In a wide ranging letter written to Deadspin, an anonymous Florida State professor went into great detail about the “football culture” that exists in Tallahassee. The letter covered situations of an offensive star cornering a petite female professor because she told on him for acting up in class, an offensive player who was tweaking on uppers while trying to write a paper but then mysteriously disappeared from the class roll when he was going to get failed, and about an “defensive secondary leader “ who wrote an essay for an openly gay professor’s class detailing how he “commanded a posse to bash a girly fag near to death, caved the queer’s face, and ruined his smile.”
That last story is where I will begin. Here are the details as told by the professor who wrote the letter:
Before Jameis, there was the gay-basher. His teacher, Robert, was also one of Florida State’s superstars, a professor in training with a pile of prestigious awards and grants. He is also gay, a fact that “any of my students are gonna figure out pretty quickly,” he says. The defensive back took his required writing class a few summers back, and they met early in the course for a one-on-one conference to discuss an assigned essay exploring a significant personal moment in the students’ lives.
“It was just me and him in my windowless office on the fourth floor of an empty campus building,” Robert says. The player submitted his essay and went down the hall for a drink, while Robert read it and promptly “freaked out.”
The paper was “a very graphic, very detailed, very proud telling of how he basically got his high school classmates together to beat the shit out of this ‘fag'”—a word used often in the work—”and literally kick him in the teeth to teach him a lesson.” They were sick of their mark “acting like a girl,” Robert recalls, and so they went about punching him in the face, emptying his gumline. The tone of the player’s essay was that “he was very proud of himself. He had taken the initiative to organize this beating.”
Robert panicked. The essay’s victim “talked sexually, had tight clothes, and had feminine features—some of which could be certainly be said of me,” he says. “Why would he give that to me? I took it in the moment as a personal threat.”
The big picture issue the author of the letter presents in my opinion is: Where can universities draw the line on “football culture?” The author paints a picture of a complete lack of institutional control at Florida State. However, by the same token the professor admits that faculty is also part of the problem even if they are often intimidated by handlers to make sure they cover up misconduct or give more favorable grades.
As long as there is an intense sense of pride that comes with your school performing well in athletics and the money involved is so great, the types of issues detailed in this letter will exist. Yes it’s absolutely too far what the player allegedly did in the story I highlighted and I hope that player was able to learn something from his actions and be better in the future.
Perhaps stories like this and ones of Penn State will get us to truly examine when enough is enough.