The University of Kansas Athletics Department has taken commitment and accountability to the next level: they have hired a legion of retired-folk (no, not The American Legion, but similar) to assure that their athletes attend class. The full article can be found in the Wall Street Journal’s riveting Life and Culture: Sports section.
First, I’ll set aside all jabs about Duke’s athletic superiority over that of the Jayhawks. Now, let us break down where two ethical questions may arise: one, should these athletes be tracked and two, why do the trackers have to be elderly people?
When I think of college, I think not of more rigorous academics, learning to live with another person, or consuming disgusting amounts of pizza: I think of freedom. Included in my freedom is the choice to attend – or not attend – class. By hiring trackers to check up on these athletes’ attendance, KU is eliminating a fundamental component of the college experience. Should they stigmatize these students on the basis that they are athletes? They forfeit many freedoms when becoming a student athlete, should the liberty to skip class and catch up on sleep every now and then be one of the opportunities forgone?
The plight of student-athletes and their ‘special treatment’ is not as fascinating as my next point: what’s interesting is that KU has set up a game of cat and mouse where the cat happens to have arthritis and the mouse happens to be one of our nation’s top athletes. The decision to hire seniors – as opposed to any other demographic – does logically make sense: the athletes do not easily manipulate them. Sixty-plus years have apparently calloused them from the temptation of free tickets, autographs, etc. Moreover, in theory young people will feel the need to be more morally upstanding when around elders (you steal from your mom’s cookie jar, not your grandmother’s).
Regardless, I maintain that it is awkward – athlete or not – to have a gray-haired man peeping in your class periodically. Also, to what degree does the age of the trackers transform the attendance game into a joke to the athletes? The article illustrates some of the tricks that the athletes pull in attempts to cut class either altogether or to take off shortly after being accounted for. Would they try to slip away if they weren’t dubious about the trackers’ sight and hearing capabilities, issues some of the trackers say make their task more difficult?
I find the program a little too absurd for comfort. Added to the list of reasons why I’m happy to be a Blue Devil: Kyrie Irving can get himself to our Psychology lecture without a senior citizen spying on our class.
Question: are you certain no one is spying on Kyrie Irving, or in some way monitoring his class attendance?
But on to the core issue: I don’t understand the ethical issue raised by the fact that it is senior citizens checking on the athletes. Is it that older people walking around are conspicuous, and thus this increases the stigma for the players? If the monitors weren’t obvious, would it be OK? If so, the issue about student-athletes having the freedom to skip if they want is secondary, if relevant at all. But if it’s about freedom and the inequality monitoring creates between student-athletes and other students, then the monitors’ age is irrelevant, right?
I guess I’m not certain that no one is spying on our athletes but if they are, they don’t make it obvious.
Personally, I think the monitoring is fine. A lot of these athletes are on scholarship and they have responsibilities beyond that of an average student. I think what makes the situation at Kansas interesting is not that they are monitoring – that takes place at many universities – but the fact that the trackers are old. I think to call it an ethical issue may be a stretch, but, at the same time, how would you feel about an elderly tracker?
I dunno, seems to me that there’s a pretty interesting ethical dimension to picking elderly students to shadow athletes. First, I think there is the potential for if not stigma at least embarrassment for those being shadowed. There doesn’t seem to be any pretense that these wizened nannies are mentors. More interesting to me is why old people might be more effective than their more youthful counterparts. Are people more reluctant to behave badly around old people in the same way we have qualms about swearing in front of children? Seems like it’d be better if we wanted to behave well around everyone. Is this a lack of integrity or just social reality?
I appreciate your further comments. Reading the original story that prompted the post, it seems that KU did have reason to believe that the younger monitors were corruptible in ways that older ones might not be. Unlikely that a star player is going to date and maybe even marry his 65 year-old monitor, or charm him or her into looking the other way. But Christian raises a good point – do we more easily lie to our peers? If so, why? Might it be that the (maybe superficial) similarities between student-athletes and other “traditional-aged” students makes it difficult for them to accept and enact hierarchical roles between themselves? Which leads me to focus on the monitor also. Is the situation sort of like being the hall monitor in elementary school, expected to rat on your schoolmates who are in violation? We all know people who relished being the rule enforcers, but we also that most of the time, we hoped those jobs were being done by our friends. People may think they’re going to be ethical monitors, but then find themselves enforcing the rules in differential ways, favoring friends, succumbing to bribes of silly bands and stickers, being especially mean to the unpopular kids, etc.
So maybe the most interesting ethical question in all of this is not why the student-athletes act worse with peer monitors than with senior citizen monitors – after all, as the OP said, they’re just acting like a lot of “regular” students (even those on _academic_ scholarships, who also, it might be suggested, should feel greater responsibility…) act – they’re skipping class, reading FB in class, dozing. But their classmates/monitors have signed on, voluntarily it seems, to do a job. Why don’t they live up to their responsibility to their employers, the athletic department?