Team’s Troubles: Just Boyish Fun?

It often takes someone who has thought long and deeply about social problems to set things in perspective. Certainly the chairman of the Academic Senate at Cal State Fullerton, who happens to be a sociologist, is right: We are making entirely too much of the latest outbreak of boyish high spirits among members of the Fullerton football team.

It is unfair to imagine that something might be wrong with Fullerton’s program simply because its members have repeatedly been involved in violent incidents, including one that resulted in someone being beaten to death, just as it is wrong to wonder about football programs across the country simply because football players seem to be arrested more often than other students for assaults on women, thefts of various kinds, selling drugs and other pranks.

In doing these things they are not acting as football players, we are reminded, but as private citizens.

If they were not so prominent--if they were merely art students, for example--they wouldn’t be getting all this attention.

I’m sure the chairman, as a sociologist, has some knowledge of the behavior of art students not available to laymen, but I wonder whether they might turn up police blotters less often than football players because they spend their spare time in museums rather than bars.

EDGAR SCHELL

Irvine