If the players and coaches truly believe that the removal of the president is a necessary step, then good for them for speaking up. However, when workers strike they lose their wages. Considering these athletes and coaches are essentially paid to perform football duties, I have no problem with suspending their pay or scholarships or per diems or what have you until they return to their jobs. I don’t think the university will do that because it would bring further negative PR.
There has always been issues on campus. Like I said up thread, Columbia is smack-dab in the middle of the state, in a rural area that has all the problems that come with that fact. I look at it as these are the incidents that broke the camel’s back.
You seem to be under the impression that Pinkel works for Wolfe, instead of the other way around. For one whose sense of the importance of college football is so inflated, this is an especially peculiar view to hold.
What’s actually happened here is that the top dog at the university has taken notice of the problems at the school, and is axing the subordinate who was supposed to have been taking care of things.
That would essentially kill the athletic department. How would you be able to go into the living rooms of athletes and recruit after that?
Despite my support for the players in this case, i have some sympathy for your position.
As someone who works in a university, i understand that the President of such an institution can’t necessarily fix things by executive fiat. While i understand that the President is ultimately the person in charge, he or she often has relatively little to do with the day-to-day cultural and institutional processes of the university as a whole. And on many campuses, especially public university campuses where there are pretty well-defined orders of hierarchy and procedure, university presidents often have to go through committees or provosts or deans in order to make changes.
I think it is also true that college administrations can’t simply stop everything that they don’t like on campus. And again, especially on public campuses, sometimes free speech rights means that we have to listen to people saying unpleasant things.
A few years back, my own campus suffered through a period of controversy, with an unofficial newspaper, produced and distributed by students, making all sorts of offensive jokes, including racial and sexual stereotyping. Some people wanted the university to ban distribution of the paper and take disciplinary action against the students, but the fact is that, offensive as they might have been, their comments were protected by the first amendment. And, to be honest, i think they should also be protected by the idea, which universities are supposed to endorse, that bad speech should be argued against rather than suppressed.
What the university could and did do, however, was start a campaign promoting ideas of respect, and encouraged students to speak out against racist and sexist and homophobic language. I think that is completely appropriate.
Anyway, i guess that’s a rather verbose way of saying that i will be following this story to see exactly what the President did, and did not do, in all of this. I’m going to reserve my judgment on that part for a little bit. But i still consider myself in support of the students, in terms of the general principle, because it is often the case that institutions like universities can harbor an atmosphere of discrimination, or at least hostility and prejudice, even if the specific incidents for which we have actual evidence seem to be relatively few or relatively minor.
As i said in my earlier post, i don’t think these players, who have so much invested in football, would have done this for no reason. As RetroVertigo observes, these incidents that are making headlines with this story could just be the tip of a large and long-building iceberg.
I enjoyed this characterization of the situation but the real top dogs at the universities are the football and basketball players, who only haven’t yet organized well enough to exploit their leverage. The days of threats and iron-fisted rule by administrators are rapidly coming to an end.
I see the majority of commenters at online stories are advocating for the Dale approach, i.e., finding more compliant and obedient athletes to replace the ones taking a stand. Good luck with that. It’s not going to get any easier.
I guess my position though is I’m not sure what more the President could do. What are the concrete ideas as to what he’s not doing that he should be doing? The President of a state school is not a dictator, and he has to be careful because he cannot prohibit the first amendment freedoms of expression on campus, and those freedoms largely allow for racist expression albeit not “fighting words” or “inciting violence.”
Well, if he recognized the problems perceived by the students and really cared, presumably he could have been visibly advocating and exemplifying the culture of the change he wants to see. That’s what the next university president will be doing, I expect.
Message and tone count; that’s part of leadership.
Yeah, like I said I’m speaking as an outsider to campus, but the kind of stuff that I think would constitute that is the kind of stuff he’s been doing: promoting diversity training, engaging with students in open forums. The one real misstep I can see is the students disliked the answer he gave them at a protest.
So it is written so it shall be done.
Wow… talk about well done civil disobedience. Sadly, it seemed to be a problem that most of the student body and faculty had with the President, but it only became a thing when the football players threatened to forfeit a game. But props to the football players and the coach for taking a stand. Well done.
Like I said, they wouldn’t do it because it would prolong and exacerbate the PR nightmare. But if they did, they’d be justified.
Color me surprised that Wolfe actually resigned. He’s a big man for doing so.
Indeed, to everything you said.
A successful University president could have figured out a way to deal with this, but perhaps he realized the seriousness of the situation too late. I love it when student activism succeeds, and I hope they can improve the racial atmosphere on campus.
And again, the portion of the student body with the most publicity and financial impact make the difference. Quite a lot of leverage.
I suspect the alternative would have been massive campus-wide civil disobedience among all the student body, and I have to wonder if they could have gotten the numbers to make the difference.
Now that Wolfe is gone, do you think the University will start moving forward on the actual problem? As far as I can tell, Wolfe’s disregard was just a symptom.
As I said, the next guy will have the PR and campus-culture mission front and center. And plenty of eyes on him.
Dalej42 valuing athletic competition above all other social issues? Didn’t see that one coming. :dubious:
Has there ever been an issue where you thought that maybe SPORTS! is not the most important thing in the whole wide world?
Collective action against our betters is scary and wrong, and once someone attains a leadership position they should be obeyed and respected no matter what, forever.