A month before the men’s hockey team hits the ice in Aggannis Arena, Boston University officials have announced a policy that bans all swearing, racial and sexist comments in the stands, giving the athletic department and school administrators the authority to remove spectators from any athletic event.
“Any profane . . . comments or actions directed at officials, student-athletes, visiting team fans, spectators, coaches or team representatives will not be tolerated and are grounds for removal from Agganis Arena, the Roof, Walter Brown Arena, and Nickerson Field,” the policy reads.
Agganis Arena will issue a written copy of the policy to all season-ticket holders prior to the first game of the season, and the code of conduct will also be printed on the back of tickets for all varsity sports.
“I think our kids are smarter than that,” BU Athletic Director Mike Lynch said. “I think they can come up with something more clever than, ‘F you’.”
While BU has considered implementing an obscenity policy for some time, officials say fan behavior at the Terriers’ regional playoff matches at Worcester’s DCU Center last March — along with mounting pressure from the NCAA and Hockey East — forced the university to take action.
“The bottom line was, the behavior that kind of took place in Worcester was going to negatively affect our team in the future,” Lynch said.
Fan obscenity has been a major issue for President Robert Brown, now in his second year at the helm.
“It is something that is kind of a deep cultural issue among the students, which is kind of a sign of rebelling against the administration,” Brown said in an Aug. 30 interview. “But the only people getting hurt by these are the student body themselves — they’re the ones with the image.”
Lynch drafted the policy in June with an administrative committee that included Dean of Students Kenneth Elmore, men’s hockey coach Jack Parker and student representatives.
To enforce the policy, university officials including Lynch and Elmore will regularly sit in the student section during games. The arena will also station additional ushers around the section.
For the university, the problem of fan obscenity was amplified by the opening of Agganis Arena in January 2005. With almost twice as many seats as the old Walter Brown Arena, the new venue has space for more alumni and casual fans to attend games.
“It’s becoming a bad place for people to bring their kids,” Parker said. “It’s defeating the purpose of having an intimidating arena. Three-quarters of the place goes mute because they don’t want to participate.”
The new policy aims to rectify that and intends to unite students with the rest of the arena by eliminating foul language from the stands. In that way, Lynch said, the team and the fans will benefit.
“The policy is not meant to quell the enthusiasm of our fan base,” Lynch said. “It’s meant to encourage all 6,300 people in the building to come together to cheer for our team. If we had a good, solid cheer that the students came up with that involved everybody in the building, that building would rock.”
Elmore said the thrust of the policy is to eliminate three main curse words from the stands, one of which is featured prominently in what many BU fans refer to as “the song.”
Elmore admitted this is something the administration had intended to do for several years, but had balked at in the past.
“It was one of those things where we had buried our heads in the sand long enough and thought, ‘let’s really try and have a conversation about this and try to do something about it now,'” he said.
That conversation included two students, along with representatives from the athletic department and the university administration. Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences senior Matt Bain, one of the students who sat in on the June meeting, said he does not believe the policy strips fans of any necessary rights.
“I went in there prepared to defend ‘the song’ and defend our tradition,” Bain said. “But when the first thing that came out of Mike Lynch’s mouth was, ‘We don’t want that to go away’ . . . it’s hard to defend that. You can’t really sit there and say to them, ‘we have to swear.'”
Regardless, some students on campus view the policy as censorship and strongly oppose what they see as a limit on their freedom of speech.
Lynch dismissed that notion and said he is unafraid of estranging what he views as a small group of problematic students amongst a far greater fan base.
“I really think the Supreme Court has more interesting topics to cover than whether or not BU throws a kid out of a game for using profanity,” Lynch said. “If I’m alienating somebody who’s going to stand up and continually chant the ‘f word’ during a hockey game or a basketball game, I would just as soon not have that person in the stands. That’s not what college sports are about.”
Those behind the policy also see it as a potential help on the ice. Aside from penalties, including bench minors that could hurt the Terriers during a game, the policy could help BU avoid being shut out of primetime national television games in the NCAA tournament. That would ensure BU greater national exposure, which Bain said would help the team on the recruiting trail.
On a game-to-game basis, however, Parker said he does not think it makes much of a difference.
“Other than ‘Sasquatch,’ I don’t think we pay attention to what’s going on in the stands,” Parker said. “We pay attention to what’s going on on the ice.”
Staff reporter Allison Manning contributed reporting to this article.