Maria Mutola, footballer

Maria Mutola is one of the world's greatest athletes. The 800 meter champion (2000 Olympic gold medalist, World Champion in 1993, 2001, 2003 etc) competed in 6 Olympic games and is often cited as the best athlete in this event. The 800 is notorious in track and field because it's technically a sprint: requiring speed and endurance, it's a grueling, even cruel, race.

Mutola is now coaching Caster Semenya, who recently qualified to represent South Africa in the 2012 Olympics. Mutola (who is from Mozambique) has lived in Johannesburg since 1999. This 2011 video profiles her as a member of the Mamelodi Sundowns women's team. This is a nice look at Mutola's relationship her two great loves. Mutola started off playing soccer with boys and, like many women athletes, she was recruited to track and field because it is one sport in which there are opportunities for someone with drive and talent. I just love seeing a picture of Maria Mutola with the caption "striker" - as if in her sleep she dreams not of crossing the finish-line first, but of slipping a ball into the back of the net.

States of Suspension

Readers should already know that the WPS suspended the league for this upcoming season. (Some reports on the decision: Sports Illustrated/Associated Press; All White Kit; The Guardian.)

To say that the league has struggled would be an understatement. It's been plagued by the usual headaches of a nascent sports league - mismanagement, outsized ambition, financial troubles, finicky owners, fickle fans, crap media. Add to that the burdening of women's soccer with the unrealistic expectations that accompany women-centered enterprises: Because it's women's soccer - we perhaps expect that people might be more broad-minded and progressive. We all let our guard down as we approach the women's game. That's one of things many people like about it. (It feels less corrupt, less cynical.) And it can amplify our sense of betrayal.

Some people get involved with women's sports because they believe in its viability as both a communal space and as a sustainable business (note the word "sustainable," not "profitable"). Others, entitled by their wealth, enter into the sports world looking for something else to own. Owning a team becomes an occasion for swaggering and self-righteous posturing. Worse, because it's sports, many of these sorts of people are reluctant to think about the good practices that need to be established to make a team work, beyond winning games.

That attitude ignores the game's realities: the stakes here for individual players are very low. Most would make more money doing almost anything else - they'd be less exposed to injury, too. Because the pay is so low, it is important that the team provide basic forms of support for its athletes - and that the work environment be professional.

The conversation about the WPS's decision to suspend the season took an interesting turn recently when a player came forward with details regarding her experiences playing for magicJack - easily the league's most troublesome member. Ella Masar was involved in a players' dispute with magicJack ownership. The post World-Cup period was rough: star athletes were returning with the mandate to save their home league. Masar stood with the rank and file players who'd been subjected to irrational and inexcusable treatment from the team's ownership. MagicJack players like Masar got caught between a rock and a hard place, as they were made to feel like the league's survival depended on their silence regarding what they were put through.

[Read Masar's statement: No More Silence]

Athletes who stand up against abusive managerial practices are routinely isolated, even by teammates who are grateful to them for their intervention. Although players might agree that things are bad, that things need to change, the conflict brought about by the effort to do so is almost unbearably stressful for most people. The burden of that kind of conflict tends to fall squarely on the shoulders of the victim - even if people feel that the victim is doing what must be done in speaking out, they also tend to wish that the whole thing would just go away. And it's easier to banish or diminish a player than it is to speak out against (never mind get rid of) the team's owner or manager. This is true, in fact, in any work environment. (Or, frankly, any playground - in which the bullied and harassed kid is the one who becomes the pariah.)

Add to this the fragility of the entire situation: magicJack needed to stay in the league for the league to continue. The owner of the team explicitly held this over the players' heads - they had no right to complain because if they did, they were going to take out the whole league. They were going to ruin things for their teammates. It was blackmail, plain and simple.

I read that story and wondered what's the point of a pro-league if it's only sustainable with bullying like that? Is it really a pro-league if a team interferes with an injured player getting proper medical treatment? How is that professional?

Meanwhile, as I wade through the laments of US women's soccer fans, I wonder about the pervasive wish for a wealthy patron who might save the league: Ellen DeGeneres, Nike (because they have such a great record when it comes to labor issues?), AEG, whoever. Isn't this how Dan Borislow wound up owning magicJack in the first place? He came in like a white knight, promising to save the league with a great team, etc.

[See espnW timeline of Borislow's involvement; "Dan Borislow, once a savior, now a pariah as WPS suspends the league" from Sporting News.]

I am reminded of a turning point in my own professional life. At some point in my 30s, I realized that if I expected some parental figure to sweep in and sort out my problems and clear my obstacles for me, that expectation might be the very thing that was most in my way. Athletes know the truth of this in relation to their game - but do they in relation to their work off the field?

It takes some time to figure out what you can do to take control over your own working conditions - and a big part of that involves identifying the people around you who are allies and collaborators. It requires figuring out how your workplace operates, how to be a good citizen in relation to your co-workers. It requires knowing the law, and knowing how and when to use it.

It it requires being very suspicious of anyone who presents themselves as a one-person solution: in my humble experience, the more that person talks about what they are going to do to make things better, the more certain it is that this person is going to make things worse.

I don't mean to defend the WPS against Borislow, exactly. Nothing about the news stories that have been coming out suggest that Borislow has been good for the league. But it was the league's administration that brought Borislow into its fold.

Anyway, who knows what lies ahead for the WPS.

I do know, however, that I don't want to watch professional matches and wonder what kind of insane crap players had to endure from their management in order to take the field. That's what the World Cup and the Olympics are for.

Tell Us Why: Notes from the UC Front

An Open Letter to UC Riverside Chancellor Timothy White

On Thursday, January 19 I spent a good part of the afternoon as a member of the crowd protesting outside the UC Regents meeting. I stood with students I'd taught, students I knew from their work with campus organizations, and students I've seen at other demonstrations. I stood with faculty, staff, Occupy activists from the region, and students from other campuses.

I stood right behind a barricade formed from placards painted after the cover of books used in our classrooms. This book-barricade was both a visual intervention (asserting knowledge as our choice of defense) and something that helped us to maintain our shape as a crowd.

In the two hours I was behind that barricade, we didn't move forward or back. We just stood there, chanting, talking, expressing our anger. The crowd got bigger and louder, but its peaceful character didn't change. The crowd successfully used Occupy Movement practices to control itself. Nevertheless, toward the end of the Regent's meeting, a UCPD officer declared through a bullhorn that our gathering was "an unlawful assembly."

The crowd chanted, "Tell us why! Tell us why! Tell us why!" It was an honest request.

No one on the other side made even the slightest gesture to respond to our question. And no administrator made even the slightest gesture towards negotiating with us. To do so would have been to admit that the UC Regents were trapped inside the building. To do so would have been to admit that the University of California Regents had grossly underestimated UC Riverside when it chose the campus for its meeting.

Our campus is "docile" by some standards. We don't have Berkeley or UCLA's history of activism. A lot of our students commute, which means that our campus environment is less condensed, less volatile.

UC Riverside is an open campus - perhaps the most open in the University of California system. Parking is relatively cheap and easy. Our students are so diverse it's hard to imagine what person would think, "this campus doesn't represent me." If Berkeley and UCLA are often the sites of large protests it is partly because those campuses represent the system - participating in an action there has a unique symbolic function as those campuses are "flagship" campuses.

Our campus represents something else. Our campus is rich with transfers from the community college system, rich with returning students, veterans, parents, kids who are the first in their families to graduate from college. Dreamers.

In the University of California system, our campus has one of the most organic relationships with its region. This makes for good press, but it also means that of the UC campuses we are the most reliant on state funds. We are the most vulnerable, our life as a public university feels quite precarious.

On some level, the people planning this meeting banked on that precarity. They banked on the notion that our students are too busy working to pay their tuition (and/or their parents' mortgages) to get involved with a protest.

The people coordinating the Regents meeting seemed to have been surprised by the size of the crowd, and by its persistence. The UCPD and the administration's confusion struck a lot of us as dangerous.

When the UCPD declared our demonstration an "unlawful assembly" it implicitly announced its intention to use force to break up the crowd without seeking another way to address the situation: negotiation of an exit for the Regents. With a negotiated exit the Regents risked not violence, but the embarrassment of being shunned.

The only instruction given to us was to not advance. In two hours, there'd been no motion from the crowd indicating that we would do so. There was discussion about moving forward and also if we should back up, since many of us were crowded on stairs and if the UCPD advanced on us there, we'd likely be hurt. But we did neither. We held our ground. The barricade formed at the front helped us to do that.

Word got out that the Regents were trying to leave via the back of the building (protesters were also there, but in smaller numbers). The crowd at the front broke up as we tried to reform at the building's service entrance.

When we got to the back of the student center, those forming the book barricade tried to take their protective stance at the front of the crowd. Someone took one of the metal barricades and pulled them towards the protesters, as we'd been doing all afternoon at various points around the building. No one had previously interfered with this.

The UCPD found their chance, though - as the crowd regrouped at the back of the Hub, they used force to prevent the formation of another blockade. Later, they would describe the attempt to form a barricade as violent. When the protesters went to move barricades (again, as they'd been doing all day with no interference), it was not an act of violence. There was nothing threatening about it - the threat was that the activists were going to successfully block the street. At this point, people were shoved to the ground, dragged across the pavement and plastic pellets were shot at the crowd. I saw wounds left by these pellets on students I've seen in my own classrooms. There is ample video out there showing this.

The UCPD threw people to the ground, the UCPD shot their new pellet guns into the crowd, the UCPD used force on us. BY this point, I should add, people had been protesting for hours - at any point the UCPD or the campus administration might have sought another path by engaging the protesters in dialogue. Honestly, I think that the people running security at the Regents meeting got romanced by the thrill of a military-style escape plan. 

The next day: UC administrators organized an Orwellian campaign to represent the violence of that incident as caused not by the UCPD but by the protesters. Even more bizarre was the eagerness for the administration to blame not students, but the public - as if the two should be distinguished from each other. In weekly letter to the campus community the Chancellor White claimed that "the disturbance of a few individuals" ruined the demonstration, and that they did not represent the "non-violent students and community members engaged in peaceful protest and exercising their right to free speech." But the people beaten and shot at by the UCPD are our students; they are our colleagues. And they are our neighbors. We were all in it together. They are the public, and the public is us.

Tell us why, Chancellor White. Why you stopped seeing yourself in us.

Illegal Use of Hypnosis in Wrestling

Just because.

Soccer by Searchlight: looking for the future in the past

 

It's a little known fact that the earliest night matches were women's games. Amazing how far we've moved in the wrong direction. In 1920 enough people were excited by the idea of watching women play that they packed the terraces. The media thought the match was important enough to cover it in print and as a cinematic news reel. Even if press from this period approached the women's game as a novelty, it broadcast information about teams and events and made celebrities of its amateur players.

Today, fans of the women's game are so sick and tired of having to cajole, beg, whine, yell and snipe about the lack of coverage - we've become bored with the whole situation. When it comes to the media blackout on coverage of women's sports, most of us have just thrown up our hands with a "whatever."

Of course we need the media to support nascent leagues. We need media to pay enough attention to league organization and team management so that those running the women's game are celebrated for their successes and held accountable for their failures. We need coverage of actual matches, week in, week out. It's ludicrous that people in the US have only ever heard of Abby Wambach and Hope Solo - and most who know these names haven't actually watched them play and and they certainly don't follow their club careers.

We need a media from another era - a media that takes an interest in new things, in things that aren't guaranteed successes. We need a media interested in a sport that is professional in the ways that working people are professional. Why not take an interest in a sport that is not making a few people rich, but that is just trying to sustain itself?

What happened to make media interest so synonymous with "profitable" that we can't imagine wanting to watch something unless there is an abstract sum of money in play between a handful of people - none of whom are on the field?

We have one clue in the 1920 ban on the women's game - The English Football Association only killed the women's game when its success in modeling a sustainable game played for the benefit of all began to suggest a different future for the game than the one we've been stuck with. Barbara Jacobs writes:

From their formation until the FA announcement [of the ban against the women's game], Dick, Kerr's Ladies [the most celebrated club] had raised over £60,000 for charity, and the same amount had been raised by all the other women's clubs combined. That's, in a total for the years 1918 to 1921, £120,000, or, in today's reckoning, 24 million pounds. And the FA? I think we can safely call the scoreline 24 million to nil. [Jacobs, The Dick, Kerr's Ladies, p. 164]

Jacobs quite reasonably points out that given the identification of women's football with highly successful community support, it was inevitable that working people filling the stands for men's matches would begin to ask where their hard-earned money was going.

The FA's 1920 decision to kill interest in the women's game left us with the "common sense" dished out as an explanation for why the women's game isn't worth watching: "There's no money in it." If working people living in the desolation of post WWI Europe could raise £120,000 from women's matches, then surely the problem has never been money itself, but rather where the money in the women's game went.

People complain all the time that you can't market the women's game as a "charity" - that there is nothing that will kill a sports-buzz quicker than the spirit of "good works." I've felt this myself.

Meanwhile corporate speculation has sucked the soul from the men's game. Who believes that the season championship is something that a team earns? What honor is there in a trophy that's been bought? Or in watching a play-off between two or three teams that have sold their economic souls in order to have the right to be in the running?

Sure, as a spectator I won't turn my back on a big match - but the pleasures of the game feel no more and no less thrilling than the pleasures of a great product, designed for easy consumption. If it feels good, this is because it asks so very little of me.

Most of us actually want more than this. Few of us, however, are old enough to remember what that "more" might actually be. We live with a vague sense that our desire for something different is impractical, unrealizable. "There's no money in that."

And so we turn to history not out of nostalgia but out of curiosity: the past doesn't teach us that "yes, there is money in that." It shows us an entirely different relationship to money. The women's game allowed those with a little to give to those with even less. The team's management and players took only what they needed to keep playing. No one was set to get rich off of it. And this made the fans love the enterprise even more. Imagine!

Interlude

Slava Mogutin, from "Brosephines" for Vice (October 2011)

I might as well just say it: I've been busy with work. I've been avoiding watching soccer matches on TV and following sports media - because these things provoke me. Plus - and this the biggie - I'm injured and alienated from the local scene which is my muse. I'll be back soon.

Until the black helicopter rants return, however, I'll share images and video like a normal blogger. 

The above photo by the artist Slava Mogutin - he has a deep appreciation for the athlete in all his (per)version. This image is one of the more demure of his work in this genre.

Silent Majority: On UC Davis and the War on Students

Depressingly, few of us who work at the University of California were surprised by the fact that demonstrating students would be treated with such violence. A squad of colleagues affirmed that it was business as usual when they stood passive while Officer Pike calmly went about his task. UC Davis's Chancellor and its Police Chief both reacted as if this were an unpleasant routine, until it became a news item.

The University of California's leaders have been a waging war on students for years. This scene is repeated with increasing force directed at protesters who have sought ever more dramatic ways of demonstrating their "non-violence." Shouting? Too violent. Standing? Violent. Sitting down and chanting? Still violent. Finally, our students are on the floor with their mouths shut.

We have also witnessed Orwellian twists in the system's efforts to quash dissent. When demonstrating students aren't bludgeoned and sprayed, they are marked with antiquated labels like "disrespectful," "intolerant" and "uncivil" in a prelude to "discipline" and disenfranchisement. In a February 2010 memo ominously titled "Intolerance on Campus," UC President Mark G. Yudof lumped organized student activists together with racists when he compared the Irvine 11 to the students who thought hanging a noose in the UC San Diego library was funny. Both, he wrote, showed a lack of "tolerance."

The comparison (which Yudof has made more than once) is chilling. It draws a line of equivalence
between a loud but non-violent protest against violence, and an action that is itself shorthand for a quite specific history of terrifying violence. Students protesting systemic, state-sanctioned violence were equated with students casually citing lynching. The political and historical acrobatics required to draw that equation are dizzying.

For crying out during a presentation by Israel's ambassador to the United States, the Irvine 11 wound up in the middle of a criminal prosecution. The Muslim Student Union was banned from Irvine's campus for six months - an extraordinary disciplinary measure I haven't seen duplicated except in cases of violence at frat parties. In fact, I've seen the latter treated more generously.

One administrative response to "the Irvine 11" has gone completely unnoticed in commentary about the case, perhaps because it is so utterly banal. The Office of Student Conduct forced the three UC Riverside students who participated in that protest to write essays about the First Amendment.

Let me repeat that: UC Riverside's Office of Student Conduct forced three students to write about freedom of expression, as a form of punishment. (In his memo on "campus intolerance" Mark Yudof identifies himself as "a scholar of the First Amendment.")

No UCR faculty member was involved in creating, reading or evaluating that assignment. What self-respecting scholar could bear such a thing? I can think of no surer way of alienating a student from his or her authorial voice that to tell them what to say, and then force them to say it. (Incredibly, these punitive essays are routinely assigned across the UC system.)

There is violence embedded in that kind of "discipline." It is not the kind that goes viral. It is the kind of thing that feeds on a system like a slow-growing cancer - empowering police officers to wield their weapons as educational tools.

In setting up camps, by so visibly occupying their schools, students acknowledge that they are at risk of being disposed of their education if they don't insist on the campus's responsibility to their presence. That University of California leadership has produced a situation in which the most effective protest has been silence should give us all pause.  Students should not have to sit down and shut up in order not to be read as a threat.

That is one reason why the UC Davis action was so shaming - such a demand is grotesquely odds with our mission, but it is exactly what the system has been asking students to do for years. In literalizing that demand, however, UC Davis's students also powerfully asserted their connection with and allegiance to the ever increasing numbers of people whose mere existence poses a problem to those who have taken so much from them.

[Obviously, it's hard for me to care much about the Galaxy winning the MLS Cup with this stuff going on.]

Footballers on the Dancefloor: from Hollywood to Bollywood, Solo, Savage and God Himself

I'm in denial. Hope Solo was voted off Dancing with the Stars. She and Maksim were ROBBED by the judges. The Argentine Tango is a perfect framework for the two strong and combative personalities. Their performance was interesting, ambitious and fun to watch.  Nevertheless, Solo and Maksim were given quite low scores. (Their Paso Doble was awesome from a head-banger's perspective but perhaps not so ballroom. Their Cha Cha was OK, but in the "relay" format you can really see the qualitative difference between Martinez, Lake and the rest (how Kardashian won that segment is beyond my understanding). Anyway, here's the Tango:

Bravo to Solo for bringing it.

This seems like a good moment to survey performances by a few other footballers. For example, Robbie Savage is on this season's Strictly Come Dancing. 

That performance needs no comment from me. Bless him.

Diligent readers of FaLW will know that I'm a fan of Baichung Bhutia, who won India's Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa in 2009. Bhutia played for Kolkata clubs Mohun Bagan and East Bengal - two of the most stories clubs in Asia. His career has largely been built around long-term ambitions for soccer in India, and he is one of the founders of the country's first player's union. Without a doubt, he participated in India's version of Dancing with the Stars in order to raise awareness of Indian soccer. Nevertheless, Mohun Bagan questioned his commitment to the sport when his succesful run on the dance show caused him to miss a practice and exhibition match. The club took a ridiculous, short-sighted stand and Bhutia left them for East Bengal.

He retired from play this year, but owns United Sikkim and is a key figure for the future of the sport in Asia. Bhutia's the kind of person many of us would love to see head FIFA. The guy has a soul. And that shows in all of his performances. (Jhalak Dikkhla Jaa is fun to watch because the dances are hybrids - part ballroom, part Bollywood. They are very theatrical and often quite athletic.) 

The most fascinating turn in this genre comes from Italy's Ballando con le Stelle. God himself appeared on its dance floor in 2005. He withdrew from the show after four weeks - he'd been flying back and forth between Buenos Aires and Italy, shortly after undergoing surgery to control his weight problems. Around this time, however, Italian tax authorities tried to collect his earnings from the program, in order to cover debt dating back to his days as a player. I'm grateful for the three weeks he gave us - everytime I watch this, my brain goes: "No, is that really...wow." And then it short circuits.

If you need more after that, I recommend Bleacher Report's survey of footballers who should be on DWTS. Given that this Bleacher Report researcher confined herself to the men's game, she missed one, most obvious candidate. For of all the dancing footballers surveyed by Bleacher Report, none actually incorporate dance into their play. For them, it's a post-goal scoring celebration. For Marta Vieira da Silva, the samba is a cruel taunt embedded into play - an announcement of her opponent's imminent humiliation (see, especially the move that starts around min 3:35):

Hope Solo would be the first to observe, however, that had she been in goal in 2007, Marta would have had much less to Samba about.

More Notes on a Scandal: Cultures of Compliance (the Penn State/Berkeley comparison)

The other week, my university's Chancellor sent out a message encouraging people to respect each other's differences - be they cultural, political, religious, academic, etc. 

It's the kind of thing administrators generate to look like they are doing the right thing. It's also the kind of thing that makes 'doing the right thing' look easy. As if difference - being different, feeling differently, living differently - was reducible to a matter of taste. The actual aim of that message was to discourage students from raising their voices. The memo's central purpose, in other words, is to minimize conflict.

That same week, at Berkeley, campus police wedged their batons into student bellies. Some show of respect. 

Dave Zirin said something a lot of us were thinking when he contrasted Penn State students with Berkeley's - one set rioting at the firing of a coach who failed his community by burying accusations of child abuse, the other peacefully asserting their right to demonstrate in support of the #Occupy movement - and beaten by the campus police for doing so. (Penn State students also "rioted" at the announcement of Osama Bin Laden's death - so, this seems to be their default mode.)

Sneering at jarhead Penn State fans is a little too easy. It's close to the flipside of the knee-jerk, smug righteousness of the fans themselves - who decry the defilement of the abused in the same gesture they flip a news van and set it on fire. These things feel related to me - the macho posturing that wraps itself around the idea of protecting innocent children, coming from the last people one would actually trust to know what it means to support a healthy sexual culture.

In any case, both situations express a crisis in the integrity of university culture. And it does feel like this problem goes coast to coast. 

There is a growing gap between what students want from their universities and what those campuses are giving them. They want an education. They are being given lessons in compliance - comply with the corporate culture or get beaten for resisting it.

It's a miracle that California students haven't started burning down their schools. The entire system has been raped and pillaged by the selfish class. It's that simple. Administrations collaborate, making deals with the "1%" by selling bad debt - what is the difference between a shady mortgage on an overpriced home sold at the edge of a bubble, and dramatic rises in tuition that can only be paid with loans that will enslave students with outrageous "unsecured" debt for most of their adult, underemployed lives?

The brutal realities of this are perhaps nowhere more evident that in the Golden State, which once boasted the best public education system in the world, but now can't afford to give its students desks and textbooks. Tuition escalates beyond a working person's reach. Families lose their homes and kids are caught between paying for school, or helping mom and dad with the mortgage. Everybody is losing.

Students should occupy their campuses - they need to unite in their grief and outrage, and they'll find plenty of staff and faculty willing to pitch their tents alongside them. But it's their campus. We work for them.

Turning to Penn State: I can't fathom making a martyr out of Joe Paterno, and there's no crowd that makes me more uncomfortable, feel more "unsafe" than college football fans.

But: I can imagine being very suspicious of Penn State's public sacrifice of its father-figure.

The atmosphere at Penn State has been described to me as "cult-like." That intense attachment to the campus, secured through its football program and its symbolic Father, is what most universities are aiming for: Rather than build the campus up from the ground with good teaching, resources for research, support for student learning - they are trying to create a corporate brand, administrations want students to have not an education but an "experience."

The myth here is that this nostalgia for "the college experience" will fund public education. For a handful of colleges it might, but at what cost to them, and to the rest of the system?

University executives now want former students to look back on their education with uncritical nostalgia, with the same set of feelings they might have for their first pair of Nikes.

If I send a check to Rutgers, it isn't because I think back on my "college experience" and feel wistful. I think about how the education I received - which was pleasurable, challenging and sometimes soul-rattling - changed my life. Enabling that in the classroom is hard work. It isn't pretty. It is a hard sell.

The Penn State students who rioted clearly drank the campus Kool-Aid. But I can imagine being a student there, and seeing the big round of dismissals as a hollow gesture. Given how long this abuse is supposed to have gone on, given how many years people continued to work with and support Sandusky after they learned about the now infamous shower incident, who doesn't bear responsibility to the alleged victims here? Ushering these guys off the stage with the directive "don't talk about anything" doesn't feel satisfactory. But what would? Something is rotten in the system. 

But what system? How is it rotten?

As I wrote in an op-ed piece for The Guardian this week, it's more, and more complicated, than football and big-time sports.

I remember the sex scandal that rocked Princeton in the late 1980s, when a distinguished male professor in the English Department was accused of rape by a male graduate student. (See the NYT Magazine article, "Arms and the Man: A Sex Scandal Rocks Princeton.")

The story was awful - the professor's behavior before and after the incident was disturbing. Those who came forward were treated badly by the university. They were feminist, anti-racist and anti-homophobic scholars tired of the climate cultivated by the Princeton administration's passivity vis a vis discrimination and harassment. Confronted with a university that dealt with a credible rape accusation by offering the accused professor a golden parachute, four left - including Emory Elliott, a distinguished American Literature scholar who was my senior colleague at U.C. Riverside.

At my own campus, three women came forward in the 1990s and filed a complaint about systemic harassment and discrimination in the History Department. The pattern of behavior was jaw-dropping - ranging from overt discrimination against women faculty with children to a rape charge filed by a female student against a male professor. It was bad enough to become a scandal within the academy. (The story was reported in a May 1999 story for The Chronicle of Higher Education: "A History Department Implodes Over Sex-Bias Charges and a Suicide.")

The women who came forward on my campus paid a heavy price for doing the right thing. If that department is now a good place to work, we can thank those scholars. But even now, I see little sympathy from senior colleagues about the crap they went through and how that might have impacted not only their scholarship, but their relationship to the institution.

I recall these stories to point out something easily forgotten: academic administration contains more than a few atavistic holdovers from the days when universities were run by and for white men.

An English Department, a History Department will (hopefully) have been forced to work through this stuff by virtue of the integration of women and feminist scholars into their ranks - the Humanities are ahead of the ball on this point.

Athletic Departments like Penn State's are nursing fantasies of the gold old days when men were men and women knew their place, and nobody rocked to boat or talked about anything.  

The bizarre thing about this is that athletic departments are actually forced to confront the matter of gender equity much more directly than academic departments. It is (apparently) hard to force a Physics department to hire as many women as it does men - but it isn't hard to force a campus to at least try to offer equal opportunity to women athletes.

That should mean that there is a greater awareness in athletic departments about all the issues that come with sex/gender equity - but instead we see a national pattern of football programs especially endorsing rape culture, women's sports programs engaging in shitty forms of gender policing (Penn State was sued by a female basketball player who was harassed by her coach over her 'unfeminine' appearance), a total passivity about homophobic behavior towards male and female athletes, and a resistance to owning up to the responsibilities that campus administrations bear in letting this stuff go on, and on, and on.

As we bear witness to this national wave of sympathy for the victims and at the massive, totally justified outrage at the cover-up, let's entertain the following possibility:

If people felt half this sympathy for the women who've been raped by football players in the past forty years, or half the outrage regarding the systemic cover-up of those assaults - perhaps we wouldn't be in quite this situation. Perhaps the guys at Penn State would have been raised to do the right thing, even if that thing was really hard.

To circle back to my opening paragraph - If I'm uneasy about comparisons of the Penn State student riot with the Berkeley student protest, even as a study of contrasts, it's because campus administrators don't see a difference. They see both as crowds to be controlled, and send them both the same memo.

What we want on our campuses is an environment in which people can speak hard truths - truths with consequences. We want students to be able to express themselves when they are angry and confused. We want an environment in which people will at least be heard. Whether they utter their truth as a shout, or a whisper.

Penn State's manual for receiving reports of harassment (more notes on a scandal)

College campuses are obliged to have policies regarding sexual harassment/sex discrimination. These very broad overlapping categories include sexual assault and the systemic cover-up of abusive behavior within a department. These kinds of a matters are handled by Penn State's Affirmative Action Office. Each area of the university is also expected to have staff members trained in handling harassment complaints - including the Athletic Department. They are the college's front line - the people to whom staff and students are directed when they need help. The people who are supposed to tell you what to do, for example, if you see a guy raping someone in the showers.

As far as I can tell, Penn State's athletic department has two such staff members - a man and a woman whose names have not come up in reporting on the scandal (neither are part of the football program).  [That said, it's possible this particular system wasn't in place in 2002, when witnesses at Penn State reported Sandusky's behavior to their superiors - the Affirmative Action office was certainly in place, however, and identified as the office to which one reports such things.] No one in the football program followed the rule book on this one.

There is a reason institutions have offices for handling allegations of sex/gender harassment. Prejudice, shame and fear can be overwhelming in these cases. Victims find their experiences minimized, people who come forward expect retaliation. Charging a senior staff member with something like this is frightening. For many, coming forward feels like you are putting your personal and professional lives on the line. So - to acknowledge the specific difficulty of this whole category of experience, campuses have offices which specifically handle sex/gender harassment in all its forms.

Unfortunately, lots of university employees sneer at that office - at my own campus, I've heard it described as "a joke" and worse by a senior male colleague, in a university meeting (not in my department). Such attitudes abound - and the more masculnist and patriarchal the organization, the worse these attitudes will be.

People working in such spaces - sexist, homophobic and more - are ill equipped to handle their own feelings about child abuse - never mind child abuse enacted by a straight man (with whom they've worked closely) on young boys.

Penn State's football program has cult-like status - clearly no one wanted to acknowledge to themselves that such a man might actually fit right into the fold. What does that mean? What does that say? I can imagine everyone in that community feels shamed by this.

There is a community of people at Penn State to whom they might turn: feminist and LGBIT scholars and staff members who work regularly with subjects like sexual abuse - with the architectures of shame that make coming forward as a victim feel, for many, life-threatening. But it's naive to think the Penn State football program would be interested in turning to its feminist colleagues for help.

I'm really interested in knowing why the Penn State staff trained in handling these matters were kept so far from it all. (Am I right on this?) The only reason I can imagine for not going to the affirmative action office is that even those reporting what they saw and heard didn't want it to get out - they wanted to "keep it in the family." As is the case with many abusive scenarios.

It's probable that the university administration tried to use the non-student status of the victims to rationalize its decisions. Though all administrators have the training (and common sense) to know better, in this case, they may have wanted to believe it wasn't their responsibility - their sole responsibility in their minds may have been to students and staff - or, more nearly, to the institution itself (by which I mean Penn State football). Again, this is conjecture.

SO, here it is - an excerpt from Penn State's manual for "Recognizing and Responding to Sexual Harassment" - an overview of the things that didn't happen.

III. RESPONDING TO A COMPLAINT

A. Concerns of Complainants
• Many complainants may show hesitation or even fear about coming forward with concerns or complaints of sexual harassment.
• A complainant may need to be assured that she/he will be treated fairly and protected from retaliation.
• Complainants are often concerned about who will learn about the details of their experience.
• Assure the person that only those people that “need to know” to resolve the issues will be informed.
• In cases of sexual assault, stalking or other forms of criminal sexual conduct, inform the
person of their option to file a report with the police, then contact AAO (the Affirmative Action Office).

B. The Initial Interview
• Have a copy of the policy, brochure, and other appropriate information available. Provide copies to the complainant.
• Listen and take the complaint seriously.
• Avoid making judgment and remain neutral and supportive.
• Determine if the harassment has stopped.
• Help the person regain a sense of control by explaining the process and what happens next.
• Determine if the complainant and others are at immediate risk.
• Take factual notes during the conversation for accuracy of recall.

C. What to Say When Receiving a Complaint
• Explain briefly the University’s Policy AD41.
• Indicate that the University takes complaints of sexual harassment very seriously.
• Advise that the University will take prompt action.
• Communicate that although complete confidentiality cannot be guaranteed, the facts will be protected as much as possible including, when possible, the identity of the complainant.
• Explain that the University will protect a complainant in every possible way, including protection against retaliation for filing a complaint or participating in a complaint.
• Explain that your role is to make sure the complainant knows and understands all available options and to help explore these options.
• Stress that the complainant may also go directly to the Affirmative Action Office for consultation and advice.
• Ask what happened.

D. Information to Secure from Complainant
Ask the person reporting the behavior or making a complaint the following:
• What was (or is) the offensive behavior?
• Where did the behavior occur?
• Who is the person doing the offensive behavior? Obtain name, employment status, phone number and description of the person complained about.
• When and where did the behavior occur? Obtain this information for each instance of offensive behavior.
• Who else was present that witnessed the behavior? Obtain name and phone numbers.
• Were there any others who have had the same or similar offensive behavior directed at them?
• Did the complainant tell anyone else about what happened?
• How long has this been going on? Did the complainant keep a journal or notes about what happened?
• Did the complainant indicate that the behavior was unwelcome? If yes, what was that person’s reaction to what the complainant said or did?
• What was the effect of the behavior on the complainant?
• What does the complainant want as the outcome?

E. During the Initial Interview
• Ask only open ended questions - “why” questions put people on the defensive.
• Remain neutral - voicing opinions or reaching conclusions prematurely is inappropriate.
• Don’t make promises or guarantee any particular results.
• Don’t ask leading questions or multiple-choice questions.
• Avoid making assumptions.
• Complete confidentiality can not be promised (you can not resolve the complaint if you can not talk to anyone about it); indicate that only people with a “need to know” will be consulted.
• Don’t reveal information which would violate the privacy of the person accused (i.e. “this is not the first time I’ve heard a complaint about this person.”)
• Summarize what the person has told you.
• Make sure that the person knows she or he will be kept informed.
• Explain the next step. Ask for complainant’s contact information.
• Indicate that she/he can call you to provide additional information or for an update.
• If the issue does not appear to be sexual harassment, refer the person to the appropriate resources.
• Complete your notes, keeping them factual.

IV. WHAT TO DO NEXT

A. Review the Information Received

Call the Affirmative Action Office for advice and assistance after gathering the preliminary information and before conducting further interviews, if possible. Consider the following:

• Do you need to take immediate action?
• Is the person potentially in physical danger?
- Has the complainant expressed fear or concern about ongoing behavior?
- Do the parties need to be separated while an investigation is conducted?
• Is the person’s employment or education status in jeopardy due to the situation?
• Who needs to be involved to resolve the situation?

B. Follow-up with Complainant - Explain/Discuss Appropriate Options

Discuss strategies the complainant might want to use in responding to a sexual harassment situation.

It may be helpful for the victim to inform the harasser directly that the conduct is unwelcome and must stop. However, this is not required and in some circumstances it is not the appropriate approach.

• Describe direct action the person can take:
- Let the offender know that their behavior is unwelcome and it must stop
- Verbally
- In writing - by sending an email or a letter by certified mail to the harasser.
(See more information and sample letters at the end of this booklet)

• Describe informal actions the institution can take:
- Have conversation with the alleged harasser to discuss the behavior and review the Policy.
- Send administrative letter addressing adherence to the Policy to unit/office.
- Provide an educational program on sexual harassment prevention to the unit.
- Place a copy of the University policy in offender’s mailbox.
- Suggest other types of assistance.

• Describe formal actions the institution can take:
- Administrator or supervisor speak with alleged harasser about the behavior and
require that behavior stop.
- Refer to the Affirmative Action Office.
- Conduct a formal investigation that could possibly result in appropriate disciplinary action.

Reflections on Penn State: A Brief Look Back, to Colorado

As we read one editorial after another expressing outrage at Penn State's failure to respond to complaints regarding Sandusky, and try to wrap our minds around the consequences of this "scandal," we should step back and remember that U.S. universities have a long history of failing victims of sexual assault. That was the general point of an editorial I wrote for The Guardian yesterday. I thought I'd follow that editorial up with some more focused "unpacking" of the issues that this story raises.

My first impulse regarding the Penn State story is to look back at that long-problematic football program - The University of Colorado, Boulder - and the legal precedents it created via its "deliberate indifference" to the behavior of its players.

The University of Colorado football program has spent the past two decades up to its neck in trouble - so many women have accused its football players of rape that it became hard not to think of the program as the living embodiment of a "rape culture."

In 2007, the university settled a complaint filed by two students who were raped by football players. The students had been encouraged to invite four players over one evening. 20 players and recruits turned up - they raped both women, and a third later that evening. Other women also reported being harassed at the same party.

The students chose not to file a complaint within the university. Instead, they filed a federal lawsuit against the campus. (Given how poorly such complaints are handled, one can hardly blame them.)

The complaint argued that the players had been told to expect sex; that the football program knew that sending the players to their apartment might put those women at risk. They accused the university of deliberate indifference to the environment of harassment and sexual abuse they created through their football program.

That case was initially dismissed because the students did not use the university's procedures for filing Title IX complaints. The students appealed the district court's decision. The court of appeals reinstated the case.

In its decision reinstating the lawsuit, the court found that there was evidence that the football program had a policy of showing recruits a 'good time,' that the sexual assaults happened because the campus failed to supervise its players and the recruits they were entertaining, and that it was reasonable to expect that such misconduct would result from these conditions - in failing to supervise its players, the administration showed "deliberate indifference" to the problem. For that reason, the women could press their case. The National Council of Higher Education Risk Management describes the results economically:

By the time of the assaults on Ms. Simpson, Ms. Gilmore, and others, the CU football coach had general knowledge of the serious risk of sexual assault during college football recruiting efforts and that the need for more or different training of players and hosts was so obvious that the failure to respond was clearly “deliberate indifference” to the need. The court found:

1. The head football coach had general knowledge of the serious risk of sexual harassment and assault during college football recruiting visits;

2. The coach knew that sexual assaults had occurred during prior recruiting visits;

3. Even with this knowledge, the coach continued to maintain an unsupervised player‐host recruiting program designed to show recruits “a good time”; and

4. The head football coach was aware of prior incidents of sexual assault both because of incidents reported to him as well as the fact that he refused to work toward changing the culture regarding recruiting visits. 

Thanks to these bravery of these two students - who made their case not only about the individuals who raped them, but the institution which basically facilitated the assaults - we have this legal standard of "deliberate indifference" by which a campus can be held responsible for its passivity.

Next: The Problem of the Compliant

Picturing Hope Solo

Hope Solo survived her fifth week on Dancing with the Stars. I'm glad: she is a smart, outspoken athlete and the challenge of that program requires that she confront the different ways by which her image, as a woman, is regulated. I, for one, am glad she's willing to do so publicly.

As I've mentioned in previous posts, some USWNT fans hate the way DWTS treats Solo: Judges complained for weeks about how unfeminine her movements are, and every week they cite her physical strength as a weakness. I've explained why I don't think that is necessarily wrong. (It's a gendered performance, Solo seems uncomfortable in heels and also unsure of how one executes a routine without powering through it.)

It is worth pausing, however, to remember why fans of women's sports can get very defensive: we've been abused. We've been abused by the media blackout on women's sports, which is interrupted only occasionally by stories of exceptional victories (in lieu of regularly coverage of a season, for example) or by portraits of female monsters. So we flinch when we see the media turn its eye towards us. It's a conditioned reflex.

Add to that the paternalistic attitude with which administrators and even (sometimes especially) supporters of women's sports treat women athletes. Leagues have banned players for getting pregnant out of wedlock (imagine doing that to men! in this case, the athlete filed a suit so she could play,  she won but the controversy ended her promising career); fans tsk tsk when they see players off the court who pile on make up or wear a short skirt. National Federations compel athletes to grow long hair, and prefer that those women keep their opinions to themselves. (Look feminine! But not too much! Play hard! But not like a boy! Or too much like a girl!)

Most of us don't know where to start when talking about the image of the female athlete, because every step seems to take us in a bad direction. So when in 2009 ESPN Magazinefirst produced "The Body Issue," featuring portraits of naked men and women athletes, fans of women's sports started sharpening their knives.

It turns out that a lot of the portraits directly challenge conventions regarding the feminization and sexualization of the female athlete - this is particularly true for the image of Solo used as one of the magazine's covers.

Practical matters make photographing nude women tougher than photographing men: Women are obliged to pose in ways that covers their chests. This means that the poses are more static and defensive. Solo's cover photo is an exception. The pose reveals much about her body while also refusing, aggressively, to capitulate to conventions regarding the female nude. She is in motion, moving forward toward the viewer - her curves (and she does have them) are not hidden so much as engaged, put to work.

I think this must by why a Washington Post writer recently described Solo as androgynous. Hope Solo is as far from being androgynous as one can be: When you look at Solo, you do not wonder if she's a boy. Not even close. If she were androgynous, she couldn't have played the broad shouldered, big haired 80s Bon Jovi bitch so perfectly on this week's episode. (She landed in 4th, her best finish to date.)

But the photographs of Solo treat her body in a way that is very close to gender-neutral. It's not Solo that's androgynous, but the composition of the portraits - it's the way she is being looked at. It the way she is not being looked at.

"The Body Issue" gives us a lot to think about. Those portraits are cool, but when you look at the rest of the issue you'll see a TOTAL absence of coverage of women's sports. The only place women figure in this issue is in the nude portraits. So, the project of "The Body Issue" seems to be completely independent of any effort on the magazine's part to move towards parity in terms of its coverage. The truly sad fact is that the editors of the magazine probably think putting that wonderful portrait of Solo on the cover "counts" as coverage of women's sports. Not in my book. And, I suspect, not in Solo's either.