Student athletes, meet Big Brother
Student athletes have long been told by their athletic departments to watch what they post on Facebook, Myspace, Webshots, etc. To be fair, they’ve got a pretty bad track record of posting incriminating hazing and drinking photos on the internet that are eventually found and exposed by websites like BadJocks.com.
Now the athletic departments have another option in their fight to keep jocks from embarrassing themselves and their schools, most of whom have strict hazing and drinking policies for teams. It’s a social network monitoring service called YouDiligence, which promises, for a price (about $250 a month, according to InsideHigherEd.com), to search athletes’ profiles for potentially risky postings or photo captions.
College athletic departments can plug in key words for it to search for (ie: hazing, drinking, partying, drugs) on athletes’ profiles, and are alerted by e-mail if any of those terms show up. However, it’s unable to search photos for hazing or other inappropriate behavior, and only works for Facebook and Myspace, at least for now.
So will this Big Brother program ever really catch on? So far, no athletic departments have signed up for the service, but maybe some will in the future to take the responsibility and policework off the backs of the coaches and assistants in colleges’ programs. There’s also no explanation of how the program works its way around the sites’ privacy controls, so that could limit its effectiveness.
Finally, at least according to the athletes I’ve talked to, most are aware by now that posting incriminating pictures or messages online is just stupid.
So until this catches on, student athletes, post away, but make sure your privacy settings are as good as they can get.
What part of dead don’t you seem to understand?
Looks like the Illiniwek brou ha-ha isn’t over: The Daily Illini is reporting that a member of the Board of Trustees never voted to remove the Chief. They voted to put him in, so it would make sense to vote to take him out. And the actual announcement came at interesting timing, at least if you buy into conspiracy theories about administration timing the decision to minimize student input.
I’m all for open meetings and fairness, and I hate it just as much as anyone else does when administrations do what’s best in terms of CYA, which it seems pretty clear here that is what’s going on. But have we lost sight of the issue? Of why they should have made this decision swiftly, long ago? People ? an entire people, or more aptly, a gross misrepresentation of said people ? are not mascots. Are we really in business of defending things as ugly as this in 2007 in the name of tradition? Are we honestly willing to wield our power as students, as fans, as alumni to preserve a tradition that insults not only other students but also our intelligence? Enough crying about PC vs. non-PC. We’re past that point. Over. Done. Let’s move forward, without the Chief. Please? Or am I way off here? Let’s hash this out ? without using the word tradition.
The Chief has left the building
The University of Illinois has finally buried their minstrel show mascot symbol, Chief Illiniwek, and people are weighing in on all sides. Letters to the editor are pouring in for both the local and student paper, The Daily Illini.
Students for Chief Illiniwek have their Illini-week all planned out, complete with candlelight vigil. A. Candle. Light. Vigil.
It’s hard to have much compassion for the students on this one, especially when they’re forming groups and posting messages like this on Facebook (I left all the punctuation alone, so sic sic sic etc.):
This is a bunch of crap if you ask me! There are alot of Illini fans that are very upset about the whole thing..If you dont like the way things were I feel people should leave! Tradition is Tradition and should NOT BE CHANGED
i agree with kyle … weve had the chief for over 80 years and now its a huge problem … wat bullshit
im sick of all the people who made such a huge deal about being anti-chief, and now all the sudden we are stupid…
My personal favorite was a group (now deleted) named “If They Get Rid Of The Chief I’m Becoming A Racist.” I wonder how many of these outraged, political-correctness hatin’ students know what their symbol of honor is really about. If this is honor, I don’t think anyone deserves to be honored. The NCAA has made it crystal clear how they feel about the situation. Enough of the slippery slopes; booting a ugly characterture does not mean we live in a sanitized, zero-tolerance world where PETA will get up in arms about bears and bobcats as mascots. The university is making the right decision here, however long overdue. Is there a justification here other than blind tradition? Can we really claim that the Chief is promoting education of all things Native American?
(After the jump is a video of the dance from his second-to-last performance ever. Judge how honorable the shuckin’/jivin’? is for yourself.)
Feed for College Ave.