A post today about fraternity hazing from friends over at Tenured Radical:
http://tenured-radical.blogspot.com/2010/10/bros-before-hos-fraternity-hazing-lows.html
I have a special place in my heart for critical examinations of fraternity rituals that started when i watched the boys of DKE at Rustbelt City University strip their pledges naked, spray them with RC cola and then parade them around our shared campus quadrangle on 30-degree nights. My interest only expanded when I moved down here to Big Southern U and saw still more bizarre (and at times physically dangerous) behavior.
Then, of course, my lady students started having what Whoopi Goldberg so famously labeled "the rape-rape" and I began to wonder if there wasn't something just a little bit weird about campus culture that venerated particular forms of masculinity.
As a social scientist, I am loathe to flat-out condemn any social organization without trying to understand what's going on with the people participating. On the other hand, when the social organization is busy beating the sh*t out of its members and encouraging them to rape women...eh...this cultural relativism stuff gets a little hazy.
Sharing the article for the benefit of those on similarly Greek-heavy campuses.
Every day I am grateful that my university forbids fraternities and sororities (and also military recruitment, a gateway to an environment which encourages much of the same behavior, just sanctioned at a higher level of power).
ReplyDeleteI was in a fraternity at my undergrad. We did NOT haze, the attitude being "if you're going to be our brother why would we want to hurt you?" I thought this made sense and it fit the small, liberal-arts loosely-church affiliated college. The most degrading thing I had to do was bus dishes after dinner.
ReplyDeleteThen I went to grad school at a largish state university with more traditional frats. At first I wondered why the other grad students looked at me funny when they found out I was Greek. Then I saw what happened on a big state school! GoodGodAlmighty! I'm glad I joined the house I did (and I still send them small donations) but I most definitely would have been GDI had I been an undergrad at a big school...
This sort of sh*ts been going on at Harvard for years; "Harper's Magazine" listed off some of the weirder/crueler ones in its "Readings" section 15 years ago....in the 1940s a plebe was stripped naked, covered in lampblack, then shocked; the idiots running the initiation did not realize that lampblack burns when it is electrified, and the plebe burned to death. In the 1990s three plebes were seen dragging a tombstone around a running track; when they were questioned they said they had to circuit the track X number of times to get into Frat Y.
ReplyDeleteIn my vicious, oftentimes homicidial, opinion frats and greeks are just a giant waste of time. Students would be better off joining a biker gang; at least they would learn such fine skills as hog repair, crystal meth sales, and monkey wrench fighting because their diplomas will be worth doodly sh*t.
That's a good blog I hadn't seen before. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteI joined a sorority at medium-sized state university and affiliated with the local chapter when I transferred to big state university. Eventually, I moved to a larger state and became an advisor at huge-ass state university. I didn't see or hear of hazing incidents while at any of schools (except among black Greek organizations). Now that I teach at a small, loosely church-related, liberal arts university, though, I am well aware of wide-spread hazing.
ReplyDeletePP: interesting. I guess it depends on the culture of the individual campus and of the individual frat. And if the administration takes non-hazing policy seriously...
ReplyDeleteWhat kind of idiot would join an organization that starts off by torturing them?
ReplyDeleteI loathe frats and sororities. But my gigantic anonymous campus has quite a few special-interest ones (Latino, mixed-race, pre-dental, gay, etc). And I'm OK with that because I think it might be a lonely place for a first-year. No hazing in these, either, that I know about.
Cognitive dissonance: this frat must be good - I had to suffer and do terrible things to get into it.
ReplyDeleteYeah, we're teaching them skeptical thinking all right.
"What kind of idiot would join an organization that starts off by torturing them?"
ReplyDelete- Marcia Brady
The average soldier, sailor, airman, Marine inside the US military; it's a little thing called bootcamp. If you went to Canoe U., the Chair Force Academy, Worst Point, then you get to drag bootcamp out to four years while combining it with college!
Oh, I was talking about graduate school, Strelnikov.
ReplyDeleteI haven't seen evidence of hazing on my campus (but then I'm not there at night). The main fraternity/sorority-related problem seems to be drunk driving (since we don't have a Greek row, which means that partygoers can't stumble drunkenly home -- a plus for the immediate neighbors, but also a problem).
ReplyDeleteWe've got some ethnic frats/sororities, about which I, like Marcia, feel ambivalent. The traditional Greek organizations seem to attract the white kids who didn't get into a "better school" because they were too busy socializing in high school, and are now focused on having a "real college experience" (which, by their definition, means continuing the socializing). There are, of course, some exceptions, but that seems to be the general pattern.
@Strelnikov -- I don't doubt that there's hazing at Harvard (the fact that the university has an anti-hazing web page suggests that there is). But, last I heard, there aren't fraternities, and haven't been for some time (if ever). Instead, they have somewhat similar "finals clubs" -- one of those Harvard can't do it the way everyone else does because it's Harvard things, I think.
Oops -- I didn't catch that Marcia *isn't* ambivalent about ethnic fraternities. I am; I do think they can provide support for some students, but some of them are clusters of kids who are just as privileged as those in the traditional Greek organizations, just less blonde. For the most part, as with athletes, the less aware I am of whether a student is in a fraternity or sorority, the happier I am. What they do on their own time is their business, as long as it doesn't interfere with class work.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, graduate school raises some of the same questions.
@MAMM, I have a (totally untested, of course, but at least based on some, albeit anecdotal, evidence) theory about why I see hazing now and didn't before: most of the "Greek" organizations at Midwestern Miracle University are local, not national. These make-believe fraternities and sororities lack the oversight of a national headquarters, and they benefit greatly from the clout their alumni have with the school's administration.
ReplyDelete