The Chicago Tribune reported that a first-year football player, who has since dropped out of Wheaton, was in his dormitory room in March 2016 when several of his teammates stampeded in and tackled him, wrapping his legs and arms in duct tape. The players covered his head with a pillowcase, carried him from the dorm and loaded him into the back seat of a car.
The students played the victim -- whom the Tribune did not identify -- Middle Eastern music, intimating that he had been kidnapped by Muslims, making offensive comments about them. The players at one point pulled down the victim’s pants and underwear and attempted insert to some sort of object into his rectum.
After the drive, the assailants dumped the victim on the baseball field; he was half-naked, still restrained and without his cell phone.
A second player was then carried onto the field. Both were found by classmates of the second player. The victim drove himself to the hospital, where he was diagnosed with muscle tears in both shoulders. His injuries required at least two surgeries.
More:
https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/2017/09/21/wheaton-gives-community-service-players-facing-felony-charges
I have no real background to try to understand what is happening here. Can someone help? Is this tragedy some sort of mob psychology? Did Wheaton just happen to recruit five students with some sort of serious anti-social behavior pattern? We don't have a football team, but the other student athletes who come through my class..i just can see them doing something like this.
ReplyDeleteI hate to tell you kids, but hazing behavior like this is disturbingly normative for American football players. Their mistake was injuring their victim badly enough for him to require surgery. If they hadn't, neither the college nor nearly anyone else would even have noticed.
ReplyDeleteNotice I didn't call it "normal." "Normative" means "that's what they do, when they think they're doing it right." Whenever I used to object to hazing when I was an undergraduate---both directed at me and others---a frequent retort was to assert, seemingly proudly, “But I’m responsible.” This still strikes me as not very good logic: just because one says one is willing to accept the consequences one’s actions in the manner of an adult doesn’t give one a license to act like a child, particularly not a cruel, brutal one.
Now you know one reason I chose to become an intellectual. From an early age, I was big enough to play football. I was encouraged and recruited to play the game. Nevertheless, also from an early age I realized that American football is a game for louts. I think it’s great that increasing numbers of parents are realizing this and encouraging their kids to play soccer---called football, outside of America. Never mind that soccer is better exercise: American football is causing too many brain injuries.
Well, perhaps I was wrong! I was heartened to see today's display of solidarity on the football field. I hope it gives a certain Orange person a fit of pique!
DeleteIndeed. I'm no fan of football, but I'd say that they got it right this weekend. If the academy could do an equally good job of showing solidarity to basic principles without demanding that everyone march in ideological lockstep, we'd be doing well.
DeleteWhy in the world is Wheaton fooling around with essays and community service? All five of these thugs should be expelled, period. And the reason for it should be placed prominently in their transcripts, so that the next colleges they apply to will know why they're no longer at Wheaton.
ReplyDeleteWheaton is a church-related college, by the way. Speaking as a religious person myself, somehow I'd expect a religious college to treat this kind of highly un-Christian behavior more seriously.
I think the expulsion becomes de facto upon incarceration. Wheaton need not lift a finger and thus avoids lawsuits from the "expelled."
DeleteAnd by the time the court case is over, they'll all have graduated. Stinks.
DeleteMy first reaction, too, was to remember that Wheaton is church-affiliated (affiliated with a denomination in the same general theological family as my own, in fact. Though I don't think I could *quite* write an honest faith statement that would pass muster with them, I could come pretty close.)
DeleteI'm not sure quite what to say, other than that Christians often fail to live up to our own ideals, and this seems to be a very clear case of that (on the part of both the attackers and the administration). I also find the attackers' attempts to insinuate that they were Muslim extremely disturbing. It comes awfully close to some of the uses of blackface during the era of lynching (and some of the lies that were told about African Americans as a group in order to justify lynching).
There's considerable truth to the idea that much if not all sin comes down to idolatry (i.e., putting something else in the place of God). While the idol is often self or money, it can also be things like a college or other institution/organization, a team -- or, as we sometimes see at political rallies that disturbingly mix expressions of Christian faith and patriotism (even when the candidate being celebrated is a very poor exemplar for the latter), a country. Sometimes, the idol can even be a religion (or at last an adherents' sense that belonging to a particular religion makes them superior to those who espouse other faiths).
So, yes, I'm worried about the role that sports in general and football in particular play in American culture, but I'm even more worried about what this incident says about how some self-identified Christians think about themselves, and about members of other faiths. To the extent that this incident says something about current trends in some subsets of American culture, it's scary in a way that goes well beyond hazing (which is already scary enough).
And "latter" in paragraph 3 should read "former." I knew that was wrong, but couldn't figure out how until after I'd clicked "publish." #@%$! middle-aged brain!
DeleteThough, come to think of it, at least in the case of which I'm thinking, both are correct.
DeleteAnd I misplaced the apostrophe in "adherent's." I think I'll stop re-reading now. Maybe it's not just the middle-aged brain. I do find this incident very, very disturbing.
DeleteJust saw a job add for Wheaton. It's one of those places that demands faculty sign an affirmation of faith and crap to get it. Funny how sanctimony always breeds contempt.
ReplyDelete