If brutality and stupidity are to your taste, you had to love last weekend’s Cincinnati-Pittsburgh NFL game, won by Pittsburgh 18-16 thanks to a recovered fumble, an intentional shot to the head of the helpless receiver after an incomplete pass, and a personal foul that put the Steelers in range of the field goal that won the game as time ran out. Earlier, Cincinnati fans threw debris at Ben Roethlisberger, the Steelers quarterback, as he was carted off the field.
Conceding that consensual sex is actually possible, even in a university setting, the university set out to define it. Sexual consent, said the health center, is “voluntary, sober, imaginative, enthusiastic, creative, wanted, informed, mutual, honest.”
“Undergraduates have become the industrial waste product of higher education,” wrote Grossman. Most of their teachers “don’t have the time or energy to kick around ideas with students over a cup of coffee—the kind of experience that breeds a sense of community. Absent that, students create their own intellectual breathing space, protecting it with a Puritanlike vigor.”
But now they’re figuring it out. If the importance of a sport is going to be inflated to the point where the economic viability of the athletic program, the self-image of the university and state, and the dignity of hundreds of thousands of alumni all ride on it, the universities need their players more than they need their presidents. Football stars in legal trouble have had a pretty good idea of the leverage they enjoy; now it’s dawning on stars with causes and principles.
