We covered the basics of the Northwestern University sports hazing scandal in last Thursday’s column and we started to discuss the evolutional bases that, left unchecked, lead to the kind of hazing that can culminate in sexual assault – on the girls teams, no less.
To quote that piece:
…as Mr. Golding [Lord of the Flies author) so brutally described, children, and particularly hyper-competitive physically gifted teenage athletes, who’ve been catered to by parents, coaches, and fans for the majority of their young lives, CANNOT govern themselves.
But despite that stark reality, college coaches, athletic directors, and yes, even university presidents, insist on fomenting the kind leadership vacuum that not only allows a hazing culture to take hold, but gives it the space to flourish. Professional sports teams aren’t nearly immune, either, where hazing is often condoned in the name of “toughening up” the rookies.
What baffles me is, though we’re all aware of the inherent tribal nature that allowed Homo Sapiens to survive the worst of prehistoric times, we’re still shocked and appalled whenever those DNA imprinted impulses rear their ugly heads in the modern world.
The truth is, it shouldn’t surprise anyone,
The very essence of organized sports it to be better than the next guy or gal. First, the athlete wants to make the squad, then they want to crack the starting lineup, then they want to be the best player on the team enroute to being the league MVP, and so forth and so on. And all of those “successes” come at the expense of another player.
It doesn’t end there, either. In the exceedingly rare care of an athlete reaching that lofty summit, everyone’s trying to knock them off it and take their place.
The best coaches understand and take advantage of that dynamic while still somehow sublimating the individual drive for superiority just enough to create a semblance of team spirit. But it’s a very delicate balance that few are able to maintain. As the great 49ers coach Bill Walsh wrote, it requires a constant vigilance.
Otherwise, the survival of the fittest drive that determines so many athletes takes over and they’ll assert their “dominance” by whatever means necessary, which is exactly what happened at Northwestern. And it’s even worse on the women’s teams because girls are taught to tear each other down from a very young age.
But I also believe there’s more to the hazing phenomenon than that.
The great Joseph Campbell, who encouraged us to “follow our bliss,” regularly lamented the lack of modern-day “rites of passage” that were once an integral part of aboriginal and ancient cultures, particularly for teenagers.
We celebrate all manner of milestones in our children’s early lives like crawling, walking, talking, riding a two-wheel bike, losing that first tooth and more. But once we hit the teenage years those symbolic rituals abruptly end. The size of most urban high schools makes them more daunting than exciting for most students, and the once-huge possibility of passing your driver’s test has lost it’s luster in the home entertainment age.
Without those reasonable rites-of-passage, Americans are slowly sloughing off those critical community bonds and the ties of belonging to something far greater than yourself. I firmly believe that widening cultural gap is what’s primarily responsible for urban street gangs, mass shootings, rampant drug use, and Donald Trump’s inexplicable popularity.
But being on a team is the essence of belonging, so again, without the adults setting clear limits, the senior team members will devise their own often more brutal rites of passage to fill that void. As we previously covered, there’s the harmless hazing variety like the newest Cubs rookie carrying the Hello Kitty backpack, but without adult-set boundaries, you get the outright abuses that ran rampant throughout the Northwestern athletic department.
But if former NU football coach Pat Fitzgerald was held personally responsible for that brutality, whether he knew about it or not (he says he didn’t), then shouldn’t university president Michael Schill be equally culpable? Shouldn’t he have known, too? C’mon! We’re talking about just 8,000 undergrads which doesn’t begin to approximate the 34,000 at schools like the University of Illinois.
Fitzgerald’s original two-week suspension was reasonable, but considering his standout reputation as an NU player and coach, were I the university president, I would’ve given him the opportunity to fix the problem before making him a sacrificial lamb in a knee-jerk response to a subset of the Cancel Culture.
What? Would students stop applying to a university that only accepts 7 percent of applicants anyway? Will his termination somehow mitigate the abuses on the softball, baseball, and volleyball teams? Will that blatant kind of scapegoating save Northwestern’s faltering reputation?
The real irony is Fitzgerald’s termination has wrought the very reality NU administrators so desperately tried to stave off. Not only will he win his pending lawsuit against the university, but those imminent proceedings will keep the story in the media for years. And the colleges starving for football success are lining up to interview Fitzgerald as we speak.
And if the adults can fail so miserably at self-governance…
