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Harvard cancels remainder of Men’s soccer season amid scandal

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In response to the recent scandals concerning sexually explicit reports on the Women’s soccer team, Harvard has officially ended the Men’s soccer team’s season.

The Harvard Crimson reported that Athletics Director Robert L. Scalise sent a letter to student-athletes on Thursday that the University was terminating the Men’s season after finding that the reports scandal continued beyond 2012 and even into the 2016 season.

“As a direct result of what Harvard Athletics has learned, we have decided to cancel the remainder of the 2016 men’s soccer season,” Scalise wrote. “The team will forfeit its remaining games and will decline any opportunity to achieve an Ivy League championship or to participate in the NCAA Tournament this year.”

The Harvard Crimson first reported the news on October 25. A nine-page “scouting report” in which, in lewd terms, the author of the report individually evaluated each female recruit, assigned them numerical scores and wrote paragraph-long assessments of the women including pictures of each taken from social media sites.

University President Drew G. Faust asked the Office of General Counsel to review the case, and upon receiving news of its continuation beyond 2012, stated she “was deeply distressed to learn that the appalling actions of the 2012 men’s soccer team were not isolated to one year or the actions of a few individuals.”

“The decision to cancel a season is serious and consequential,” added Faust, “and reflects Harvard’s view that both the team’s behavior and the failure to be forthcoming when initially questioned are completely unacceptable, have no place at Harvard, and run counter to the mutual respect that is a core value of our community.”

The Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response has stated they will be working with all student-athletes, and especially the men’s soccer team, to further educate them on the issue.

Comments

  1. Was this distributed to the women in question, or was this simply kept internally within the men’s soccer program?

    If it was the former, I would agree that it needed to be met with some form of punishment, but if it was the latter, then I see it as nothing more than the trigger-warning, and nauseatingly politically correct cultural cultivated within colleges campuses now days.

    I can understand how white knights can be upset if they’ve never had a “scale” conversation about cheerleaders, fellow athletes or fellow classmates, but for the rest of the male population that have…which is completely healthy/normal…this type of over-the-top punishment represents a complete breakdown in our society to handle any adversity.

    That feeble mentality is coming home to roost, too, and the very PC-minded people will eventually fall victim to it, too.

    Reply
    • There is a real difference between having a ‘”scale” conversation’ and producing a multi page report with photos stalked from social media. The fact it happened once is bad enough, but that there were some ongoing behavior takes it to another level. It sounds like the university was prepared to sweep it under the rug, but the ongoing nature forced their hand. Sadly, rape culture is real and tolerated way too frequently and many colleges have had highly publicized issues with sexual assault among their students. The university should absolutely have taken swift and decisive action to nip this sort of behavior in the bud and be unequivocal that this was unacceptable. I attend college soccer games at Stanford all the time and see the men’s and women’s team cheering each other on with apparently real respect and affection for one another and imagine it is the same at Harvard and navy other colleges. I can’t even imagine the sense of violation and betrayal the female athletes felt when they found out not that the men thought about them sexually but that they had produced and updated a god damn book rating them and co-opting their personal photos from social media. Not sure a ‘boys will be boys’ defense is ever really acceptable and certainly not in this case

      Reply
      • Sadly, rape culture is real and tolerated way too frequently and many colleges have had highly publicized issues with sexual assault among their students

        Rating women, among men with no intention of publication, is propagating rape culture? Dear god.

        I can’t even imagine the sense of violation and betrayal the female athletes felt when they found out not that the men thought about them sexually but that they had produced and updated a god damn book rating them and co-opting their personal photos from social media.

        I can assure you the sense of violation and betrayal does not outweigh the victims of false claims of actual rape, mob-mentality reporting and portraying young men…who are acting like young men…as sexual predators for acting like young men and subjecting them to labels as being within the rape culture.

        Ask Rolling Stone how that worked out for them today.

        Yes, Joamiq. The world is passing by sanity at a high rate of speed seeking an unrealistic utopia of safe spaces where people rely on defining their identities by what others think and far too quick to pat themselves on the back to “protect” non-victims by making them feel as such.

      • Yes, please enlighten on us this new bastion of hyper-sensitivity, utlra-feminist and over-the-top PC culture and how healthy that is for you within your safe space, “fooo” (an appropriate name too).

  2. and when women judge/rate men’s physical attributes in the same way they are just being strong feminists not ashamed of their sexuality. Canceling the rest of their season is ridiculous. Whatever happened to sticks and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me.

    Reply
    • Funny, I didn’t read anything about the women drafting nine-page reports about the men’s looks. If you don’t seen anything wrong with the men’s team’s behavior, you’ve got issues.

      Reply
      • Did you ever read the Kickette soccer blog that was written by women and pretty much entirely devoted to rating and talking sexually about male soccer players? No one had any problem with that. People thought it was hilarious and this site even had a link to the blog. Did you see the Cosmopolitan article last summer that rated the best male bulges of the Olympics?

        That nine page report was from 2012, and not done by the current players. What they did was continue to rate the women players in personal communication between themselves. If you don’t think female college athletes are having those same types of personal communications about members of the opposite sex you are delusional.

      • Kickette isn’t published by students at a university from what I remember. That is why authors of the hottest WAGs is not slammed either. Do you want a parallel? How about the Duke student that ranked all the boys she hooked up with in a powerpoint presentation.

      • Speaking of Duke, let’s have a conversation about the supposed “rape culture” being pushed by the regressive-left and reflect on the lives ruined because white knights, insane feminists and mob-mentality media pouncing on the young men of the lacrosse team because of this same overreaction to pat ourselves on the back for “defending” a “victim”.

        That, truly, is a huge problem that still continues today. See: Rolling Stone a few days ago.

    • lest you forget, this is an EDUCATIONAL institution that is not built on zero-sum logic of wins and losses, but rather one that is designed so that everybody wins (perhaps not academically) on moral grounds. the fact that it’s harvard and is more pretentious and PC than most.

      given the circumstances, any indication that ANYTHING potentially related to assault (sexual, verbal, physical, etc) or bullying would be met with hypersensitivity.

      if such a reaction, at such an institution, surprises you then you may, in fact, be delusional….

      Reply

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