Real 'Locker Room Talk'

Elite colleges are suspending male athletes due to lewd private messages. Have the schools gone too far?

- Max Kutner

AT AMHERST COLLEGE, a member of the men’s cross-country team referred to a woman online as “a walking STD.” At Columbia, a student on the men’s wrestling team wrote to his teammates, “I hope someone actually gets sexually assaulted,” after the university canceled an event because of concerns about sexual misconduct. Meanwhile,at Harvard, men’s soccer players circulated a list of female soccer recruits, ranking them based on their appearance, among other things.

Since November, these top institutions and one more have suspended male athletes or entire teams from competing because of lewd comments on private messaging apps. A fifth school investigated similar allegations, and a resolution is pending. In most of the cases, student publications revealed the details from the private messages or documents, prompting school officials to launch probes and suspend the players from competing.

In recent years, colleges and universities have focused largely on sexual assault complaints, but these latest athletic punishments suggest schools are also taking sexually offensive language more seriously. This comes at a time when the U.S. Department of Education could shift priorities under President Donald Trump, who has dismissed his own lewd comments as “locker room talk.” In 2011, the Education Department issued guidance for how schools should handle sexual misconduct, which the 2016 Republican Party platform said “must be halted” because it interferes with law enforcement and threatens due process rights for the accused. In her Senate confirmation hearing, Betsy DeVos, Trump’s pick to run the Education Department, condemned sexual assault but refused to say that she would uphold that guidance.