The civil case, which was close to a confidential settlement in 2017, has undoubtedly exacted a heavier toll. Desdunes’s mother had hired Doug Fierberg, a Washington, DC, lawyer who has made his career suing fraternities and extracting multimillion-dollar settlements. Fierberg sees himself as an activist intent on improving the safety of fraternities. Because three-fourths of men living in frat houses are underage, he said, national fraternities need to require an adult living on-site—as sororities typically do. Instead, at the Cornell chapter, Fierberg told me, “Anything goes inside of that house.”
Fierberg was skeptical of fellow members’ accounts of Desdunes’s heavy drinking. In his view, to absolve themselves of blame, they were impugning the memory of a brother who could no longer defend himself. Testimony in the civil case revealed how undergraduate members hid their infractions by assigning “lookouts” when they knew they were breaking the rules. The adults overseeing SAE relied on the honor system, or after-the-fact punishment. SAE’s volunteer adviser, Ron Demer, who was in his seventies, rarely visited the house after early evening. Cornell administrators, while praising the benefits of Greek life, viewed their own role as largely educational. Even though the college devoted substantial sums to supporting fraternities and sororities, deans considered themselves more as partners than regulators. Travis Apgar, the associate dean overseeing fraternities, commanded a staff of eight and a $700,000 annual budget. In the Desdunes case, lawyers asked him why the school didn’t make use of these resources to monitor chapters by showing up at parties. Apgar replied that such policing would violate the spirit of fraternities as a “self-governance community.”
In making that comment, Apgar sounded like a fraternity man. That wasn’t surprising, because he was. In the same way the Federal Reserve draws on bankers for their expertise, colleges tend to pick fraternity and sorority alumni to oversee Greek life. Apgar belonged to the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity when he was an undergraduate at the State University of New York at Albany in the 1990s. He was also a popular paid speaker and consultant to colleges and Greek organizations across the country, offering his own cautionary story of being hazed as a pledge. In an interview with the Cornell Alumni Magazine, Apgar made the common fraternity argument that flies in the face of all the facts, suggesting fraternities didn’t drink any more than other students on campus. “There’s a lot of underage drinking in our student body, period—it’s not unique to fraternities,” he said in November 2010, three months before Desdunes’s death. Still, he acknowledged that the “fraternity community” had, at least tacitly, endorsed underage drinking: “We’ve inadvertently turned a blind eye to it to a large extent. And by doing that, we’ve unintentionally sent our students a message that they have interpreted as, ‘New York State law doesn’t apply to you.’”
Fierberg also maintains that fraternities’ strategies protect the organizations financially, rather than eradicating dangerous behavior among their members. After the Desdunes case, he said SAE reorganized to try to keep its wealth out of the hands of the Desdunes family and others who sue the fraternity. At its 2015 national convention, the fraternity changed its bylaws, separating the national organization from the fraternity’s charitable foundation—which has $15 million in land and investments—and its housing corporation, which oversees more than $400 million in real-estate holdings. (Clark Brown, SAE’s general counsel, said the move was unrelated to the case.)
As is now standard after drinking deaths, SAE’s lawyers argued the young men violated SAE’s risk-management policies, so they had voided their insurance coverage. In April 2015, Barnum, the president of the chapter, and his parents sued Lloyd’s of London, SAE’s insurer, seeking coverage. A judge ruled against them. That means Barnum, a project manager at citizenM, a boutique hotel chain, and his parents must rely on their State Farm homeowner’s policy.
I reached out to members who were named in the court case. Picket, Desdunes’s roommate, was the only one who responded in any detail. “His death is a tragedy I’ll probably never fully get over,” Picket wrote to me in an e-mail. The buddies had a long-standing arrangement to lock their door, then text the key’s location, if either one needed a good night’s sleep. He said his decision to take that step to avoid being kidnapped still haunted him. Each year, as many as fifty chapter members visit Desdunes’s grave on the anniversary of his death. “There’s a culture in Greek Life, and our fraternity was no exception, where kids are on their own for the first time and we’re all drinking too much,” wrote Picket, who now worked as a real-estate analyst at a money manager in New York. “I wish I would have done more to help George.”
After SAE lost its recognition at Cornell, another fraternity opened its doors to the now houseless pledges who had belonged during the kidnapping. Sixteen of the twenty-two joined Tau Kappa Epsilon. Cornell administrators expressed concern the men would transfer SAE’s culture to TKE. They were reassured the men had learned their lesson. SAE and TKE both had long and illustrious traditions at Cornell and across the country. Both had stately Tudor-style mansions with names evoking English country estates—Hillcrest at SAE, Westbourne Manor at TKE. President William McKinley had been an SAE; Ronald Reagan, a TKE. Like SAE, TKE’s national organization forbids underage drinking in its “risk-management” policies.
In November 2011, TKE held a recruitment event at a Chinese restaurant and offered beer and hard liquor. A freshman ended up so drunk that the brothers took him to his dorm and handed him over to his roommates. He later had to be hospitalized. Ari Fine, a student from suburban Boston, had been there that night. Fine had also driven the Honda Pilot that picked up Desdunes at the SAE kidnapping. He had become TKE’s treasurer. In a deposition, Fine later recalled that neither he nor anyone else did anything to stop the underage drinking at the event. Cornell revoked TKE’s recognition because of “repeated high-risk behavior around alcohol.” The school faulted the fraternity for failing to take the freshman directly to the hospital. The brothers had learned little, if anything, since that night in February when drinking games turned deadly for George Desdunes.
2
BROKEN PLEDGES
“Whose Conduct Proceeds from Good Will”
Following orders, Justin Stuart handed over his phone and wallet. He walked down the stairs to a dark basement, its windows covered with blankets and old clothes. Suddenly, earsplitting music assaulted him. From speakers perched on a washing machine, he heard German lyrics, guttural, threatening, and incomprehensible.
“DU, DU HAST. DU HAST MICH!… DU, DU HAST. DU HAST MICH!”
Stuart, a nineteen-year-old college freshman, didn’t recognize the song. He had not yet entered kindergarten when the German metal group Rammstein released it. If he had understood the lyrics, he wouldn’t have been reassured. It was a sinister soundtrack, playing on the words “have” and “hate,” by a band whose concerts featured eerie white masks and flamethrowers.
“DU, DU HAST. DU HAST MICH!… DU, DU HAST. DU HAST MICH!”
Stuart had come to this basement, which smelled of mold and stale beer, to begin his initiation into the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity at Salisbury University in Maryland. In a brown wood-shingled home about a mile from campus, a de facto fraternity house, a Salisbury senior named William Espinoza stood in front of Stuart and eight other pledges on that Thursday evening in February 2012 and gave them a hint of what might come next. Stuart and Espinoza had graduated from the same Maryland high school in a Washington, DC, suburb, but now Espinoza held all the power. He was the SAE “pledge educator.” Like a US Marines drill sergeant, he controlled the lives and futures of the new provisional members, the pledges. The pledge term of instruction, designed to teach them about the fraternity and test their commitment, had just begun. It would last eight weeks. “Get ready,” Espinoza told the recruits. “This will be your favorite song by the end of the night.”
Stuart had descended into the basement about 4:00 p.m., when fingers of winter light still reached in through
cracks in the window coverings. The aural pounding lasted hour after hour, an endless loop punctuated by a few seconds of silence. As the sun fell and the rest of the light faded away, the pledges withstood the noise, the uncertainty, and many hours later, the hunger. Like prisoners, they wore a uniform—jeans and white shirts. They leaned against the walls, their shoes sticking to the cement floor, which was coated with what seemed like the tacky residue of rancid beer.
“DU, DU HAST. DU HAST MICH!… DU, DU HAST. DU HAST MICH!”
At 9:00 p.m., the older brothers, loud, drunk, and menacing, ran down the stairs.
“Backs against the wall!”
“Heads down!”
Stuart and the other pledges complied, their eyes downcast. What followed seemed like a demented version of a pop quiz. The older members asked detailed questions about the history of SAE and the lyrics of a fraternity song. If a pledge answered incorrectly, things got ugly. First came insults, screamed in ears at close range, old-school basic-training style.
“You’re a worthless piece of shit!”
“I’ll make you suck a dick!”
“You’re a good-for-nothing faggot!”
Then, some of the older members got physical. They shattered liquor bottles against the wall and ripped the shirt off one of the students. One spat in a pledge’s face. Afterward, when that test was over, the music continued, the repetition incessant, broken by the few blessed seconds of silence.
“DU, DU HAST. DU HAST MICH. DU, DU HAST. DU HAST MICH.”
Stuart thought of the American war on terror, the prisoners subjected to the worst the psychologists had to offer, the military torturers playing Eminem and Metallica to weaken defenses and prevent sleep. After eight or nine hours in the basement, as Thursday night turned into early Friday morning, members led pledges, who were blindfolded with old shirts, upstairs to continue their education.
One by one, they arrived on the second floor, where their blindfolds were removed. They were told to kneel before a table draped with a purple-and-gold fraternity flag. Six candles flickered on the table. Behind them sat Espinoza and the chapter president, a burly six-foot-two physical-education major, Sam Kaubin. The pledges had passed the first hurdle. As a reward, they were taught the secret SAE handshake of interlocking pinkies. Like potential new employees, they also received a sheaf of documents, including a nondisclosure agreement. “Shut up and sign,” someone said.
The brothers bestowed each pledge with a nickname: Pootie, Slappy, Meat, Semen, and Landfill. Stuart was referred to as “Drop,” suggesting he was likely to quit. Afterward, each initiate was ordered to chug a pitcher of beer. Stuart and his fellow recruits were then taken to another house, where, urged on by SAE members, Stuart downed seven or eight drinks and a mystery punch, a fraternity favorite called “jungle juice,” often Kool-Aid and vodka or grain alcohol. Stuart, who hadn’t eaten for ten hours, had never been that drunk before. He returned to his dorm at 3:00 a.m. and slept through history class.
Stuart hadn’t signed up for this kind of treatment. In fact, Salisbury University only a few days before had led him to believe his initiation would be entirely different. When he was first invited to join SAE, he had visited the student affairs office, where he had been asked to sign a document. It noted that hazing violated school policy and is, under Maryland law, a misdemeanor punishable by as much as six months in prison and a $500 fine. “Consent of a student is not a defense,” the document said.
SAE’s national office took a hard line, too. Minerva’s Shield, the same safety rules ignored at the Cornell chapter, couldn’t be clearer: “Hazing in any form is not acceptable. Chapters are to be hazing-free at all times. If you have to ask if an activity is hazing, then it probably is.” The fraternity’s headquarters sought to undermine the common rationale for the practice. “You may have heard the expression ‘Break them down to build them up,’” the manual said. “The concept may work for the military, but it has no place in an organization like Sigma Alpha Epsilon that promotes ideals such as friendship and scholarship.” It also noted that hazing violated the spirit of its True Gentleman creed.
During pledgeship, members didn’t quiz Stuart on that section of Minerva’s Shield. But he was required to display a flawless recall of the words of the True Gentleman creed. The brothers ordered Stuart to recite them on a chilly March night in the backyard of the same house where he had been held captive in the basement.
“The True Gentleman,” Stuart said, shivering, “is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies.”
It wasn’t easy to get the words out. As he said them, fraternity members sprayed him with a hose and poured buckets of water over his head. It was no wonder he was shivering: Naked except for his underwear, he stood in a trashcan filled waist-deep with ice.
HAZING FLOURISHED LONG before fraternities; it was a venerable tradition with roots in medieval Europe and even ancient Greece. In England, the finest boarding schools featured “fagging,” the forced servitude of underclassmen by their elders. In the American colonies, Harvard and its successors gleefully imported the practice. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America, colleges enforced “freshman laws,” which required first-year students to run errands for, and tip their hats to, upperclassmen. When the Civil War ended, returning soldiers brought military-style hazing to college campuses, especially Greek-letter organizations. Fraternities then made their own enduring contribution to hazing. They institutionalized it within a defining tradition of the college fraternity and called it “pledging.” In the word itself, and in the official literature, the practice has the ring of promise, of fealty to a sacred tradition of honor and brotherhood. A teenager earns his way into the group by learning its history and traditions, as well as respect for his elders. After the Civil War, when pledging took hold at fraternities, its duration could be as short as a day. The pledge period soon grew to weeks or months, devolving into the orgy of abuse so familiar today.
Early hazers doled out beatings, force-fed vile substances, and staged kidnappings. In 1873, a Cornell student named Mortimer Leggett was blindfolded, taken into the countryside at night, and left to find his way home in the darkness. He was pledging the Kappa Alpha Society, the first “social” fraternity. Leggett, son of the US commissioner for internal revenue, lost his way, fell off a cliff, and died, thereby becoming one of the first high-profile fraternity hazing deaths. Like medieval torturers, fraternities’ hazing pioneers sought to terrify with the primal elements of water and fire. At early twentieth-century Stanford, fraternities favored “tubbing.” This practice entailed stripping a pledge naked, then submerging him in cold water until he “strangled,” or nearly drowned. In the 1920s at Dartmouth, Delta Kappa Epsilon branded its Greek letters onto the forearms of the pledges. Hazing would reach its apotheosis at the end of the pledge term, a terrifying time often dubbed “hell week.”
In his essential history of college fraternities, Nicholas Syrett documents how hazing sought to enforce a vision of “manliness” that fraternities prized. “Manly” men were winners asserting their dominance over the weak. They were sturdy, able to hold their liquor, unintimidated by their peers or societal rules. As universities became co-ed, all-male organizations inevitably raised suspicions about members’ sexual orientation, so demonstrations of toughness became especially valued. Because manliness afforded social status—success with careers and attractive women—initiates were willing to put up with abuse to join the club. Fraternities “believed that their membership should be composed only of men who were able to withstand particular tests of manhood,” wrote Syrett, a professor at the University of Northern Colorado.
Early American educators and specialists in child development endorsed fraternity hazing as a natural, even beneficial, part of a boy’s growing up and a way of establishing his independence from his mother. In 1904, the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall, author of an influential b
ook on adolescence, said Greek organizations were helping men prepare for battle, both in the military and, presumably, in business and politics. “The practical joke is war, cruelty, torture reduced to the level of intensity of play,” he wrote. “A good course of rough and roistering treatment” helped free a man of what he called the “petticoat control” of women. Reflecting this view, Thomas Arkle Clark, dean of men at the University of Illinois and a founder of its Alpha Tau Omega chapter, described fraternity hazing as a kind of “horseplay” or “rough house” that “determines what a man possesses, whether he has a streak of ‘yellow’ or whether he has stamina.”
By the 1930s and 1940s, however, the alumni running national fraternity organizations tried to rein in hazing. Many, including SAE, banned “hell week,” to little effect. More than a generation later, SAE’s national leaders again took aim at hazing. In 1978, it dominated an entire issue of the Record, SAE’s official magazine. An unsigned essay explained why the abuse continued: “The popular American macho image, the incredible terror of being thought a pansy, or worse, a faggot, impels many men to support hazing activities as consistent with masculinity.” The author seemed sympathetic to the impulse behind hazing: “There is something of a bully in all of us. It is momentarily ego-satisfying to mistreat and humiliate another person, even if he’s helpless to respond. This is not to suggest that all hazers are sadomasochistic monsters. They aren’t. But the few who do derive great pleasure from the enterprise give the rest of us a bad name.” This view walked a fine line. Hazing was understandable, natural, a male birthright; it just shouldn’t be too brutal and you shouldn’t enjoy it too much. You could imagine a reckless teenager, or a closet sadist, seizing on that muddled message as he shoved a freshman’s head into a toilet.
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