synthesizing

While it encourages me that there are students ("colleagues, as Sarah puts it =) who will have a discussion about this subject, it is also disappointing and disturbing to read anecdotes like Aaron's. One thing that I keep thinking of while reading these posts is Burke's rhetoric of identity and othering - specifically the part where he says something along the lines of "when you focus on one thing, you are choosing to ignore the other" - essentially creating that division that makes everything black and white, no gray. Everything we have been discussing - student-athlete or non-student-athlete, white or non-white, brains or brawn - falls under this category. Why is it that all students of color are assumed to be athletes, and that all athletes are assumed to be unintelligent? I think everyone has fallen prey to this stereotype at one point - a year ago I had a black guy in my History of Rhetoric class who showed up wearing a basketball jersey and basketball shoes, and when he pulled out a copy of "phaedrus" with pages of notes in the margins and highlighted sections and a list of questions for discussion, I almost fell out of my chair because I was so surprised. Why? Because he was black, so I thought he was an athlete (turns out he wasn't)? Is that how our university culture has conditioned us to respond? WSU tries to claim that we are diverse, hiring a black president, and on the "Why WSU?" page of the WSU webpage featuring an Asian-American professor speaking to a Middle-Eastern student (my exboyfriend, ironically, who I know occasionally felt out of place at this pretty much all-white campus), and yet one only has to look at the GLBT hate crimes that have been going on here or the way that the majority of campus dubs CES majors as "granola-chewing tree-hugging liberals" to see that the effort to increase diversity and understanding - cross-cultural communication, if you will - made by much of the campus (NOT everyone) is half-hearted, at best.

The fact that we are lumping all student-athletes into one category shows that we ourselves are almost victims of the same stereotyping we are trying to shed light on. As a former employee of Northside Cafe, I have worked in the Cougar Fitness Cafe and witnessed firsthand athletes boasting that they can break rules and get away with whatever they want just because they can, treat non-athletes rudely and in general act as though they ran the school. I have also witnessed firsthand friends on the swimteam and the rowing team who were up at 4:30 every morning to make it to practice, while working and going to school and DD-ing for non-athletes who were going out when they themselves couldn't go out because they had practice in the morning. While I understand that we have to, for the sake of our argument here, I do think that to lump all athletes into the same category does them a disservice, because like in every generalization, you will find exceptions on both sides of the spectrum.

One thing I would like to respond to in Sarah's post, about how student-athletes utilize the ARC because they are treated with respect and genuine care and that other resources on campus may be a "stigmatizing environment" where they are assumed to be lacking in intelligence. I work with hardworking, patient, respectful and genuine students (some of whom are volunteering their time) in a university-run resource center and I have yet to overhear any of them treating anyone disprespectfully based on any social aspect - ESL difficulties, which Greek letters are on their sweatshirt, if they are wearing an Islamic veil, etc. If student-athletes feel that they are viewed as "he/she must be dumb because he/she plays sports," perhaps this stems from the fact that to an outsider it may appear that student-athletes are too good for the resources provided for all students - that they have to have something different, something better, and something separate. Once outsiders get this idea, then student-athletes really do feel uncomfortable/unwelcome and then the whole cycle perpetuates, increasing the isolation and division of the student-athlete from the rest of the student body. While student-athletes may prefer the resources at the ARC because they know more people and feel more at home there, I do think it is unfair to say that anything outside the ARC stigmatizes athletes (I know this isn't what Sarah said, btw, I'm just taking it a step further to illustrate a point - although I think it is interesting to hear Sarah's point of view from a very similar job just in the opposite side of the student-athlete barrier). Also I think it is important to point out that other organizations are funded outside the university - Greek chapters by national organizations, student organizations by fundraisers, etc. - but that all student-athlete resources are funded by the university. So how much of the division between student-athletes and the other part of the student body is caused by the university itself? How much does the university just perpetuate those stereotypes, and how much do student-athletes perpetuate them themselves? Do they just get tired of trying to fight the stereotypes? What gives?