Student Sports Fans and Bigotry

"College students who are serious about their identification with their institution’s football and men’s basketball teams are more likely than other students to have homophobic and sexist attitudes." See here for the full article.

Thoughts on why this might be the case and what should be done to deal with these issues?

(Hat tip to Rob Sica for bringing this article to my attention.)

Graduate Programs in the Philosophy of Sport

In the comments section of the last post, an undergrad inquired about the graduate programs that exist which focus on the philosophy of sport. Those who teach or study in such a program, or simply know of one or more, please give some basic information in the comments section of this post.

Moral Development through Sports

A lot has been assumed and written on this topic, but a friend recently pointed me to an op-ed piece in the NY Times, which includes the following:

Concentrating your effort on one or at most a few goals at a time increases the odds of success. Focusing on success is important because willpower can grow in the long term. Like a muscle, willpower seems to become stronger with use. The idea of exercising willpower is seen in military boot camp, where recruits are trained to overcome one challenge after another.

In psychological studies, even something as simple as using your nondominant hand to brush your teeth for two weeks can increase willpower capacity. People who stick to an exercise program for two months report reducing their impulsive spending, junk food intake, alcohol use and smoking. They also study more, watch less television and do more housework. Other forms of willpower training, like money-management classes, work as well.

This is relevant for sports because one of the deliverances of common sense seems to be that participating in sports, which is one way to exercise, is or at least can be conducive to moral growth. A kid might grow in courage as she faces adversity on the soccer field and then become more courageous in other areas of her life. While some studies show that very little of this is actually going on in sports, I would speculate that this is not because the potential is not there, but rather it is because we are not doing what it takes to realize the potential of sport for moral growth. In the above quote, it looks as if increased willpower just happens. The difficulty is that a person can demonstrate incredible self-control and discipline in one area of life, such as the diet and training regimens of elite athletes, but severely lack it in other areas, such as finances or relationships. The important question is how to expand a virtue from one realm of life to other realms. Or, to put it differently, how to develop a virtue such as courage or self-control so that it permeates more and more of my life, and not just my sporting life. Perhaps the practical lesson is that I should seek to develop a virtue like self-control in my sporting life, and then turn my attention and seek to develop it in another realm or two (such as reading, or eating, or in dealing with difficult people, or not watching tv).

Deadline Extension for IAPS Abstracts

2009 IAPS Conference – August 27-30 in Seattle, Washington – Deadline Extension (April 15, 2009)

Doug Hochstetler, Conference Chair

We welcome your abstracts for submission to the 2009 IAPS Conference -- the deadline for abstract submission is extended to April 15, 2009. The setting is Seattle, Washington with Seattle University serving as the host institution. Dr. Dan Tripps, Director of the Seattle University Center for the Study of Sport & Exercise, is Chair of the Site Organizing Committee, and is working with his committee to prepare what promises to be an outstanding conference. Check the IAPS website (www.iaps.net) for the Call for Papers and additional information.

Exploitation in College Sports?

In my introductory ethics course today we had a debate related to whether or not college athletes are being exploited. To frame the issue, consider the following definitions of exploitation:

“[T]o exploit a person involves the harmful, merely instrumental utilization of him or his capacities, for one's own advantage or for the sake of one's own ends.” (Buchanan 1985, 87).

“Common to all exploitation of one person (B) by another (A)…is that A makes a profit or gain by turning some characteristic of B to his own advantage…exploitation … can occur in morally unsavory forms without harming the exploitee's interests and … despite the exploitee's fully voluntary consent to the exploitative behavior…” (Feinberg 1988, 176-79).

“Exploitation [in exchange] demands…that there is no reasonably eligible alternative [for the exploitee] and that the consideration or advantage received is incommensurate with the price paid. One is not exploited if one is offered what one desperately needs at a fair and reasonable price.” (Benn 1988, 138).

“[A] group is exploited if it has some conditionally feasible alternative under which its members would be better off.” (Roemer 1986, 136).

Given these different takes on what exploitation is, can a case be made that college athletes, at least big time college athletes, are being exploited in one or more of the above senses? As one president of Stanford University put it, big time college athletics "reeks of exploitation" because of the revenue generated for the university from the services of the athletes while many of the athletes gain little from their own college experiences.