Tag Archives: hazing

Business Frat Hazing Tradition

My friend knows someone in a business frat who told her that one of the things they had to do as hazing was spend four hours locked in closet together in complete darkness.  While they waited the members played  the song called Trapped in a Closet on repeat.

My friend found this tradition to be rather simplistic.  She didn’t think that there was any point to this hazing tradition because it wasn’t teaching the hazed individuals any real lesson.  Instead it was just hazing for the purpose of hazing.

I agree with her, the hazing tradition is rather simplistic.  It doesn’t seem to have any purpose except to teach the prospective members to blindly do what they are told.  This is an unhealthy form of hazing because the lack of lesson is degrading and represses individuality.  As a result it reinforces the idea of hazing as cruelty.  This probably furthers the process of hazing from year to year because it will make new members them more likely to inflict this kind of cruelty onto others as their comeuppance for having them done to them.

The Goat Room

At Williams College in Massachusetts the frat system was dissolved in the 1960s but all the old frathouses still exist and have been converted into dorms.  They are identifiable as frat houses because they still feature the fraternities old symbols on the wall.  One of the most interesting hazing traditions that this frat took part in was at the end of the initiation process the current members of the frat would take all the prospective members into this room.  They would then bring in a goat and tell the prospectives they had one final task to complete before becoming a member.  Any man who sought entry into the house would have to have sexual intercourse with the goat that night.  The brothers would then leave and come back in the morning.  When they returned they would ask the prospective members who had “fucked the goat.”  Some would step forward.  Instead of lauding them for their dedication to the fraternity these men would be chastised in front of the group for their blind following of such a vile order.  They would be asked to leave and not admitted into the fraternity.  Those who had refused to have intercourse with the goat would be lauded for their strong character and offered a spot in the frat.

I went to visit the informant at her college and we participated in a 24 hour theater festival.  We were rehearsing in the goat room and I noted that I recognized the symbol on the wall as a frat symbol.  My friend and the other girl with us then proceeded to tell me the full story.

I think this story is very interesting because it plays with the expectations of fraternity culture.  You expect the brothers to come back and kick out those who refused to follow orders but in fact the opposite is true.  However the act still portrays fraternities in a negative light.  The prospective members underwent a traumatic experience and in the end they were not accepted.  This is perhaps even more traumatizing than following orders that lead to acceptance.  Either way the story prizes individual thinking over a group mentality.  It is also interesting to note that this story exists in a school where fraternities do not.  The story is probably making a commentary on the evils of the fraternity system and how the school is better off without them.

Your tongue sticks to it…

My informant is an archaeology student. Last summer, she attended a one month long field school through ARC Rome in Gabii, Italy. Field schools are an integral part of an archaeology student’s education. In addition to giving students such as my informant necessary experience in identifying and excavating archaeological sites, field schools are a rite of passage. Below, she recounts the good natured hazing she was subjected to during the field school.

 

“Last summer, I went to my first field school. I was working at the the site of Gabii, in Italy. Also in my field school was Dustin, who was from another university. He told me that an easy way to identify bone was to lick it. If your tongue stuck to it, you knew it was bone. Of course, I then tried licking all possible pieces of bone, as my amused field director watched. I kept licking things to check if they were bone, until one afternoon, when I found a particularly large object, covered in dirt. It was so covered in dirt that I couldn’t really tell what it was. After dusting it off as well as I could, I licked it. It wasn’t bone…It was a rusted iron spike! Then I figured that licking things was a bad idea. I don’t know if it’s true that your tongue sticks to bone, but I don’t think you’re supposed to try.”

 

Knowing that my informant was in her first field school, Dustin was able to take advantage of her naivety and persuade her to lick bone. These excavations are a liminal space, of sorts, between being an archaeology student and being a working professional in the field. Once you have completed your first field school, and all of the initiation rituals that entails, you are considered well on your way to becoming an archaeologist.

Town Meeting Never-Ending Applause

Endless Applause

Initiation tradition/Practical Joke

 

In my informant’s  school (grades 7-12), there are weekly school gatherings called Town Meetings.  In these meetings, any student may make an announcement. It is tradition that when the first 7th grader gets up to make an announcement every year, the students break out in applause, but do not stop applauding. The noise of clapping too overwhelming, the student awkwardly stands on stage and cannot finish the announcement. My informant thought this was funny, and enjoyed the tradition.

 

Although embarrassing to the victim, it allowed everybody else to laugh together, reinforcing the community. This is also a liminal activity that introduces the new students to the school, a form of initiation. Knowledge is key here; those that know the joke can partake. The seventh graders, who do not know the joke is coming, are the “other”. Once they know, though, the 7th graders become part of the community. A year later, those 7th graders (now 8th graders) can be part of the joke and laugh at the new 7th graders too.

Hazing- skinny dipping naked in fountain

My informant was visiting USC and on the second night of her stay, she went out to find a late night snack. While wandering around campus, she saw a few naked guys, presumably students, jumping around in one of the fountains. They then ran off. She had heard stories of such an act being part of hazing and so attributed the sighting to that.

Seeing that was interesting, she said, because she doesn’t personally see the value in something like hazing but knows it’s important to some fraternities and to some people. To her, though, it was just more evidence of the shallowness and lack of worth of most frats.

Hazing rituals have been going on in colleges for decades, and though administrations try to crack down, it always seems to remain. The rituals are usually embarrassing and uncomfortable, as well as sometimes dangerous. I believe their intention is to humble those who want to join the frat so they know their place. And because of their existence, actually being in a frat seems more significant since hazing makes it difficult to join. It makes it seem more exclusive and special. Hazing is also supposed to bond those attempting to join together via their humiliating experience. Personally, though, I’m not sure I see much point to the rituals. Many frat students seem to want to continue the trend only because they had to go through it; performing the ritual on someone else is like a taking back of power, a revenge for what was done to them, but exacted upon someone else. The rituals also often reflect this human desire to have power over others and even to inflict pain upon them, even if it something we generally repress.