Context Podcast Digital Collection

Johanna Bringhurst: Hello everyone, and welcome to context. This program is brought to you by the Idaho Humanities Council with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The views expressed here today do not necessarily represent those of the IHC or the NEH. Hi, my name is Johanna Bringhurst. And joining me today is Doctor Sharon Stoll. Doctor Stoll serves as the director of the center for ethics at the University of Idaho.

She is considered one of the leading authorities in competitive moral education intervention techniques for college college age students in America. Also a professor of physical education, Doctor Stoll is a distinguished faculty member and winner of many awards. A former public school teacher, coach, and athlete, Doctor Stoll holds a Ph.D. in Sport Philosophy from Kent State University and is the creator and director of one of the few programs in America that is directed toward moral education with competitive populations.

Doctor Stoll is well known for her knowledge and teaching and methodology as applied to pedagogy in moral education and character development. She is also the author of eight books and is an active consultant and lecturer. Doctor Stoll, thank you for joining me today.

Dr. Sharon Stoll : Thank you for asking me. I this is a new experience, so I'm excited about being here. Thank you.

Johanna Bringhurst: Can you start off by telling us what is the Center for ethics at the University of Idaho?

Then they come to us and say, could you help us teach this because it's not working very well. What we what we do, we say we do it, but it doesn't seem that we're getting this across. So what can we do? So in general, that's what we're about. We are really an organization that, helps others teach what they say.

They believe.

Johanna Bringhurst: How do you actually go about doing that work when someone comes to you?

Dr. Sharon Stoll : Well, we know a great deal about moral development, and we know a great deal about how it how it happens. We know that, moral values are very important. Obviously, that means that you have a stated belief that honesty is important and respect is important. Justice or fair play is important. Those are basic prime moral values. So we know that those values exist.

We also know that how we learn these kind of things are through a process that's moral knowing. We learn how to think about these things for it to a process of knowing. And within that there's one subset that we focus on directly. And that's moral reasoning that you can actually sit down with people and help them come to what were they or say they believe this, then how does that actually come to practice?

So there's moral knowing and there's moral valuing, which has to do with the whole process of how we can we function with other people, how we perceive other people, how we see other people, how we behave and treat other people. That's this moral value in process. And then there's moral action. It's actually having the courage to follow what you believe.

So all of those have little subset values within them. But in moral knowing our big thing is in moral reasoning. So if I'm teaching a class with whatever age group it is, I don't care if it's football players at University of Georgia or Alabama. We start out and we just ask some basic questions, you know, what is it that you believe?

They hardly ever say, we want you to treat us something. However, if I ask them, okay, you want me to be competent all the time and know my stuff? Whatever. Doesn't matter how I treat you, then I can just call you an mf-er and that's fine. Well, no, Doctor Stoll, that's not fine. So you want something from me and how my behavior.

We expect certain behaviors in order to function. There has to be some sort of honesty in what we're doing. If we are lying completely to each other all the time, relationships can't occur. So that comes out and being fair and just comes out and being respectful comes out. So it's a process in which we actually, contemplate their own moral development process about what they expect and what they want.

I've never met anyone who ever said, it's okay for you to be rude, obnoxious, and hateful to me. I've never met anyone like that. Everybody wants the same thing. I don't care if my students from Zimbabwe or China, which I have one right now from People's Republic of China or Turkey or whatever. I've had students from all over the world.

Always. We live in a world of rules that we're supposed to be following.

Johanna Bringhurst: Supposed to be.

Why? It's because General Douglas MacArthur, way back when, said that on the on the friendly fields of strife or sowing the seeds that in other days and other fields will bear the fruits of victory. Very idealistic, but the notion is that you learn competition on a field of play. You learn how to work with others team play functionality.

So that's what we do.

Johanna Bringhurst: So what is the mission of the center and how do you measure your success?

Dr. Sharon Stoll : Well, our mission is teaching this notion of competitive integrity. If we believe it exists, we do. We believe it exists. And we think that sport can build character in the sense of being able to follow these rules and having you're not corrupt, that we follow the rules and we forward and that helps us as individuals. It helps us grow to be people of character.

And we can learn that through the field competition. The court. So all that is part. Now how do we measure that? Well, that's the tricky thing, Joanna. I wish I could measure that and guarantee you that it would work, because if I could, I would be so wealthy today.

Johanna Bringhurst: I say, yes, you would.

Dr. Sharon Stoll : I'd have homes everywhere if I could do that. The problem is we are human beings and we are messy beings. We're just messy.

Johanna Bringhurst: I guess we are. Yeah.

Dr. Sharon Stoll : I can guarantee you that in all the years that I've taught this, that I could take a group of young people and 10 to 12 weeks later, if I spend time with them, this is what the Atlanta Braves wanted me to do. They offered me a ton of money, not enough. It had to be a whole lot more.

Than they offered to to spend time only with their developmental teams because they're 19 year old boys. They just have holes in their heads. They just do dumb things. And they came to me and said, just quit your job, come work for us and just stay with our 19 year old boys like Mother Teresa. All right? And so we're going to be there with them and we're going to help and make better decisions.

Well, I can guarantee you I can help moral reasoning. We, we have done that, we have instruments. We can measure your reasoning from when you start and when you finish. And a normal population working with them, they will increase. What the problem is, we don't always act on what we know.

Johanna Bringhurst: Oh, that's for sure.

We took a class of 380 some business students.

Johanna Bringhurst: Okay.

Dr. Sharon Stoll : And we put them in a competitive situation. But first we did we measured their level of moral reasoning. And these were juniors at the University of Idaho. And they were, it was, great numbers. They were morally developed at the norm like where they should be, like level 3 or 4 or whatever. The Kohlberg in scale. It was just beautiful.

And we then put them in a competitive situation in a game. Where you, if you cheated, you got ahead faster. Okay, so these morally developed kids who had a pretty good sense of right and wrong, who agreed to that's what they believed. We put them in a competitive situation and they cheated to win.

Johanna Bringhurst: Oh, no. Really?

I have him on video cheating he's playing the game with everybody else and it's about resources and making deals. And he's just lying through his teeth.

Johanna Bringhurst: Oh my goodness.

Dr. Sharon Stoll : He was morally developed at almost almost a five which was really great. But his behavior and action was at a one doing whatever he had to do to get ahead. So I called him in, sat him down, watch the video with him. I said, what are you doing? He said, I'm cheating. I said, oh yeah, I know you're cheating.

Why? Without breaking a pause, without smiling, he said, Doctor Stoll, I wanted to win. We told the group we broke them up in 12 different groups and used different motivations to get him to cheat. Some of them we paid money. You cheat. If you win by cheating, you get $5. If you win by cheating, you don't have to take the final exam if you win by cheating.

Johanna Bringhurst: He just wanted to win.

Dr. Sharon Stoll : He just wanted to win. Now when, it was kind of funny because when I talk to him about, he's well Doctor Stoll I know it was cheating, but I wanted to win. Besides that, everybody in the class was cheating. So I just want to do better at this. So, if we sat down with a group of kids today, 20 years ago, 40 years ago or whatever, and we said to them, what's the purpose of competition?

Johanna Bringhurst: Today, 90%.

He was a linebacker. It was kind of sort of a local boy. I got to know him very well and I tried to go all the football games. One of my students are in class and they're football players or volleyball players or whatever. I try to go see their game and, this young man came in after a tough game on the weekend where we had lost the game, and I was packed in there, and he came in and I said to John, how did you do this week?

It? And he turned to me and gave me a disgusted look. He said, we lost. And I said, yeah, but how did you do? And he said, Doctor, are you listening? I said, yes, I am. We lost. I said, John, are you listening? How did you do? Oh, oh, oh well, I had the best game of my, of my career.

I had this many tackles and I had this many blocks and I did whatever. But Doctor Stoll, we lost. I said, I know. But there's a difference between winning and how did you do. Right. Bottom line for you as growth is how did you do, how was your game correct. He said, I know Doctor, I got that, I understand that, but we lost.

So it's this, this whole notion of what we really teach people and what we really teach young people in sport is outcome. And it's so bad right now, Johanna. So, so bad right now.

All right.

All right. So it's so bad right now. The DNC today is dumping a ton of money into mental health of athletes. We have more incidents of athletes suicide than at any other time in the history of sport.

Johanna Bringhurst: It's tragic.

Dr. Sharon Stoll : It's very tragic. And why it is. One of my doc students who just finished a year ago is also a coach. He's our swim coach at Idaho, and he was so concerned about this during Covid that he wanted to know if he could help improve coping and reduce anxiety through actual pedagogical techniques during the swimming season. This is hardly, if ever, done, because coaches always focus focus on motor skills, not moral skills.

But he took time out of his 20 hour a week because you ain't allowed to be in contact more than 20 hours a week by NCAA rules, he took time daily to talk with them, read to them, have them write. Because reading, writing and reflection is the key to moral growth. He took time to talk to them, to read to them, to have them respond.

And then on Saturday, before their meet, he would have them respond to a prompt which they sent to him. And on Sunday he read, he's got a lot of athletes, some coaches, they have a lot of athletes. He read everything they had to say to him, and then he responded. He measured their anxiety levels before and their anxiety levels after.

Johanna Bringhurst: Oh no, you finish your thought.

He's going to start up again. But he has found it's very, very important. coaches in general don't do that anymore. They don't talk to their athletes. it is such a corporate enterprise that athletes per se are part of the money market. And now with name, image, likeness, it has gotten completely out of out of whack, of reality.

So these 19 year old kids, now remember I spent with the Atlanta Braves, 19 year old athletes in Atlanta. Braves received millions and millions of dollars. And with a short period of time, they go bankrupt. It's because of the ABCs of life, alcohol and drugs a b babes, women, children, women, children, women, children. And the third one is cash money.

When they make a lot of money, all the cousins come out of the woodwork and say, we'll run your business for you. I worked with the NFL for a period of time and with American Division one football for a period of time for my husband passed, and then I had to change my direction a little bit. But in the NFL, within five years of leaving the NFL, a majority of those athletes are bankrupt.

So we hand all this money to athletes who are young. Immature. Moral development is slow to begin with. Most of us are not morally developed. The wisdom plays to 25, 26, 27, 30. Maybe some people never get there. Who knows? maybe some people at 12 or 13 have a little bit of wisdom, so we can't just say it's a period of time, but there's a range and.

So we say 16 to 22. This is the age for most of our athletes. There's like a hole in their head. And we turn around and say, here you go. There's all this money and we have this thing called transfer portal. So anybody can just get up and leave at any time. And go somewhere else.

I find that all very depressing because these young people do not have the skills to make these kind of decisions. To control their tendencies at being young and dumb. And all this money is going to come in. They're going to be done with their eligibility. Very few will become pro. They will have made all this money driving a big fancy car, spending it like water.

And people say, oh, Doctor Stoll, you got to get with it. This is the new world. This is the way it is. So, you know, I've been in this business a long, long time before. Before the NCAA got whacked pretty hard about what they were doing. When athletes were fired from coaches, they would be a year at one place and be they'd have to leave.

And the same things with coaches would move people in and out. Athletes would take classes, lots of different places. That one young man by named Michael, who came in for me, him and he had been to four institutions. He'd been at Grambling, Missouri, Porterville Junior College and University of Idaho. And he brought in his transcripts. And Michael had take an introduction to psychology at Grambling, at Missouri, at Porterville and University I Idaho.

And I said, well, bigger question here, Michael, is you're a very bright young man. Why are you taking the same class four times? And he said, Doctor Stoll, I'm Black and I run fast and I have good hands. Nobody cares about me now, this was 1984, okay? Things have gotten better. I think we care better. But do we really?

Because now they're in the transfer portal and now they have NIL. And I think our focus has become so objective and so monetary. You can see why coach Mark Sowa's studies so important.

Johanna Bringhurst: Link. Curious why you started the center for ethics in the first place. Were you seeing issues that you wanted to address at the University of Idaho, or how did it come about?

I was a professional athlete. I was a coach. My reaction was, of course it is, course. Sport builds character. And she said, would you, what do you know about moral development? I said, oh, do you think about moral development? My field's philosophy of history, sport. She said, well, if you will, you read whatever I bring you on moral development.

And I said, of course. So dummy me. She brought this big box of books on off to Korea for the summer, and I read the box of books and the articles. She came back, she said, first thing she said, Doctor Stoll. Are athletes morally developed as a normal population? And I said, no, I don't think so because I was a coach and I was an athlete, and I know what gaining advantage is all about, and I know what strategies are, and I know that we really don't value rules.

And everything about moral development is the process of thinking, reasoning, writing, reflection about these important values. At the same time that Chun-hei asked that question, I was working with all these kids in class and I could actually see what was going on. not a class in moral reason because I hadn't started it yet, but I could see what was going on.

And I said, I don't know about you, but this data is so depressing. I think we need to do something. And that's when we started the moral reasoning classes that we still carry on here, in which, luckily for us, the president at the time, University of Idaho Thomas Bell, and Gary Hunter, the athletic director. Permitted us, invited us to come in.

I said. Pie crust promises. You're going to go down there and get in a fight, oh no, Doctor Stoll, we're not. And so they all said, oh no, don't start. We're not going to. And then the Chatty Cathy one says, Doctor Stoll we're going to get you a field pass. You come down, you be with us on the bench or you feel pass and you'd be right with us.

Whatever. The next Wednesday night, I'm up on the fourth floor at the time, Memorial Gym, and I could hear him coming up right. One of them says, Chris, what are you gonna tell doc? He says, oh, I gotta figure it out. I gotta figure it out. I gotta figure it out. It's cool, it's cool, I gotta figure it out.

So that's the whole thing about I wish we could say we get guaranteed behavior because we can't, but we get help, help these young people gain a great deal of information about themselves and about their reasoning process and produce things. Righty. They are coping. So there's a lot of stuff that we can do through education that it would be very helpful to show people.

Johanna Bringhurst: With all of your experience. I'm wondering, what does honor and what does integrity really mean to you?

Dr. Sharon Stoll : Well, honor integrity means to me is what are you what you say you are and that is hard. It's very hard. I believe everyone needs to take time in figuring out the answer. The big question who am I? one of my doc students right now is in the process of, working with that, through podcast believe it or not. We are starting programs with podcast, helping coaches and athletes.

And that's a big ontological question. Who am I? What do I believe, and can I verbalize that? And can I live by that? So integrity is knowing who you are, stating your principled values and trying very hard to live your life that way. Will we make mistakes? Yes. Will we fail? Yes. But that's not the issue. It's not about what we do.

It's what we should be doing. It's always about what we should be doing, and every person needs to spend time with that. And unfortunately, in universities today, I think we spend way too much time with Stem S.t.e.m. I think we spend way too much time on Stem and not enough time with young people answering those very difficult ontological questions.

We haven't measured them yet, but I am betting that they probably will score very low on a moral reasoning index. But this kind of thing is really important because our our education is too focused on outcome and not enough focused on the development of the self and integrity of the self. So a long answer, but that's what I believe.

Johanna Bringhurst: I really appreciate your thoughts on that. when we first, were preparing for this conversation today, I told you, I'm a mother of three sons, all in those teenage years. And athletics is a big part of our family life. And it's it is a place where these ideas of integrity, justice, moral character become really prominent. It sounded like you were saying.

We spend too much time on teaching athletes and maybe just students in general, how to gain an advantage, how to win, instead of focusing on how to develop those traits. Is that rate.

Doctor Stoll we're measuring the wrong thing. You're measuring honesty and justice and respect, responsibility. We should be measuring teamwork, loyalty, dedication, sacrifice, intensity because it does all those things. Fortune 500 companies prefer an athlete, collegiate athlete more than someone who has no competitive experience because teamwork, hard work, dedication, intensity. Secondly. So we developed an instrument. It's called the right instrument.

And I was a coach for many years. And I'll tell you, I never talked about moral development. I was too busy worried about winning. And I was intense. And I'm very competitive person. I was intense as a coach. I actually got out because I was too intense.

Johanna Bringhurst: sounds like you're doing your penance now, Doctor Stoll.

Dr. Sharon Stoll : Oh, I am.

Johanna Bringhurst: So it's so wonderful to talk to you and to learn about the really important work the center for ethics is doing. I love to wrap up by asking you, what do you wish that Idahoans really understood better about integrity? What's something that you wish we all just knew and could do better?

Dr. Sharon Stoll : Well, I think that all populations and all people need to wrestle with this thing about who we are and answer those questions, and it isn't about money, and it isn't about outcome, and it isn't about objective measure. It's about who we are as human beings and how we value and treat each other. I think that's really important.

I think we need to be involved in organizations that help support that, focus on that, help us all, be better people.

Johanna Bringhurst: Very wise, I heartily agree. Thank you so much, Doctor Stoll, for joining me today. And we will share in our, notes links to the center for ethics if any of our listeners want to learn more. Thank you so much again for being here.

Dr. Sharon Stoll : Thank you. Bye bye.