If you’re a part of Greek life on campus, you’re probably familiar with the concept of hazing. And if you live in a sorority house, you’ve probably been hearing knocks on your door a little more often lately.

This past week, at least three groups of men have showed up at my sorority house dressed in costumes. They asked to take a picture inside our house, and then they were gone and onto the next house.

We usually just roll our eyes and laugh it off, but it started to strike me how unusually we treat the practice of hazing.

There’s an unspoken awareness whenever you see blacked-out fraternity house windows, boys walking around in hot dog costumes or a group of guys picking up beer cans off the lawn.

As much as everyone knows that it happens, nobody seems to question it. Perhaps because the pledges are sworn to secrecy: They’ll tell you they “lost a bet” if you ask them why they had to shave their legs.

And when they show up at your sorority house every other day, you become accustomed to them, and wondering what it’s really like to be a fraternity pledge becomes exhausting. But we should consider the repercussions of turning a blind eye to the suspicious actions we see.

The University defines hazing as “an act that endangers the mental or physical health or safety of any person OR that defaces, destroys, or removes public or private property, for the purpose of initiation into, admission into, affiliation with, or continued membership in, any group or organization.” 

Justifications for hazing include character building, teaching discipline and strengthening the bonds of brotherhood.

“Hazing is good for you,” wrote one anonymous columnist on Total Frat Move. “It taught me discipline, it taught me strength and it helped me check my vastly overinflated freshman ego.” 

He claims hazing is important because it instills a rite of passage, and compares it to the virtues of “the early days when we were still cavemen doing tribal shit.” Because doing blindfolded wall-sits while reciting the creed is equivalent to hunting lions for survival.

Regardless that most fraternity bylaws condemn the practice, hazing still happens, and nobody seems to care unless someone is seriously hurt. Since 1970, there has been at least one hazing-related death on a college campus each year.

The notion that a chapter only functions if hazing is permitted is purely an excuse to keep around pledges who submit to every demand. Perpetuating these humiliating and sometimes dangerous practices just so active members can be driven to class and not have to clean beer-soaked floors speaks to the lack of dignity that hazing supposedly exhibits.

And the appeal to tradition fallacy is sometimes the only justification for continuing hazing: Hazing has occurred at every college that has ever existed, so why stop now?

When it comes to the University, most of the hazing that occurs in the public eye seems innocent enough, but what happens behind closed doors remains beyond the business of any non-fraternity member.
Hopefully, we won’t have to wait until a tragedy occurs to change the climate that surrounds fraternity pledgeship.

Isabella is a sophomore in ACES.

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