The drum major’s death demanded a response, a plan, a solution. Something that ensured Robert Champion had left behind a world where one student would never again beat the last breath out of another.
After a football game last November, Mr. Champion boarded a bus with other members of Florida A&M University’s Marching 100 band. Soon thereafter, he was dead. A medical examiner found deep bruises on his chest, arms, shoulders, and back. He died, the autopsy report said, of “hemorrhagic shock due to soft tissue hemorrhage due to blunt force trauma sustained during a hazing incident.”
Reactions to Mr. Champion’s death have taken many forms. Florida A&M suspended that band, fired its director, and halted recruitment of new members. With help from a public-relations firm, the university voted to create an “anti-hazing committee,” a panel of outside experts that will examine how other colleges have dealt with violence among students. Late last year, a Congresswoman from Florida announced her plan to introduce legislation that would strip federal aid from all college students punished for hazing. In Georgia, where Mr. Champion grew up, lawmakers are considering legislation that would ban any student convicted of hazing from the state’s high schools and universities.
These responses ring with outrage. They also suggest a fingers-crossed kind of faith. To believe that the words in a blue-ribbon report or a hard-nosed law could loosen the grip of hazing is to underestimate the complexity of the problem.
Florida A&M’s anti-hazing committee, one trustee has said, will be “forward looking,” and will not “examine or investigate the circumstances” of recent hazing incidents. That’s a mistake, says Narayan B. Persaud. When Florida A&M’s Board of Trustees voted 9-1 last month to create the panel, Mr. Persaud cast the lone vote against the plan. “It will catch the surface issues,” he says, “but it still will not get to the core of hazing.”
Mr. Persaud, a professor of sociology and criminal justice, has studied juvenile delinquency for years. The university, he says, must conduct a robust interdisciplinary study of hazing, examining the particularities of Florida A&M’s campus—who its students are and where they come from.
Moreover, there’s too much emphasis, on the behavioral aspects of hazing, and too little on “the psyche” of it, he believes: “For me, it’s the motivational, the emotional, and the cognitive, the historical or cultural conditions that breed this kind of behavior. What I don’t want to see is for a panel to come in and after the work is done, we feel like we’ve done a good job and the issues are gone. If the issues are grounded in the campus culture, they will rise again.”
Hazing is the beast in academe’s basement, often lurking unseen and unreported, only to rise again and again despite countless rules and zero-tolerance policies. It takes many forms, some physically violent, some emotionally cruel, some booze-soaked, some silly. Since 1970, colleges have seen at least one hazing-related fatality each year, and the annual tally of reported injuries and abuse is long.
Despite its prevalence, hazing remains somewhat mysterious. It’s been the subject of relatively little research, and relevant studies are longer on the “what” than the “why.” Nonetheless, recent data suggest that hazing affects more students—and starts much earlier—than college officials may have previously thought.
Several scholars have also examined how hazing rituals tend to vary among students from different racial and ethnic backgrounds. Lawrence C. Ross Jr., author of The Divine Nine: The History of African American Fraternities and Sororities, has written that hazing among white students often involves excessive alcohol consumption, whereas hazing among black students typically involves “brutalizing pledges.”
But make no mistake, hazing is an “equal-opportunity disgrace.” That phrase comes from Hank J. Nuwer, an associate professor of journalism at Franklin College and author of four books on hazing. On college campuses, the ritual infects athletics teams, honor societies, glee clubs, and drama clubs. After three students were hospitalized last month, Illinois College suspended pledging among its literary societies.
Whatever their hobbies and interests, humans are built for initiation rituals. We are social animals with the need to belong, and we devise tests that others must pass to prove they deserve a place among us. “It’s about prestige,” Mr. Nuwer says. “Where there’s a group that’s perceived to have status and power, there will be newcomers willing to make some sort of sacrifice to become a part of the group.”
One Graduate Looks Back
For an outsider, as for the adult looking backward through time, the idea of taking punches or chugging a fifth of bourbon to become a member of a campus club may seem absurd. But it’s easy to forget the gut-churning insecurity many teenagers experience when they first arrive at college, desperate to fit in somewhere among the hordes of strangers. Moreover, if you happen to associate marching bands with nerds, you may underestimate the power and prestige of the big, loud, and electrifying bands that have long marched at several historically black campuses.
Lawrence Patrick, 36, recalls watching a taped performance by Florida A&M’s Marching 100 back in 1991. “I was blown away by the excitement,” he says.
Although he grew up in Detroit, Mr. Patrick learned a lot about the famous band from Tallahassee. Starting in the third grade, he was always playing an instrument—piano, bass, tuba, percussion. And he was always surrounded by “band people,” many of whom considered the Marching 100 the best band in the nation. “If you wanted to play football, you went to Michigan or Notre Dame,” he says. “If you wanted to be in a band, you went to Florida A&M.”
In 1993, Mr. Patrick did just that. After earning a perfect score during tryouts, he joined the band during his sophomore year. The first time he donned his band uniform—green pants with white stripes, big furry hat, black boots—for a football game, he felt proud to wear the garb of the most prominent group on the campus. In some college football stadiums, fans leave their seats at halftime; at Florida A&M many spectators come just to see the band’s performance, leaving as soon as it’s over.
Members of the Marching 100 have long prided themselves on creating a “blended” sound, in which all the trumpets sound like one trumpet, all the drums, a single drum. “It’s like sonic candy, you feel the vibrations in your bones,” says Mr. Patrick, who played the bass drum at Florida A&M. “The band’s like an organism, a living, breathing thing in which you lose yourself and become part of the whole.”
When the music stopped, however, Mr. Patrick did not feel in sync with many of his bandmates. The reason, he says, was his refusal to submit to hazing, physical abuse that he and other former members describe as rampant in the band, the trial through which younger members gained acceptance from their peers.
After practice one day, Mr. Patrick says two of his bandmates—apparently frustrated by his refusal to attend “beat-up sessions"—jumped him in the locker room. The first punch broke his glasses. Another knocked him to the floor, where he was kicked. He says he reported the incident to drum majors, but that nothing ever happened. He stopped going to practice. Eventually, he says, he was told there was no longer a place for him in the Marching 100.
Mr. Patrick never saw a connection between hazing and performing, though he recalls that the most skilled members of the band were not the ones who hazed. Although he was not hazed in his high school, he says, many of his bandmates were. The Southeast is full of high-school bands led by alumni of Florida A&M, Southern University, and Bethune Cookman University, among other colleges where hazing has been reported in bands.
“The kids are conditioned to think that it’s OK,” Mr. Patrick says. “They were taught to expect to be hazed.”
As a freshman, Mr. Patrick pledged Phi Beta Sigma, where, he says, he was beaten with wooden paddles and canes. He sustained nothing worse than bruises, though sometimes those were so bad that it hurt to sit down. On such days, he would wear two pairs of boxers and place a pillow between his rear end and his desk chair.
“They start out doing things that seem relatively mild, but annoying, then it gets more and more serious,” Mr. Patrick says. “You don’t even realize it until you look back the next day and say, '[Shoot], I could have died last night.’”
There was always a carrot to keep pledges going—the sense that the process was almost over, the knowledge that all the members you saw each day had somehow made it through. Joining the fraternity, Mr. Patrick knew, was a lifelong commitment, a means of gaining access to a powerful social and professional network. Mr. Patrick had known men back in Detroit who belonged to the same fraternity. Those were all powerful motivations, he says, to keep his mouth shut and endure whatever happened.
The night he and his fellow pledges became full-fledged members, he says, was the worst. “We got beat up real good,” he says. “They did this whole ritual, and at the end they expected you to be smiling and to be happy, and they’re hugging you.”
But Mr. Patrick was angry. A brother asked him, “Would you do it all over again?” His answer now is the same as it was then: “Hell no.”
The roots of intense hazing among black fraternities go deep into American history, says James Peterson, director of Africana studies at Lehigh University. “This was all born out of segregation,” he says. “Because of the historical context in which these groups emerged, members were defining identity within a historical process that dehumanized black folks. And now that’s bled over into the band system.”
Ricky L. Jones, a professor in the department of Pan-African studies at the University of Louisville, has traced hazing back to ancient sacrificial rituals. In his book Black Haze: Violence, Sacrifice, and Manhood in Black Greek-Letter Fraternities, he describes how members of black fraternities, who perceived that they lacked the opportunities that whites had, came to see the ability to withstand and administer physical punishment as a crucial means of defining manhood. “In this context,” he says, “hazing is not just a process; it’s an identity builder.”
Skidding Out of Control
Discussions of hazing are often fraught with a problem: The term itself means different things to different people.
That became clear to researchers at the University of Maine at Orono when they embarked on a national study of hazing among college students. Their ensuing report, “Hazing in View: College Students at Risk,” published in 2008, is an analysis of 11,482 survey responses from undergraduate students at 53 colleges and universities. The researchers defined hazing as “any activity expected of someone joining or participating in a group that humiliates, degrades, abuses, or endangers them regardless of a person’s willingness to participate.”
They found that 55 percent of students had experienced hazing, and only 5 percent of those had reported it. And 90 percent of those who had been on the receiving end did not consider themselves to have been hazed.
“Many of them don’t use the term ‘hazing,” says Elizabeth Allan, a professor of higher-education leadership at Maine and an author of the report. “They’ll just say, ‘No, that’s tradition, we’re just trying to build group unity.’ So the challenge of even defining hazing muddies the waters.”
Nearly half of the students surveyed said they had experienced hazing before enrolling in college. That suggests that hazing, much like underage drinking, is a problem that colleges often inherit.
That aspect of hazing was especially interesting to Susan Lipkins, a New York psychologist who works with children and young adults. In 2003, she was shocked by reports of hazing among members of a nearby high school’s football team. The perpetrators had sodomized their teammates with broom handles, pinecones, and golf balls.
What made people do that to each other?
The question led Ms. Lipkins to learn everything she could about hazing and the motivations behind it. She has since started an anti-hazing Web site and written a book on the subject (Preventing Hazing: How Parents, Teachers, and Coaches Can Stop the Violence, Harassment, and Humiliation). Listening to her describe a “blueprint of hazing” conjures the image of a wheel turning year after year.
“The psyche of the perpetrators is that they believe they have the right and a duty to pass on the tradition,” Ms. Lipkins says. “They experience anger and humiliation when this is done to them, and then they get to complete the circle, they get back their self-esteem.”
Ms. Lipkins often appears as an expert witness in hazing cases, many of which have a common theme: accidents arising from behavior that skidded out of control. When consulting with colleges, she draws an analogy between hazing and car accidents. “In a car, you just buckle up and you never know when an accident’s going to happen,” she says. “In hazing, you never expect bad things to happen, but there is no buckle-up. The common response I get is the face of denial, from high-school kids to the president of the university, the thought that this cannot happen here.”
Erle Morring knows about accidents. As a sophomore at Auburn University in 1990, two of his Sigma Nu brothers died within a span of three months. Now a vice president for a health-care company, he also travels to 30 colleges a year to talk about the dangers of hazing.
Once, Mr. Morring believed that hazing was innocuous, fun. As a pledge, he had to go to “spotlight parties,” where he was blindfolded and led into a dark room. When the blindfold was removed, members shined bright lights in his eyes while insulting him and asking him questions about the fraternity’s history. As a member the following year, he watched this ritual from the other side of the room. “I was immersed in it,” he says. “It was brotherhood, it was unity. We believed that all the pledges had to do this to become tight.”
Neither of the two fraternity brothers who died fell victim to beatings or booze binges. One died after being struck by a car driven by a Sigma Nu brother following an off-campus run-in with a rival fraternity; the other member committed suicide.
But Mr. Morring believes the deaths arose from a culture in which hazing and underage drinking were the norm. “I frame this as an issue of environment and culture,” he says. “Hazing is not just about a rule or regulation, but an environment.”
Moreover, he warns his audiences against thinking of hazing only in terms of welts and bruises. “If I take a paddle and beat the hell out of you, and you start bleeding, I know when you break down, physically,” he says. “But you never know when someone is breaking down mentally.”
A Common Ending
Since Mr. Champion’s death at Florida A&M, pundits and commentators have wrestled with the question of whether hazing is “worse” in black organizations than in white ones. Although the differences among various forms of hazing are important to consider, the similarities of hazing deaths are important, too.
Take the case of the late George Desdunes, a sophomore at Cornell University and the son of a Haitian immigrant. Last year Mr. Desdunes and another member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon reportedly participated in a voluntary “kidnapping” in which several pledges bound his wrists and ankles with zip ties and duct tape. According to court documents, the pledges then played a game that involved asking Mr. Desdunes trivia questions about the fraternity. As an apparent punishment for giving wrong answers, he was forced to drink vodka and flavored syrup until he passed out, according to a lawsuit filed by his mother.
Mr. Desdunes was found unconscious on a couch, still bound, later that morning, and he died that day. His blood-alcohol level was five times the legal limit in New York, according to the lawsuit.
There’s reason to suspect that Mr. Desdunes’s death, though arising from far different circumstances than Mr. Champion’s, and occurring within a mostly white fraternity system on a predominantly white campus, was also quite painful. Both deaths could be described as violent.
If humans are hard-wired for hazing, it’s also true that colleges are well constructed to perpetuate it. The very organizations—fraternities, and, in some cases, marching bands—in which hazing so often thrives are also treasured by alumni and valued for their role in attracting students and shaping the social scene. The zero-tolerance policies and anti-hazing pledges found on so many campuses are at once hopeful documents and practical ones: They set expectations for good behavior while offering at least some legal protection from liability claims resulting from its opposite. But there’s no proof that words on paper have ever cured a campus of hazing.
Mr. Jones, the author of Black Haze, belonged to a fraternity in college. He believes Greek organizations do tremendous good for their campuses. “If frats were only about hazing, we would have eradicated them a long time ago,” he says. “But hazing is their fatal, incorrigible flaw.”
When Black Haze was published, in 2004, Mr. Jones believed there were things colleges could do to prevent hazing while preserving the organizations in which it occurs. He now thinks that the cultures that support hazing are so deeply ingrained that institutions may have no other option but to eradicate such groups. “It was a long road to that stance,” he writes in an e-mail.
The national conversation about hazing, Mr. Jones says, is shifting away from philosophical questions (why do people haze?) and toward “political ones.” In an era when campus scandals have brought down even the most powerful presidents, how many more deaths and injuries are college leaders willing to tolerate?
“These groups are telling all of us, ‘here’s the way we do things, we’ve always done things this way, and we’re going to continue doing them this way. Yeah, we beat people, we force people to drink themselves to death, we inherently see it as traditional and good, with a few losses here and there,’” Mr. Jones says. “Now the political question for presidents is, what are you going to do with that?”