I never drank “Nile Juice” from the penis of a statue of a Sphinx. It was never on my bucket list, but the way alumni describe the expired tradition is weirdly enchanting. We would hear about the juice at Homecoming … Continued
If someone were to tell you about “Fraternity: An Inside Look at a Year of College Boys Becoming Men” the newest book by investigative journalist Alexandra Robbins, they may explain it the way a friend described it to me: “It’s … Continued
Our students and alumni learn to cover their tracks and call it leadership by watching us – the leaders of the fraternity/sorority world. They see how we act and act in the same way and we lecture them for it.
Broad, unrefined prohibition is an unworkable answer considered respectable only among those who fetishize authority and power – people who have no place in leading a values-driven fraternity experience.
Dog and Pony Show Laws like Pennsylvania’s, which merely bundle already illegal things together with a different context and title, will do nothing to stop deaths due to hazing. They may actually make it worse.
The issue is not that fraternity members wish to be regressive heathens who kill their own members. The issue is that some students are held to different standards than others, that many are aware of it, that they are pushing against those policies, and that we are responding by disparaging people as if they were simply regressive heathens determined to kill their own members.
The scariest element of dangerous hazing activities is that many accelerate from innocuous to dangerous over a period of a few years.
Here are some thoughts for chapter officers, chapter advisers, and general members to nudge their chapters away from dangerous hazing trends.