New York Times, is currently doing the rape two-step, what with two members of that team recently arrested for sexual assault.
This dance excludes the following:
An acknowledgment that enormous numbers of fans love hyper-violent sports, the more violent the better, and players are richly rewarded for being violent. And, uh, like, you don’t have to be a university graduate to grasp that some hyper-violent players are going to be violent in general.
An acknowledgment that many of the players don’t belong in college (see this post’s headline), that many won’t graduate – won’t really take courses in any legitimate way at all – and, as the person quoted in the headline says, are not college kids as we know them. Now a college president might try a new step and say In the name of diversity, we’ve decided to accept a cohort of violent flunkies. We think our students can learn a lot from them. But le président is likely to stay with the trusted routine in which Our quest for well-rounded individuals with special skills drew us toward this athletic prodigy and we’re stunned and disappointed that he has made some bad decisions.
An acknowledgment that a university can shut down a sports program. Usually, of course, sports programs get shut down when they’re so unmitigatedly vile that even the NCAA wants them to take a breather. But on occasion the campus itself will demonstrate enough integrity to turn off one of its assault-machines long enough to try to regroup (but regrouping is a bitch because it means fielding a new, non-competitive team).
An acknowledgment that the crucial fault lies in the university’s cynical recruitment strategy, which overlooks massive red flags for many players because all it cares about is how tough they are. Why are these guys at Boston University? Who let them in?
Here’s what the dance includes:
A sudden rhetoric of crisis from the president, as if no one had heard of America’s violent sports culture before.
A hastily assembled faculty review board, rather like the pointless Knight Commission, which will grind out more crisis-rhetoric.
A hasty dismissal of the bad boys from the team because their behavior has nothing to do with our values at BU even though we not only accepted them but have been treating them like royalty.
March 12th, 2012 at 9:47AM
Peter Mullin’s point, however, is that college hockey really isn’t like other sports, because the players are developed in junior leagues (Canadian, but with a few US teams) and on national junior teams, rather than on high school teams. This is overwhelmingly true of the rosters of the hockey teams at BU and most other big-time programs.
The highest level of junior hockey is considered professional by the NCAA, but players who participate in lower levels retain their college eligibility.