It’s become normal to have an instinctive mistrust of all athletes. When the evidence was absent, everyone thought the Duke boys were guilty as sin, or at the very least guilty of something. This latent suspicion is a real and present danger to the fabric of our community, and last year it nearly tore us apart. Go down to Bryan Hall and you’ll see an iron monument to the events of last spring, where a fight between Palestinian students and football players turned the campus against itself on national television. The most viable solution we’ve come up with so far has been to install bars on Bryan’s doorways; give us another five years at this rate and we’ll have to put a wall up between Ragan-Brown Field House and the rest of campus like the Israeli-Gaza border.

A recent student survey given at the cafeteria asked “What could Guilford do to prevent racism on campus?” A common answer was for either the football team or all athletes to attend an anti-racism conference or course of some kind.

What possible form this indoctrination would take is unanswered. Images come to mind of a weekend boot camp where the football and baseball teams are forced to finger-paint pictures of happy multi-racial people while chanting in unison that they will resist their unclean, steroid- and testosterone-driven urges.

That Guilford would consider such a condescending, hyperbolic response to a perceived character flaw might seem might seem unlikely to anyone but the male athletes. The first semester a Guilford male commits to being on a team, he’s sent to a mandatory anti-rape seminar.

Of course, on a college campus where inhibitions run low and blood alcohol content runs high the seminar is a good idea, especially for out-of-state students who are unfamiliar with what defines consent under N.C. laws. These programs are now done as a part of CHAOS.

Unfortunately, the male athlete’s seminar is notoriously patronizing and hostile. The fall 2006 program asserted that since it’s estimated that one in five women are raped, one in five of the men in the room were likely rapists; the boys were also urged to be endlessly suspicious of other teammate’s behavior and to imagine their mothers and sisters being violated. But even if it were done appropriately, is the extra seminar for athletes really necessary?

By signing on to a Guilford team, an athlete commits to an intense exercise regime, stricter discipline codes, academic monitoring, randomized drug testing, and a family of coaches and teammates with a vested interest in keeping him or her out of trouble.

Unless a Division Three, scholarship-free athletic program is a breeding ground for moral degradation, sending athletes to tolerance seminars based on the flawed, instinctive assumption that they are ethically inferior to other students, isn’t addressing a problem. It’s creating one by undermining the athlete’s trust in a community that treats them as moral liabilities.

So before something happens again on campus that plays on our suspicions of one another and Greensboro police department has to break out the riot gear, maybe everyone on campus should have to recite and take to heart Lincoln’s second inaugural address:

“With malice toward none and charity for all, let us finish the work we are in, to do all which may achieve and cherish a lasting peace among ourselves and all nations.