Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D.

To the Editor:

Re “Should You Watch?” (Week in Review, Oct. 24):

As Michael Sokolove suggests in his juxtaposition of “sport” versus “spectacle,” a basic question is whether a just society allows young men to become gladiators, there to be consumed for the glory of college, franchise or empire.

But American football is a risk not only to the bodies of athletes. Particularly at the college level, it is a risk to athletes’ intellectual and social development. And, as I explain in my article “Student Gladiators and Sexual Assault” (Michigan Journal of Gender and Law, 2009), football programs, depending on how they are administered, also present grave risks to the physical and psychological well-being of female students. The N.C.A.A. and individual colleges have taken only meager measures to control those sex-discriminatory risks.

I love football, but it cannot be allowed to be socially sanctioned barbarity, for many reasons.

Ann Scales
Denver, Oct. 25, 2010

The writer is a professor of law at the University of Denver.