"Moral Courage Story"
Original Story Written by: (annonymous)
Summarized & Analyzed by: Kentaro [12/12/2002]
Like most independent schools, St. Paul's School for Boys posts athletic schedules on its Web site. Click on it, and you'll still find the list of this spring's baseball games, tennis matches, and crew events from its campus in suburban Baltimore.
But not lacrosse. Not this spring. Despite being ranked No. 1 in a nationwide lacrosse poll earlier this year, this prestigious 151-year-old institution cancelled its entire varsity season on April 3.
That day, headmaster Robert W. Hallett met for 20 minutes with a group of parents and with the varsity team-many of whom had been drawn to the school because of its reputation as a lacrosse power-to announce the cancellation.
The reason? Earlier in the spring, a 16-year-old team member had a sexual tryst with a 15-year-old girl from another private school-and, without her knowledge, videotaped the whole thing. He was apparently mimicking a sequence in American Pie (a movie some of the students had recently seen and discussed) where a character videos a sexual encounter and puts it on the Web. When this student's teammates gathered at a player's home to look at what they thought would be game tapes of an upcoming rival, they saw his tape instead.
None of the teammates objected. Nobody tried to stop the showing. Instead, they watched.
You can imagine the soul-searching among board and staff members leading up to that announcement. Lacrosse-a game played on a soccer-like field with a small ball hurled from long sticks with nets on the ends-is Canada's national summer sport and has a strong following among East Coast prep schools and colleges in the United States. At St. Paul's it has a 60-year history and solid alumni support. But the school, affiliated with the Episcopal Church, still requires chapel for its students and retains a serious tradition of ethical concern. What do you do when a popular sport crosses swords with an ethical collapse?
In this case, the answer was clear. The boy who made the tape was expelled. Thirty varsity players were suspended for three days and sent into counseling with the school's chaplain and psychologist. And eight junior varsity players were made to sit out the rest of the season.
This is a story about moral courage-a lack of it among teammates who failed to object to the tape, and the expression of it by an administration that took a formidable public stand where in other schools it might have slid past with perfunctory penalties. "At a minimum," Hallett wrote to parents, "we should expect each boy here will, in the future, have the courage to stand up for, to quote the Lower School prayer, 'The hard right against the easy wrong.'"