I never understood the appeal of fraternities if their initiation involves hazing. Why on earth you would pay exorbitant fees so that a bunch of douchebags can beat you or force you to do things you wouldn’t want to do so that later you can binge drink with them and be their “friends” is beyond me.
Not all fraternities (or at least, not all fraternity chapters) haze.
Yeah, if I’m paying that much, I should get to hit one of them in the nuts at least!
Although fees vary, they are usually not that much. The cost of joining a house may not be much more than you would have to pay anyway to live in the dorms. Of course, this marginal difference will be enough to keep some people away.
I was in fraternity in the early part of this decade. I suppose we hazed, but it was really mild stuff that was meant to be funny: wear dumb outfits at parties, sing stupid songs at diner, etc. The worst thing that anyone ever did was get an industrial-sized container of plastic wrap and wrap all the pledges together down at the football field and leave them there to get out.
That’s true. I was mainly thinking of the fraternities that don’t have dedicated housing and the fee you pay is just a membership fee (doesn’t go toward living expenses).
One reason hazing continues is that it instils a strong sense of loyalty in fraternity members and leads them to value their fraternity experience more highly. Even if the frat sucks, many people will subconsciously enhance the experience to justify the pain and humiliation they had to endure to gain entry. Otherwise, they would have to admit to themselves they were fools and made a bad decision. It is similar to having to wait a long time to get into a nightclub – it sure must be good!
I don’t think most beer soaked frat brothers are aware of the underlying psychology, though. Most likely they are just continuing a pattern that has worked in the past.
My apologies for not having a specific cite handy, but googling various combinations of “hazing fraternity loyalty” pulls up a few scholarly articles.
Schools used to be much more violent then they are today. Students in Europe used to regularly challenge each other to duels, and dueling scars were seen as the mark of an educated man.
Not since the late 19th Century, as far as I’m aware. But yes, in earlier times, Academics would indeed sometimes settle disagreements by duelling.
Hazing goes on even in high school, if you count the embarrassing but not illegal stuff. Debutant pledges will dress up like our mascot, have to carry around a sign saying they will sing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” or “I’m a Little Teapot” if you pay them a dollar. Yeah, it’s disguised as a fundraiser, but everyone knows that only pledges do it, and you can’t get in if you don’t. And that’s just the stuff that’s out in the open.
As for fraternities, they come with more than fake friends and boozing. Tons of guys would lose their scholarship money, and be allowed to go live with a mate, until they could raise the money to go back. They will go out of their way to help you if you get into any type of trouble. And they stay together even after they are no longer members, so they lose their fake-ness, anyways.
Now, I wouldn’t go through illegal, or panic inducing, or unhealthful. But other stuff isn’t that big a deal. Like I said, embarrassment. Or harmless pranks. The concept itself isn’t really that problematic: it’s just the extremes.
Nobody was ever supposed to die in these fencing duels, though. I’m not sure if it ever happened, but I doubt it. If I had to choose between fencing in a duel and getting my face slashed, and drinking until I get alcohol poisoning and potentially become brain-dead, I would choose the duel in a heartbeat. I would much rather have my face slashed than be forced to drink to the point of illness. And it’s a way better story to tell, too.
That’s how Tycho Brahe lost his nose.
I’m a grad student at a Big 10 university with a big Greek scene. Now, being older and also being sort of baffled by the whole thing (my undergrad doesn’t really have this sort of thing), I’m not very interested and I certainly haven’t gone to any frat parties, but last month I did see some signs of minor hazing, like guys wandering around in silly outfits and wigs, and girls saying odd phrases to passersby, before giggling hysterically. Nothing that looked like it would cause severe emotional trauma.
The intracampus buses also had placards reminding us that hazing is bad to let university authorities know if it was going on.
WAY back in the 80s I joined a housed fraternity. The activities that would probably count as hazing:
Roll-outs. Woken up in the middle of the night, stand in the house’s living in your boxers, drink cheap beer.
Dinners. Tossed a cheap beer to drink as punishment for some transgression.
Cheap beer ranged from Milwaukee’s Best to malt liquors, and sometimes they might be warmed up a bit.
If you had a midterm or other such academic work, you could drink a substitute of something like prune juice or other less than desired liquids. Your pledge brothers also might help you out.
While some of this qualifies as hazing, it was never seen as really scary, punishing, etc. It was all part of the game, and for the most part enjoyed. We had none of the paddling, sexual stuff, or damages around. No hard liquor was ever used in the pledge program, as a way of keeping away from the worst of alcohol poisoning.
As for dump and run - never happened. We had a guy drinking, who then did a bong hit and went down with an asthma attack. We got medical care immediately. We forced another brother to get counseling for alcohol problems.
I don’t know if that makes my house unique, or if there is just confirmation bias among those that hate houses. Fraternities typically only make the news when someone really screws up.
Alright, I’ll try to help answer this, albeit through second-hand knowledge. I attend an academically rigorous state school, though I think it ranks at a moderate party/Greek scene level. Though I am not, and have never been, part of the Greek system, I have friends who are and have talked with classmates about their experiences with hazing.
Obviously, the levels of stupid shit vary wildly from frat to frat. At least a couple of them are little more than housing co-ops. Guys join the frats to essentially pay significantly less than the going housing market rent. Then there are your typical party-hard “Animal House” type arrangements.
The administration has a strict no-hazing policy and they do enforce it. Therefore, I think all the rush chairs for the frats quite understand that they do not want to expose anyone to a life-threatening situation. One of the more severe hazing incidents recently involved lining up a bunch of pledges on an empty baseball diamond in the middle of the night on a bitterly cold fall night. They were discovered by campus security, and I think sanctions were eventually imposed on the frat in question.
At least one guy I talked to confirmed that, yes, there are still marathon drinking competitions involved as part of the hazing ritual. However, he emphasized that the frat would never force a pledge to drink more than he thought was safe. One pledge, did in fact refuse to drink that night and his chances of being accepted into the frat were not affected.
More commonly, however, are rituals that provide an inconvenience to the pledges. It’s very common for pledges to be given a long handbook of facts about the fraternity history, past members, etc. and be required to recite passages and facts from the book anytime one of the regular frat brothers asks them to. It’s also ubiquitous that pledges be required to spend every hour of their night and day (excepting class time) at the fraternity house. Thus, during rush time, some students in the university housing will expound on how lucky they are to have an apparent lack of a roommate. Another tactic is sleep deprivation; pledges are required to stay up for several nights in a row, attending class in a pleasantly zombie-like fashion.
This is a health hazard, both in and of itself and in conjunction with normal daily living on an even moderately crowded campus.
Not having to do with fraternities, but this seemed like a good thread to bring it up in. Back in high school I heard rumors of guys on the baseball team dipping their balls in ice cream and teabagging new members. Has anyone here ever heard of anything like that?
There are many scholars that do research in this area, like Dr. Walter Kimbrough. Dude is awesome.
I’m a professor at a large state university which happens to be the same institution I attended as an undergrad eons ago. I’m also Greek, but I should state that I am a member of NPHC organization (Black Greeks). Hazing was illegal when I was in school, but it was done anyway on an underground basis. Black Greeks got away with a lot of stuff because it was seen as “cultural” and to be frank, IFC Greek advisors had no idea what was being done half the time.
All of the major Black Greek orgs (Alpha, Kappas, Ques) with the possible exception of the Sigmas have been sued successful because of hazing injuries and/or deaths since the late 80s. They all officially do not haze or have lines, but I know it still goes on.
I happened to be part of a spirit/service organization that was essentially a “superfraternity” in that the members were mostly from the houses on campus with a few independent guys mixed in. One night the “new guys” were brought to an “inspiration night.” It was in the basement of one of the most prestigious houses on campus. The guys in this house were known for being leaders on campus - not big knuckleheads or drinkers, but the kind of frat that got respect from administrators and independents. The basement was essentially a dungeon. They had paddles and cattle prods down there. There were also private rooms - guys would be taken in there and you’d hear them shouting and swearing. Really creepy stuff.
The administrators who sanction fraternities are Greek themselves a lot of times and have a big picture mentality - hazing really embeds a lot of terrible habits, ruins the intake experience for a lot of people, and killing or seriously injuring someone is a likely outcome. What’s more, the legal system and civil cases can pretty much take a fraternity out by incarcerating the members and suing the national organization into oblivion.
But it still happens, and I suspect it’s pretty invisible unless you know what to look for. I was driving home the other day and noticed a group of similarly dressed young men erecting a fence next to one of the more notorious houses. I’m pretty sure that’s not all they were doing, and if they wanted to walk off and leave there’d be pretty serious consequences.
One of the administrators who is also one of my students points out that it’s a difficult position. He has to foster relationships and trust with Greeks so he can effectively do his job. But if he busts a house every time they do something that either is hazing, or could be construed as hazing, that trust evaporates.
I know of two deaths from alcohol poisoning at our campus in the past 2-3 years.