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In Wednesday’s edition of the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater Royal Purple, managing editor Michael Daly slammed the “preferential treatment” some athletes consider their due, and “the coaches and administrators who send the message it’s acceptable to behave how you want because you can run fast or jump high.” As an example, he cited a recent incident in which police had to be called to the campus campus weight room to deal with an athlete who refused to show ID on entry.
Whitewater football coach Lance Leipold wasn’t happy.
“This is fucking bullshit,” Leipold told Purple sports editor Christopher Kuhagen (see note below). In an email, he said the paper would “no longer have access to student-athletes or coaches in the football program,” and in a phone call he told Kuhagen to “go cover soccer.”
After the Purple published a story on Leipold’s outbursts, however, he quickly issued an apology by email. “I want to sincerely apologize for my recent behavior,” he wrote. “Some of the language I used with you was inappropriate and I am very sorry. You, UW-Whitewater campus community and alumni expect and deserve better from me as the Head Football Coach and the example I need to set for our program. I am open to meeting with you anytime to discuss this further.”
He and his team would, he said, continue to make themselves available to the Purple‘s reporters.
Note: In the Purple article on Leipold’s tirades, the expletive before “bullshit” was deleted. It’s possible, but unlikely, that it was something other than “fucking.”
Nobody has lived at 610 North Buchanan Boulevard in Durham, North Carolina since March 2006, when police began investigating charges that members of the Duke University lacrosse team had raped a woman there.
Three years later, the criminal charges against the players have long since been dropped, but the house remains padlocked and vacant. Duke owns the building, and wants to tear it down, but lawyers for members of the team are insisting that it be preserved as evidence in a possible lawsuit.
The Duke Chronicle, the university’s student newspaper, has the story.
It’s been almost two weeks since the University of North Carolina became the twenty-first campus this year to break with Russell Athletic over labor violations. No other schools have dumped Russell since then, but the campaign against the apparel manufacturer is still going strong.
A few highlights of the last two weeks’ organizing:
- Activists at the University of Minnesota are building on their victory there — now that UM has axed Russell, they’re pressing for the university to join the Worker Rights Consortium’s Designated Suppliers Program.
- Villanova University’s athletics program has announced a temporary freeze in purchasing from Russell while they investigate the situation, and the campus newspaper published an editorial last Thursday calling on the university to break with Russell permanently.
- A member of Kansas University Students Against Sweatshops wrote an op-ed for the Daily Kansan urging KU to cut its Russell ties.
- The Student Coalition Against Labor Exploitation held a Russell Athletics teach-in at the University of Southern California.
- Campus activists attended last Friday’s Associated Students UCLA meeting to press the case for dumping Russell.
Meanwhile, Russell Athletic is inviting the presidents of the colleges and universities that have cut their ties with the company to visit Honduras on an RA-hosted “fact-finding trip.”
March 20 Update: USAS is tweeting that the Montana State University Bozeman has become the 22nd campus to drop Russell in 2009. Also, there’s a major story on the campaign going out over the AP wire. Also, USAS reports that MSU-Bozeman and Santa Clara University have both dumped Russell. That makes 23 campuses.
May 1 Update: Boston College and the University of California make FIFTY-SEVEN campuses. Wow.
I stumbled across two classic movies over at Hulu.com yesterday. Both are streamed in high-quality video for free at the site, and are available to watch anytime.
In the last few months it’s been hard to avoid hearing the name of Harvey Milk, the San Francisco activist and community organizer who became the nation’s first-ever openly gay elected official in 1978 — and was assassinated just eleven months later. The Gus Van Sant/Sean Penn biopic Milk has been getting well-deserved rave reviews since it opened in November. But Milk isn’t the first movie made about Harvey, and it may not be the best. The 1984 documentary The Times of Harvey Milk is an astounding achievement, and a great lesson in the history and practice of organizing. Check it out at Hulu if you haven’t seen it already.
The Marx Brothers’ 1932 Horse Feathers is history of a different kind. In it Groucho plays a university president, and the movie’s plot — such as it is — centers around corruption and gambling in college sports. College students were cultural icons in the 1920s and 1930s, and Horse Feathers gives a fascinating glimpse at how the university was perceived in popular culture at the time.
Jan Kemp, an English professor at the University of Georgia who exposed exploitation of student athletes in the 1980s, leading to reforms in NCAA eligibility policies, has died of Alzheimer’s Disease.
Kemp was fired by UGA in the early 1980s for refusing to inflate the grades of varsity athletes who were in some cases functionally illiterate. When she sued the university for wrongful dismissal, the university’s academic policies were themselves put on trial.
In one of the most damning pieces of evidence, an audiotape was introduced on which the head of remedial studies at UGA could be heard telling fellow professors that student athletes were “a kind of raw material in the production of some goods to be sold as whatever product, and they get nothing in return.”
Kemp was reinstated as a result of that trial, and awarded more than one million dollars in damages. The verdict led to the resignation of the university’s president, and to new academic standards for athletes at UGA and in the NCAA as a whole.
studentactivism.net 
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