In a related roundtable discussion, which was published in the same issue of the Record, some of the men suggested that pledges enjoy the challenge and the excitement of hazing—or, at least, grow to understand its value in retrospect.
Tony Becker, a member of the Stanford chapter, considered that suggestion ludicrous. In his view, hazing reflected a grim view of humanity straight out of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.
“Do you like to drink liquor until you throw up and eat your vomit?” Becker asked. “I don’t either, and I don’t think any self-respecting human would.”
Robert Arnot, an undergraduate with the University of Texas SAE chapter, said hazing was an absolute necessity.
“On our campus, most of the major, strong fraternities have a traditional physical pledgeship,” he said.
Arnot was asked why.
“Because it works, and it has worked for decades. Our chapter is powerful on its campus and always has been. Some fraternities in Texas have abandoned hazing only to find that chapter unity deteriorates.”
Later, Arnot added: “It builds character, without a doubt. It takes a kid from the country club who’s never had to tie his shoes and humiliates him. It takes a green ol’ country boy and exposes him to things he’s never seen before.”
This view, expressed by a generation of fathers whose sons are now in fraternities, has no doubt been passed down, like the lines of wooden paddles hanging on the wall of a chapter house. I saw this legacy celebrated on another wall, as well, at the Levere Memorial Temple, SAE’s national headquarters near Chicago. It was that mural in the basement—the one painted by the German artist that depicts students as bearded gnomes. In one scene, a blindfolded gnome is bending over, clutching his huge, green-booted feet, while one of his compatriots rears up to whack the unfortunate creature on his behind with a paddle. On the first floor, in the Levere Temple’s extensive library, I also flipped through editions of the Phoenix, the manual given to all new members that passes down SAE’s history and tradition. The pledge manual often seemed to endorse hazing. “The life of the pledge is not easy,” the Phoenix read in 1968. “He is often placed in situations which may cause him embarrassment, sometimes even resentment.” In 1972: “Your physical endurance and willingness to endure some humiliation might be called into question.” In the 1980 and 1988 editions: “Your pledgeship will test ‘your enthusiasm and perseverance’ and ‘your ability to bear up under stress.’” Finally, in 1995, the Phoenix condemned hazing, as it does in the current edition. “No organization is worth sacrificing your human dignity just for you to belong,” the pledge manual now said.
As the SAE manual affirms, fraternities have shifted from condemning the excesses of hazing at “hell week” to advocating its abolition. But the ban proved challenging to enforce in part because of the fluid definition of hazing. If a fraternity brother asks a pledge to strip and submerges him in ice, is that hazing? Sure. What about drinking games? Can members ask pledges to clean the house? Or wear a costume? Like con men and hustlers who woo their marks with good-natured requests, hazers often start small to win trust, then slowly raise the stakes. The fraternities’ “zero-tolerance” approach hasn’t worked. That failure has led a handful of fraternities, including SAE, as well as colleges such as Dartmouth, to try a once-unthinkable solution: ban pledging. Even though pledging has long been one of the defining features of the fraternity experience, advocates of a ban say any program for new members, no matter how benign, can function as a cover for hazing because initiates find themselves so powerless.
Fraternity traditionalists are horrified, in part because they downplay the prevalence and seriousness of hazing. As with drinking, contrary to all evidence, fraternities and their campus supporters suggest they are being unfairly blamed for a common behavior. College Greek-life offices often feature the following statement, which is taken from the Hofstra University website: “Myth #1: Hazing is a problem for fraternities and sororities primarily. Fact: Hazing is a societal problem.” Such statements are misleading. Hazing is everywhere, the argument goes, so it’s alarmist to worry about it at fraternities: by implication, this line of reasoning suggests that a freshman is just as likely to get paddled on the debate team, the literary magazine, or the student-government spirit committee.
When boosters downplay hazing at fraternities, they are citing the results of a 2008 University of Maine survey of more than 11,000 undergraduates at fifty-three colleges. The research, which received funding from Greek groups, found that hazing was widespread at student organizations other than fraternities. Half or more of the members of performing-arts groups, as well as clubs and intramural sports teams, reported being subject to abuse that met the definition of hazing. But the study also found that hazing was far more common at fraternities and sororities. Three-fourths of members of Greek organizations reported that they had been hazed. Among members of other campus groups, only varsity athletes reported a similar level of abuse. In other words, this research shouldn’t reassure freshmen wondering about whether to pledge: fraternity members—and varsity athletes—are more likely to be hazed than anyone else on campus.
In the Greek world, hazing has spread beyond the historically white fraternities that pioneered it. Kappa Alpha Psi, a historically black fraternity, has a decades-long history of hazing that has sent pledges to the hospital and, on occasion, the morgue. In his 2014 memoir, Charles Blow, the New York Times columnist, wrote about his brutal beatings at the fraternity’s Grambling State University chapter in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Blow, who is African American and became president of his chapter, described assaults with two-by-fours and paddling bearing no resemblance to a childhood spanking: “In response to the paddling, we each developed ‘pledge ass’—inch-thick, saucer-sized pads of damaged tissue and damaged nerves that formed just beneath the skin of each butt cheek.” An Asian American fraternity developed an equally dangerous form of physical torment. In December 2013, Chun Hsien Deng, a freshman pledge at Baruch College in New York, was blindfolded and forced to wear a backpack weighed down with more than twenty pounds of sand. As he ran a gauntlet, called “the glass ceiling,” which symbolized limited opportunities for Asian Americans, brothers of Pi Delta Psi repeatedly tackled him on a frozen yard in the Pocono Mountains. He later died from head injuries after members delayed taking him to the hospital.
Hank Nuwer, a prominent anti-hazing activist who has kept a running total of its casualties, counts at least one death a year at fraternities in the United States from 1969 through 2016. By far, the most common—and most dangerous—hazing involves forced drinking. More than half of fraternity and sorority members in the University of Maine survey reported hazing related to drinking games. One-fourth of them said they had been forced to drink alcohol until they got sick or passed out. Almost all of the more than sixty fraternity-related deaths from 2005 through 2013 resulted from alcohol, hazing, or a combination of the two. (Sorority women do report hazing, but deaths are rare.)
SAE has a particularly brutal history of hazing. At its University of Texas chapter, a sleep-deprived eighteen-year-old freshman pledge named Tyler Cross fell from a fifth-floor dormitory balcony in 2006 after pledges had been given half-gallon liquor bottles to drink. Earlier, “pledge trainers” had touched a hot clothes iron to pledges’ faces, shocked them with a cattle prod, and forced them to eat Crisco and cat food. At the University of Kansas, Jason Wren, a nineteen-year-old freshman died from alcohol poisoning during a “Man Challenge” ritual that included drinking margaritas, beer, vodka, and Jack Daniels. The drinking at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo illustrated the danger. In December 2008, SAE members summoned sixteen pledges to an off-campus house for what they called “Brown Bag Night.” Tarps covered couches to protect them from vomit. Pledges sat in a circle, with a trash can at the center. At 10:30 p.m., each pledge was given a brown bag filled with cans and bottles of alcohol. “Drink up,” an
upperclassman told them. “Finish by midnight.”
Carson Starkey, an eighteen-year-old from Austin, Texas, was one of those pledges. He had a bag with two twenty-four-ounce cans of Steel Reserve beer, a sixteen-ounce can of Sparks alcoholic energy drink, and a fifth of rum he would split with another pledge. The initiates also shared a bottle of 151-proof Everclear, which is 75.5 percent alcohol. As members chanted “puke and rally,” Starkey emptied his bag in twenty minutes. After he passed out, fraternity brothers debated whether to drive him to a hospital less than a mile away. They placed Starkey in a car and removed his Sigma Alpha Epsilon pin so that doctors wouldn’t know he was at a fraternity event. Then they changed their minds. Rather than go to the hospital, they brought him back in the house and left him on a dirty mattress. He never woke up. Four fraternity brothers pleaded no contest to misdemeanor charges related to hazing. They were sentenced to jail terms ranging from thirty to 120 days. Starkey’s family sued Sigma Alpha Epsilon and several members for negligence, and settled for at least $2.45 million. As part of that 2011 settlement, SAE must now disclose disciplinary actions on its website. From 2011 through 2013, SAE chapters received twenty sanctions related to hazing, about one-fourth of all violations. It was the second most commonly specified offense, after illegal or dangerous drinking.
Colleges find hazing allegations difficult to prove. Absent a death or serious injury, police rarely file charges. In most states, as in California, hazing offenses are misdemeanors. After the University of Texas SAE death, two “pledge trainers” were sentenced to four days in jail. Six states—Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, New Mexico, South Dakota, and Wyoming—have no laws against hazing. When young men come forward to detail the abuse, their experiences are often categorically denied. In 2010, John Burford, a former SAE pledge at Princeton, recounted a litany of hazing: chugging a twenty-ounce bottle of tobacco spit, getting whipped and bitten at a strip club, swimming naked in a frozen pond, and drinking dangerous amounts of alcohol. SAE’s national organization denied the allegations, though they helped prompt a review of Greek life that led Princeton to prohibit fraternities from recruiting freshmen.
Another brother-turned-whistle-blower drew national attention to hazing at Dartmouth’s SAE chapter, the model for the preppy frat in Animal House. In 2012, a former pledge, Andrew Lohse, wrote a column for the student newspaper about what he called a “systematic culture of abuse.” He said pledges were forced to swim in a kiddie pool full of vomit, urine, feces, semen, and rotted food; chug vinegar; and “drink beers poured down fellow pledges’ ass cracks.” Rolling Stone magazine later ran a story based on his account, and Lohse wrote a book. Dartmouth placed the chapter on three terms of social probation for hazing, disorderly conduct, and serving alcohol to minors. The college accused twenty-seven individual members of hazing but later dropped the charges, citing contradictory evidence. Many at Dartmouth then disputed Lohse’s account.
Lohse later won a measure of vindication. In February 2016, responding to reports of hazing, SAE’s national office suspended the chapter for at least five years, saying such behavior “absolutely will not be tolerated.” SAE headquarters reported the hazing to the university, which withdrew the chapter’s recognition. Lohse said a Dartmouth administrator let him know that the hazing resembled what he had described years earlier. “It was textbook, just as I had described,” Lohse told me. I spoke with an SAE pledge who had been interviewed by investigators. Clark Brown, SAE’s general counsel, confirmed much of his account. The pledge told me Lohse’s book, Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy, had inspired the older brothers. Instead of a cautionary tale, it had become an unauthorized pledge manual. “It was kind of a running joke,” the former member said. The pledges met on a golf course at night, bringing a strange assortment of items such as women’s underwear, condoms, and vegetables, he told me. They were each baptized in a kiddie pool, though he didn’t think it held the kinds of noxious materials that Lohse described. They were forced to drink until they vomited and to repeat a mantra recounted in Lohse’s book: “What happens in the house stays in the house.”
BEFORE HE FOUND himself submerged in ice, Justin Stuart knew nothing about SAE’s hazing traditions. He had arrived at Salisbury University, a public institution of 8,600 on the Maryland shore, hoping to network, make friends, and build on his success in high school. Stuart grew up in Potomac, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC, and attended Montgomery County’s highly rated public schools. In high school, Stuart worked as a lifeguard at a community pool and built houses for Habitat for Humanity. The lanky six-foot-two teenager played varsity lacrosse and golf. “He was the ultimate team player,” said Colin Thomson, head lacrosse coach at Thomas S. Wootton High School in nearby Rockville. “Justin has a good head on his shoulders.”
Like many drawn to SAE, Stuart was ambitious and saw himself working in finance. The success of former SAE members impressed him. He had his first interview at the Scarborough Student Leadership Center, a Greek hub on campus named after the SAE chapter’s founder. Stuart stood before ten fraternity brothers seated at a table as if they were corporate executives in a boardroom. They asked about his major, his grade-point average, and why he wanted to join. They even videotaped the encounter. His pledge invitation, delivered by members in suits and ties, arrived soon after. Like a college acceptance letter, it was inscribed with an SAE seal. “They made it seem like it was super exclusive and that only the brightest are invited,” Stuart told me. He wasn’t naïve about fraternities; he anticipated some unpleasantness in pledging such as cleaning up after older brothers, but nothing like what he experienced when his “education” began.
After the first night in the basement with the German music, the SAE pledge program continued on Tuesdays in a science hall. Brothers covered a window with white paper, and, as pledges tried to learn SAE history, they were barraged with insults, including anti-gay slurs. Stuart considered quitting. Members assured him that they had all gone through the same crucible, and the worst was over. He weighed the benefits of SAE membership: entrée to parties, where freshmen could meet sorority women, and access to its alumni network of Wall Street and Fortune 500 companies. Perhaps just as important, he worried that if he left, he would end up shunned and alone.
So Stuart accepted the tasks of the fraternity pledge—the “personal servitude” that had been a tradition for generations. On weekends, just as at Cornell, the pledges were on call to “sober drive” drunken brothers deep into the early morning hours. The recruits’ social lives and grades suffered, as did their moods. Like a symphony, the pledge term often builds to a crescendo of pain and humiliation. The anticipation can be as frightening as the abuse itself. As spring break approached, pledges texted each other, dreading what would come next.
“They want to get us drunk to fuck us up,” one of the pledges texted in March.
A day after that text, the recruits found themselves again confined in a basement, this time for a ritual known as “family night.” Members divided pledges into “families” with names such as Thunderbird and Red Lady. As before, the German song blared in their ears. Stuart was then led upstairs, where he was blindfolded and tossed into a car without a seatbelt. Tires screeching, the driver sped around curves and made quick stops. Stuart thought he was going to die. Back at the house, a brother asked him to bend over. Still blindfolded, he heard clapping, thumping, and chanting—the animalistic rhythm of ritual. A member took a running start and hit him in the buttocks—once, twice, three times. Paddling might sound innocuous, but it can be a cruel assault, a punishment remembered for its mix of lasting pain and embarrassment. Each blow sounded like a punch to Stuart, as if his skin were cracking. He held back a scream, while his back seized up, leaving him briefly unable to walk. (For a day or so, it would hurt to sit down.) Members then told pledges to dress in women’s clothing and makeup, or diapers. Stuart wore a skirt, a leotard top, and a platinum-blonde wig. Then he had to chug four or five shots of a “secret drink,” mad
e up of various liquors, before being driven to an off-campus party, so his humiliation could be more public. There, members handed pledges yet more alcohol. “If you don’t drink this, you’re out,” they said. Stuart figured he had ten drinks, fewer than some others. He saw one pledge dry-heaving for hours; another was vomiting blood. After the party, the recruits commiserated in text messages.
“They fed me a pint of Jack and Jose,” one pledge wrote. “Not to mention sake is the grossest drink I’ve ever drank but I’m going to try to get used to it.” He said he “got carried out and woke up with a burn on my forehead.”
Another pledge added: “I woke up in throw up and with a black eye and my knuckles were all bruised and I was limping.”
In a text, William Espinoza, the pledge educator, berated the younger students: “You raged at my house and some of you thought it was cool to punch holes in my wall, and you will be patching those fuckers up.”
After that night, Stuart decided to quit SAE and alert the authorities. He sent an anonymous e-mail detailing what had happened to the campus police’s “silent-witness” website. By then, the late nights at the fraternity had been exacting a toll. Stuart’s grades fell from As to Cs. He often couldn’t sleep because he worried about his safety. He had heard dark rumors about what was to come: a nighttime obstacle course, milk chugging, eating cat food, or worse, human waste.
Other pledges were also anxious and exchanged frantic texts later that month:
“We will be in the basement tonight. Just prepare mentally.”
“Damn… Let’s go guys at least they can’t kill us.”
“Or rape us.”
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