Harvard Soccer Team’s Season Suspended After Ranking of Women on Appearance, Sexual Potential Revealed
Update Nov. 4, 10 a.m.:
Harvard University has suspended its men’s soccer team for the remainder of the season because of a sexually explicit “scouting report” created by the team about freshman recruits for the women’s soccer team.
University President Drew Faust said in a statement Thursday night that an investigation into the 2012 team found that their ”appalling” actions were not an isolated incident but seemed to be an annual tradition that continued through the current season.
”The decision to cancel a season is serious and consequential 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,” Faust said.
Athletics director Robert Scalise sent an email Thursday announcing that the university was canceling the remainder of the team’s season, including postseason play. The team will forfeit the rest of the season’s games.
The Harvard Crimson, the Ivy League university’s student newspaper, reported that it uncovered an annual tradition of the school’s men’s soccer team, in which freshmen recruits for the women’s soccer team were assessed based on physical attractiveness, often in sexually explicit terms. According to the 2012 “scouting report” obtained by the Crimson, the men’s soccer team assigned each potential recruit a numerical score based on her physical appearance and what the male players imagined to be her preferred sexual positions.
Harvard’s director of athletics, Robert L. Scalise, claimed to be seeing the “report” for the first time on Oct. 24. He told the student paper, “Any time a member of our community says things about other people who are in our community that are disparaging, it takes away from the potential for creating the kind of learning environment that we’d like to have here at Harvard. … It’s very disappointing and disturbing that people are doing this.”
Scalise also told the Crimson that the contents and tone of the report could be attributed to something that has dominated headlines lately — the notion of “locker-room banter” or “boy talk.” Scalise said, “Whenever you have groups of people that come together, there’s a potential for this to happen. It could be an individual, it could be a group, it could be a rooming group, it could be an athletic team.”
The men’s soccer team’s “report” is far from the first troubling allegation of rape culture at the Cambridge, Mass., university. In March of this year, Harvard released a report on how best to address sexual assault on campus after a fall 2015 survey found that 31 percent of undergraduate senior females said they had experienced some kind of sexual assault during their four years at the school. In reply, Harvard launched a task force to address sexual violence on campus.
The report, issued in March, focused on one of the problems illustrated by the men’s soccer team’s ranking of women and objectifying them sexually: “Space — who controls it, what is allowed within it, who finds it attractive — shapes the possibilities for social interaction,” the report on the prevention of sexual assault reads.
This spring, Harvard once again made headlines when the Porcellian Club — one of the school’s “final clubs,” which operate much like fraternities on other campuses — justified its denial of female members by explaining that doing so would make sexual assault more likely.
In a letter to the Crimson in April, the club’s president wrote: “Given our policies, we are mystified as to why the current administration feels that forcing our club to accept female members would reduce the incidence of sexual assault on campus. Forcing single-gender organizations to accept members of the opposite sex could potentially increase, not decrease, the potential for sexual misconduct.”
Earlier this week, the University of California, Berkeley, a prestigious public university, announced a ban on all parties at fraternities and sororities, as well any campus-affiliated event in which alcohol is served, as a means of addressing the sexual assault epidemic on campus. The decision comes after two female Berkeley students came forward with allegations of having been sexually assaulted at off-campus fraternity parties the previous weekend.
The news out of Harvard this week is particularly disturbing in light of a news story happening concurrently at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, another of the country’s prestigious public schools. A student reported on Oct. 12 to being sexually assaulted multiple times by a fellow student, Alec Cook. Since she came forward with her allegations against Cook, dozens of other female students have come forward with allegations of their own. Police have stated that they believe Cook has been assaulting women since March 2015 and have uncovered a notebook in which Cook kept notes on women he met, what he liked about them, and what he wanted to do to them sexually. His notes also allegedly describe wanting to “kill” certain women on this list.
With 19 percent of all undergraduate women reporting having experienced sexual assault and 75 percent of all transgender, gender-expansive, and gender-questioning students reporting sexual harassment on campus, there’s no question that sexual violence is a significant problem in higher education. And attitudes and cultural norms — such as “locker-room banter” — that allow and encourage women to be seen solely as objects available for men’s sexual desires and domination seem to be at the root of this epidemic.
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