How One University Is Challenging an Ugly ‘Tradition’ Among Students

Todd Heisler, The New York Times, Redux

When George Desdunes was found unresponsive on a February morning in 2011, a Sigma Alpha Epsilon pledge took action.

He instructed his roommate to throw out the zip ties and duct tape that had been bought to bind the wrists and ankles of fraternity elders like Mr. Desdunes, a sophomore at Cornell University, as pledges peppered them with SAE trivia and plied them with vodka. The first priority at that point was to hide the evidence.

Like other rituals, the mock kidnapping, meant as a fun form of reverse hazing, was supposed to remain secret. Instead, Mr. Desdunes’s death shined a spotlight on the dangerous pranks and sometimes sadistic traditions that have claimed dozens of young lives nationally in recent decades.

Greek life remains a big draw at Cornell, where more than 4,500 students — roughly a third of the undergraduate student body — belong to one of 64 recognized fraternities or sororities. But in the past five years, the university has tried to lift the shroud of secrecy that allows hazing to continue.

The practice was banned at Cornell in 1980 but continued anyway during Greek organizations’ initiation period. Administrators cracked down time and time again, but with Mr. Desdunes’s death, David J. Skorton, the university’s president at the time, had had enough.

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Bringing problems out into the open and promoting confidential reporting have helped lift the veil of secrecy that perpetuates abusive behavior.

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Cornell kicked the SAE chapter off campus, and its national headquarters disbanded it. Beyond that, Mr. Skorton asked all fraternity leaders to suggest safe alternatives to pledging, said he wouldn’t approve anything that encouraged dangerous behavior, and shared his message widely. “Demeaning activities that cause psychological harm and physical danger” have no place at Cornell, he said in The New York Times. He outlined a vision of students coming together in “socially productive, enjoyable and memorable ways … completely free of personal degradation, disrespect, or harassment in any form.”

Instead of a pledging period that can last several months, fraternities at Cornell now have a maximum of four weeks to orient new members (a compromise between mere days and a longer break-in time).

Chapters have to submit their new-member-orientation schedules to the university, as well as to the national fraternity and an alumni adviser, for review. Mock kidnappings don’t fly; ropes courses or community-service activities do. Administrators make suggestions, and, if they learn that chapters have deviated from the plans, hold them responsible. Hazing violations are posted online.

Anyone who suspects hazing — in a fraternity or any other campus group — is encouraged to report it. Cornell’s Student and Campus Life Office recently released a video in which a student confronts his roommate after he nods off in class, ditches a study session right before a test, and is summoned in the middle of the night. Together they file a confidential hazing report.

The video is part of a broader push to encourage bystander intervention. Reports from friends, parents, and others have led to punishments ranging from mandatory attendance at prevention courses to a chapter’s loss of recognition by the university.

Gauging success in combating hazing, like sexual assault, is complicated. As awareness of the problem has increased at Cornell, so, too, have reports of potential violations. At the same time, though, in campus surveys, fewer students say they have been hazed.

Sam Turer, a senior who is executive vice president of Cornell’s Interfraternity Council, took a six-week course called the Greek Leadership Academy, through the university’s outdoor-education program. The voluntary one-credit course teaches students how to change the mind-set on how new members should be treated.

“When people challenge us with, ‘This is tradition,’ it’s easy for us to respond, ‘No, your tradition isn’t humiliating and hazing people,’ " Mr. Turer says. Fraternities, he argues, were created to lift people up, not to belittle them. “When we describe the history, they get it.”

Reducing hazing, Cornell has found, requires challenging the assumption that pledges are far beneath full members in the fraternity pecking order. “That power differential adds to the notion that you have to prove yourself — that you have to earn the right to be a member,” says Kara S. Miller, director of sorority and fraternity life.

Sit-down discussions with small groups of fraternity members and a Greek-life adviser or visiting expert on what constitutes hazing, what it accomplishes, and what it doesn’t accomplish have been helpful, says Timothy Marchell, director of the university’s Skorton Center for Health Initiatives.

Students may say they’re seeking cohesion and solidarity, but often they haze because they went through it and want to see someone else suffer, Mr. Marchell says. “It’s more about dominance and an abuse of power, or sometimes, a feeling of displaced revenge.”

That’s a heavy message to deliver to fraternity members who insist that their motives are honorable. Humor, he says, can soften the blow.

“Say you’re interviewing for your first job after college and the interviewer says that solidarity and cohesion are important, because you’ll be working in teams,” he tells students in the small-group discussions. Would they say, “I think you should take your team to the basement of a dingy building and duct-tape them together and make them drink shots”?

No matter how many rules a college puts in place, the most effective approach to keeping students safe is to change mind-sets, people at Cornell believe. That means dispensing with euphemisms and exposing the ugly side of a tradition handed down for generations.

“It’s never OK to humiliate or intimidate new members,” say posters around campus. They point out that 87 percent of students agree.

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.