Hate speech remains a problem - as evidenced by three Ivy League school teams being suspended for creating offensive messages.
College athletic programs promote team-building, stress the importance of fair play and reinforce the values young scholar-athletes should embrace as they head into the wider world.
Except when they don't.
Something apparently went horribly wrong at Princeton University this semester, leading officials to suspend the men's swimming and diving team from competing for the remainder of the season.
The move came after messages described as racist, vulgar and misogynistic were discovered on an electronic mailing list, the school said in a statement. A university spokesman told The New York Times that the comments were made about members of the women's swimming and diving team.
"The behavior that we have learned about is simply unacceptable," Mollie Marcoux Sarmaan, the university's director of athletics, said.
Princeton U. cancels men's swimming season
That the offensive messages exist at all is appalling enough. But that the suspension represents the third such punishment against an Ivy League team since November makes the ugly behavior less an aberration and more a deep-rooted plague.
As The New York Times reported, Harvard cancelled the remainder of the season for its men's soccer team after officials became aware players using sexually explicit terms to rate female plays. Columbia meted out a similar punishment while officials investigated text messages players sent that allegedly used racist, misogynistic and homophobic language.
The Associated Press reported that some of the messages originating at Columbia disparaged female students, while others expressed hope that someone would be sexually assaulted at a campus event or used slurs against blacks in the context of discussing the police shooting of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
It's way too glib to pass this behavior off as "boys being boys." Too glib and too dangerous, especially in a national culture in which hatred, anti-Semitism, racism and other forms of bigotry are festering.
We've seen where closing our eyes to the exploits of athletes can have tragic consequences. It happened here in New Jersey, where a dozen players from the Glen Ridge High School football team raped a mentally handicapped girl in 1989 - only to have members of the community rally around their local "heroes."
Treated as gods, lauded by their schoolmates and lionized by their adoring crowds, these young men (usually they're men, although it can happen to women as well) absorb the seductive message: As long as they keep winning, they can get away with anything.
Until they can't. Until the likes of Princeton or Columbia or Harvard pull the plug.
There are going to be people - fans, alums - who squawk that the punishment is excessive. It's not. Any team players who think they can get strew their filth with abandon need to know there are consequences. Those consequences start here.
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