Athletics officials suspend teams and restrict sharing of pictures on the Internet
Nearly a dozen colleges are investigating alleged hazing incidents in their sports programs after a Web site published photographs of college athletes posing in sexually suggestive positions — and showing one woman who appeared to be passed out drunk while a teammate wrote on her face.
The images have led some of the colleges to suspend teams from competition and to place restrictions on athletes’ use of online photo-sharing services. The incidents have also fueled a debate about what constitutes hazing and whether coaches and athletics officials have been complicit in allowing it to go on.
This fall the National Collegiate Athletic Association plans to sponsor a major study of hazing, and the association expects to release a handbook on the issue for coaches and team captains within the next year.
This week, at the annual meeting of Pacific-10 Conference officials, in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, sports administrators plan to discuss the potential ramifications of hazing and what legal rights colleges have to scrutinize athletes’ personal Web sites and Internet use.
Both topics were added last week, soon after the photographs showing alleged hazing first appeared on the Web site BadJocks.
Among the colleges with athletes who apparently posted initiation photos were Catholic University of America, Elon University, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Fordham University, Kenyon College, Northwestern University, Quinnipiac University, Union College, in New York, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, and Wake Forest University.
Officials on Edge
Bob Reno, who publishes the site, says he found the hazing photos on a file-sharing network where students upload personal pictures. Over the past few weeks, colleges have forced athletes to take down the photos and have removed rosters of the accused teams from their Web sites while they investigate the alleged hazing incidents.
Last week, however, one blogger linked to dozens of additioal hazing photos he found on a file-sharing site, many of them even more provocative than those Mr. Reno published. That has left some athletics officials on edge.
“None of us is immune,” says Christine A. Plonsky, director of women’s athletics at the University of Texas at Austin, which was not involved in the hazing accusations. “You hope none of these things go on, but you might find out they do.”
Most colleges have strict anti-hazing policies. And over the past few months, many athletics departments have held meetings with students to draw attention to their policies, prompted in some cases by a seminar on the subject at a meeting of the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics last summer. Many college officials have also tried to discourage their athletes from sharing certain photos of themselves on the Web.
At the University of Texas, senior athletics officials say they recognize that many athletes use photo-sharing services and they do not expect to prevent students from doing so. But they remind coaches to make clear to players that they will be reprimanded for pictures depicting misbehavior in the same way they are punished for acting inappropriately in public.
At Arizona State University, coaches tell players that they could jeopardize their careers after sports if they share certain photos online.
“It takes a corporation two seconds to pull up incriminating photos that could prevent you from getting a job,” says Lisa Love, Arizona State’s vice president for university athletics. “Unfortunately, athletes don’t have a realization of the potential consequences.”
Instead, they often resist removing personal photographs from publicly shared sites, says Thomas C. Hansen, commissioner of the Pacific-10 Conference. At an April meeting between Pac-10 athletes and conference and university officials, he says administrators were “puzzled” to hear athletes argue that posting personal information on the Internet was not something that could lead to problems.
“It was like your children saying all their friends were doing it,” Mr. Hansen says.
Lax Enforcement
Mr. Reno says he posted the images on BadJocks to draw attention to the problem of hazing and how lax colleges are about enforcing their hazing policies.
Hazing is clearly a big problem in athletics departments, but it is unclear whether it is on the rise. A 1999 study by Alfred University, in New York, found that about three out of every four college athletes experienced some form of hazing when they joined their team. One in five of the more than 325,000 athletes surveyed said they were subjected to potentially illegal hazing, including being beaten, or tied up and abandoned.
In the past decade, hazing has become more sexual and violent, and women increasingly haze their teammates much like men’s teams do, says Elizabeth J. Allan, an assistant professor of higher-educational leadership at the University of Maine at Orono, who studies hazing.
“It’s hardly surprising — but it’s upsetting — that as women have gotten the same sports opportunities as men, they would become as thoughtlessly engaged in the same activities as men are,” says Patricia Vertinsky, a sports historian at the University of British Columbia who focuses on gender issues. Female athletes no longer feel like they must conform to certain “feminine” ways, she says — but instead “they’re saying, ‘Let’s let women have it all.’”
Photographs of women hazing their teammates are among the most disturbing images to appear on BadJocks, several hazing experts agree. Pictures of female soccer players at Northwestern University depict team members dressed only in underwear, and blindfolded with their hands bound. Two women are shown performing lap dances for members of the men’s soccer team. Northwestern has suspended its women’s soccer team while it investigates the matter.
In another photograph, a member of the women’s softball team at Fairleigh Dickinson University appears to be passed out on a bathroom floor, according to a caption written by a player. A teammate is shown crouching beside the drunk woman, scrawling on her face with a pen. “Ha ha they drew penises on my face!” the caption reads. The university is investigating.
Many of the photos show athletes drinking beer, laughing, and appearing to have a good timebut presumably they were under pressure to consume alcohol. One hazing expert describes the activity as “mild” or “medium” hazing. Still, mild hazing can quickly escalate, says Susan Lipkins, a psychologist and the author of Preventing Hazing (Jossey-Bass), to be published in August.
In fact, many students fail to recognize the dangers of hazing even as they are being hazed, Ms. Allan says.
“Many students say they are aware when hazing occurs, but when it’s happening to them or they’re witnessing it, they don’t label it as hazing,” she says. “Part of the problem is that hazing takes people by surprise because they don’t recognize the power of coercion and group peer pressure.”
Character Building?
Studies show that many coaches are aware that hazing occurs on their teams, but they often look the other way. That is because many college coaches and athletics directors experienced hazing during their own playing careers, says Don McPherson, executive director of the Sports Leadership Institute at Adelphi University and a former all-American quarterback at Syracuse University.
“If you are a coach at the college level, you have survived hazing, and you believe it built up your character,” he says.
But coaches can no longer avoid talking about hazing prevention, because they may be held liable if they know their players are hazing teammates and they fail to do anything about it, Ms. Lipkins says.
“Coaches have to realize that if they don’t tell their players that hazing is a significant issue, their jobs are in jeopardy, their team’s seasons are in jeopardy, and athletes could end up in the hospital or jail or the morgue,” she says. Coaches need to remind players frequently, she says, that they will not tolerate hazing.
Of all the recent photos to be published, the one that troubles Ms. Lipkins the most is one showing a Northwestern student standing at the top of a narrow staircase, blindfolded with her hands tied behind her back.
“What if she trips?” Ms. Lipkins says. “That little act, with or without alcohol, is already a lawsuit. I see that, and it’s hard to understand how the rest of the world sees it as fun and games.”
http://chronicle.com Section: Athletics Volume 52, Issue 39, Page A1
