Table of Contents
Student-Athletes May Face Increased Online Community Restrictions
Athletic directors and coaches are the latest group to express concern with online communities like Facebook.com and MySpace.com. At the end of June, Laing Kennedy, the Athletic Director at Kent State University, announced that student athletes must remove their Facebook profiles by August 1. A recent article from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, which discusses this trend, explains that “Kennedy, who received harsh criticism, quickly backed off his ban and said last week he now restricts and monitors athletes’ use of the site.”
The monitoring and restriction of student-athletes’ profiles is more complicated than the same actions involving non-athletes. ADs and coaches seem most concerned about the images of the school, the athletic department, and the teams that these profiles can portray. The Columbus Dispatch reports that when discussing his proposed ban on student-athlete Facebook profiles, Kennedy said, “Student-athletes are representative of the university…and anything embarrassing on a student’s profile can be embarrassing for the university as well.”
As FIRE President Greg Lukianoff states in the Journal-Constitution article:
We have always recognized that students can give up certain rights to play athletics in college… They are representatives of the college. So we do recognize that universities have increased power to place limitations on students who are athletes.[…]Do you have to give up all your expressive rights to be on the sports team? By monitoring or censoring these sites, [college athletic programs] seem to be ignoring that these are both athletes and students.
Instead of banning these online communities, ADs and coaches should educate student-athletes on the consequences of their choices.
Recent Articles
Get the latest free speech news and analysis from FIRE.
FIRE's 2025 impact in court, on campus, and in our culture
We are proud to serve as the nation's premier free speech watchdog. Here's what we accomplished this year.
The trouble with banning Fizz
On college campuses across the country, students and administrators are debating bans on Fizz, a mobile app that lets users within a particular community communicate anonymously.
VICTORY: Court vindicates professor investigated for parodying university’s ‘land acknowledgment’ on syllabus
Ninth Circuit rules UW violated the First Amendment by punishing a professor for putting a satirical land acknowledgment on his syllabus.
Can the government ban controversial public holiday displays?
If the government invites holiday displays, it can’t ban the ones it dislikes. Open the forum, lose the veto — even for Satanic statues.