34 CommentsTwo days ago, NBC reported that Chad Washington, CC ’15, was charged aggravated harassment as a hate crime against an Asian student, and that he was other football players who have yet to be charged. Yesterday, WKCR Sports compiled an album of racist, homophobic, and sexist tweets by various football players.
Yesterday night was WKCR Sports’s weekly program, The Firing Lion. On air, they confronted the double-edged sword that is social media, whether there is a “culture of bigotry” on the football team, and what sort of meaningful action the administration can and should take. It was a little hard for them to talk about the tweets, because they couldn’t in accordance with FCC standards read them on air.
They uploaded the show to their SoundCloud this morning. It’s worth listening to (if you can find a spare hour). The ‘KCR sports team thinks through this stuff in good faith.
Unrelated to WKCR but important: Gothamist obtained the criminal complaint against Chad Washington. Apparently both Chad and his friends and the Asian victim and his friends were drinking.
Unrelated to WKCR but interesting: the football team had an emergency meeting on Tuesday night around 9 pm to discuss all this and get their story straight. Coincidentally, there was a large outpouring of support for Chad on Twitter and Facebook right after the meeting.
Update, 2:17 pm: WKCR Sports just released an Imgur album of tweets in which the official football account promoted and recognized some of the student accounts in question.
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34 Comments
@Nope @Anonymous: WKCR also tweeted proof of the coach and the official columbia account directly interacting on twitter with the athletes. So maybe some, but definitely not all. http://imgur.com/a/BDiza/all
@Anonymous http://imgur.com/a/kfemI#0
@Justin Well I’m fcked, I’m Asian AND a girl
@Anonymous It’ s a possibility that many of the football players might have “blocked” the coach/ official columbia twitter. If true, then the responsibility is solely on the players, not the university/coaches/athletics staff. No information, just a possibility
@honestly though that is unacceptable and I hope she is okay
@Anonymous Is it for certain that the second story is not the true one? I just wanna make sure before we rush to judgement.
@anon you mean the “source familiar” one which conveniently neglected the women-harassing part?
@wtf okay i’m usually not one to make judgements before hearing everything out and i know this is also not reflective of all the players, but i saw this comment on another one of the posts and just want to echo the need for a real change..I know this RA and she is one of the most caring selfless people I have met-can’t believe this is what she got in return for all the work she does
“this kind of stuff happens all the time and people get away with it..there was an RA in Carman who was harassed for 2 months by football players because they were mad she wrote up one of their parties. They fucking threatened her with gang rape. That shit is unacceptable. And it made me think twice before accepting an RA position for next year.”
come on, Columbia. Let’s please have a REAL, HONEST conversation about this and actually make a change instead of just trying to make it go away.
@oh god @wtf: these meat-heads really make me feel embarrassed to tell people how great columbia is. “gang rape”? what the fuck?!
@anon I can confirm this story is true as well. Also I know some students were “expelled” last year in carman for racism toward floor mates, but one was let back in because his daddy was a tenured professor. This covering up of racism has to stop!
@anon If you want to see these terrible people punished for their actions sign the petition here:
http://www.ipetitions.com/petition/suspend-and-remove-columbia-athletes-who/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=system&utm_campaign=Send%2Bto%2BFriend
We demand the suspension and removal of these athletes from the rosters of their respective teams and an announcement of such an action to the Columbia community.
@Anonymous It would make more sense to use your time trying to punish the cheaters in the Barnard scandal.
@John Song Wouldn’t it make more sense to have them keep playing? I mean come on. They wake up early, take a bus up to Baker Field, get their asses kicked, and then come back to Morningside Heights to suffer the scorn of their classmates. The C on the football helmet is the scarlet letter synonymous with LOSER. I wouldn’t hire any of these guys except to do menial work; their losing spirit is too contagious.
@CC '11 Decided to visit Bwog for nostalgia’s sake (and for senior wisdoms! Reading them even as an alumna, which probably says something bad about my life– but I knew I made the right choice when I saw the writer of Barnard Boy had written a senior wisdom), and was sad to read about what’s been happening. Honestly, as someone who never played a sport but enjoys watching sports, I had and continue to have respect for athletes. The worst part about this thing for me is that I expected way better from these football players. I didn’t know any football players when I went to Columbia, and I heard good and bad things about them, but I never saw this coming. I guess I’m more disappointed than angry. Their tweets were so stupid– I can’t believe that they actually believe what they’re writing. I just can’t. Logically, I know people are prejudiced and bigoted. But we’re all so much better than this.
@Anon While I think there is a pervasive “locker room” culture in all of athletics (as a former high school athlete I can certainly attest to this), I think it’s important not to rush to make judgements about the entire football team. I also think it’s important to wait until we hear more details regarding this case. Washington has not been convicted of anything, and although it is clear he was comfortable using racist and homophobic language, it is not clear whether he actually harbored any deep hatred or resentment that would motivate a violent action. From my experience in high school, many guys would say offensive things not because they wanted to express their hatred of other groups, but because they thought (wrongly) that saying stuff like that was funny. These tweets, I believe are nothing more than extremely distasteful jokes. I think Chad Washington would have picked on anybody at that moment, he could have been black, white, asian, latino, etc; and he likely would have said mean things regardless of race.
@Anonymous The point is that actions have consequences. No excuses.
@Anonymous Guys, come on. Before you condemn the athletics department by saying that the official football twitter promoted these athletes, do some research and see that various members of the football team were often given a day to run the @ColumbiaLionsFB account, and so of course promoted themselves and their close friends. Can you really imagine any administrator tweeting “Visor ganggggg”? The men who did this have already shown bad decision making abilities, and used that same lapse in judgement to use the official twitter in ways they should not have.
Once again, this is a select group of people doing this, not the entire football team, student-athlete body, or student body/administration at Columbia. It is a group of men who made very, very bad decisions, but the rest of the campus should not be held accountable for their actions.
@Anonymous I wish my school would give me control of official Twitter accounts.
JOCKS GO HOME
@your mom nah meatheads go home
@uhm so… you really don’t see how the athletics dept. letting the football players use the official twitter invalidates your argument?
@Anonymous What’s the asian’s name?
@no. no no no no no no no no NO
@Seriously though We all wanna know, what’s the asian’s name?
@your mom ya
@Anonymous LET ME MAKE THIS POINT:
what makes everyone think the coach had time to watch 100 twitter accounts and try to turn an entire program around?? The few individuals who have been named for their horrible tweets were either
A: recruited before coach Mangurian was hired
B: deliberately did not follow the rules and hid their twitters from all administrative eyes. AKA when told to give their social media information to the athletic department they failed to do so
The point of a person such as coach Mangurian to have a twitter is to tweet- not follow what others are saying, it is used as a PR tool to help escalate the reputation of the program.
With this being said punishing this program as a whole is not necessary in my opinion. These were moments of bad judgement by young college students- and lets be honest we’ve all done stupid things that we regret. I think that this is a learning experience for the entire student body.
@former footballer A) Doesn’t matter who recruited them – Mangurian should be their leader.
B) This isn’t about social media rules for athletes. It’s about every single student at CU holding themselves to a higher standard because we are all/will be CU grads, and this reflects poorly on all of us.
I can’t deny being a dick at times when I was on campus, but I can say that it was not very often. I can also say what we’re seeing here goes far beyond being a dick, and not once did I witness anything like this 2007-2011. These guys should be booted.
There shouldn’t be a punishment for the entire football program, but there should be a fix to this behavior. The fix is a focus on recruiting classier individuals, and a concerted effort by the coaching staff to identify these pricks freshman year and fix them, or drive them out.
@Anonymous @former footballer
A) Doesn’t matter who recruited them – Mangurian should be their leader.
— He has already started to turn the program around. Do you think that would have been possible if he didn’t have the teams support?
B) This isn’t about social media rules for athletes. It’s about every single student at CU holding themselves to a higher standard because we are all/will be CU grads, and this reflects poorly on all of us.
— I could not agree more which is why i’m so ticked that the whole student body and columbia community is attacking the football program. You cant honestly sit here and tell me that the FB team is the only group that has any issue like this.. that would be lying.
I can’t deny being a dick at times when I was on campus, but I can say that it was not very often. I can also say what we’re seeing here goes far beyond being a dick, and not once did I witness anything like this 2007-2011. These guys should be booted.
— Sean Brackett was one of the players identified in the twitter sabotage.. his stats go back to 2009..
There shouldn’t be a punishment for the entire football program, but there should be a fix to this behavior. The fix is a focus on recruiting classier individuals, and a concerted effort by the coaching staff to identify these pricks freshman year and fix them, or drive them out.
— there are always a few bad apples and in this case they have spoiled the reputation of the whole bunch
@Anonymous No one cares. Most of the school is finding out through this ordeal that we have an athletics dept., and if you can call them football players, than I guess we have our own version of a “football” team, personally, getting your ass kicked for 4 quarters every game in your college career and then getting laughed when you tell other real athletes where you “play”…
Also the school needs to pull their head out of their ass if they think this is a single defined incident. The majority of CC is racist, bigoted, classist, and the school has no interest in actually removing bias. Worry about how much our tuition goes up and quit acting you care about any of the students here.
@jerks Can’t get over these tweets. Athletes or not – you’d think Columbia students would be less ignorant. And smarter about what they post on social media. Good luck getting jobs kids. Oh yeah. Football alumni always hook you up whether you deserve it or not
@Risky Move I understand that teammates are supposed to support each other given almost any circumstance, but if most or all of the football team openly supports Chad in this situation, it could result in the football program losing even more of the already few student “fans” that they have. People will feel even less obligated to go to Homecoming to see a team that condones and supports this behavior.
Granted, I don’t know explicitly what kind of “outpouring of support” this is, so I can’t really make any conclusions or judgments on it.
@Sports can u nerds just shut up about stuff u dont understand #goreadabook
@good! thanks for that constructive comment!!!
@Anonymous There was not a football meeting in Sigma Chi last night. The football team is not directly affiliated in any way with Sigma Chi. Some members of the football team are in Sigma Chi, but those involved with the incident on Saturday are not a part of Sigma Chi
@Anonymous haha okay. cool. u shud rite emails for kevsho