The College Fix

As deaths and injuries from hazing continue to draw headlines, one of the largest university systems in the country has developed a set of recommendations that includes culture changes, “shared accountability” and a “zero-tolerance” policy.

The task force that drew up the recommendations, which were adopted by the University of Texas System board of regents last month, also plans to develop a website that includes research data on hazing and resources to fight it.

The recommendations were informed by a 2007 online national survey of nearly 12,000 students on 53 campuses, the report said.

More than half of students “involved in any type of club, team, or campus organization had engaged in at least one hazing behavior meant to ‘humiliate, degrade, abuse, or endanger others or oneself regardless of willingness to participate,’” the report said. “Drinking games are the most commonly cited hazing behavior at all college campuses surveyed.”

UT campuses themselves showed wide variation in how many hazing incidents were reported.

Over the past three years, four institutions received no formal hazing reports and two had a small number of reported incidents, the report said. The three larger academic campuses with a significant number of student organizations and teams tended to have more reported hazing incidents within the last three years.

“Students shouldn’t feel that as part of the ‘initiation rite’ they have to undergo hazing to be accepted into the group,” Wanda Mercer, UT System associate vice chancellor for student affairs, told the board of regents May 14, the UT system said in a press release.

The approved plan requires UT institutions to adopt a zero-tolerance policy making all of the campus accountable for any form of hazing. It states that hazing behaviors include both male and female students, and are not limited to Greek or athletic organizations.

“Institutions should eliminate ‘pledging’ and employ the term ‘new member processes,’” the report says. “Additionally, organizations should be required to meet with campus staff prior to beginning these processes.”

Task force members are working with UT’s Office of Academic Affairs to develop an anti-hazing website “that provides policy and alternatives to hazing,” the report says.

It also recommends giving organizations ideas for “team-building activities” in lieu of hazing, ranging from bonfires to sporting events and retreats. Institutions should  “create amnesty policies that encourage students to seek help for severely intoxicated or impaired students” and which provide “immunity from prosecution” to encourage students to report hazing.

The UT System’s action follows moves by private organizations. In March the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, which has chapters at more than 200 campuses, said it would no longer allow “pledging” as an initiation process, which had become comparable to hazing.

“As an organization, we have been plagued with too much bad behavior, which has resulted in loss of lives, negative press and lawsuits,” Bradley Cohen, president of Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s national organization, said in a YouTube video. “In order to survive we must change.”

Lawyer Douglas Fierberg, who represented the family of George Desdunes – a Sigma Alpha Epsilon sophomore at Cornell who died in 2011 after he was bound, blindfolded and forced to drink – said he supported the move away from fraternity pledging, according to the New York Times.

Some colleges require students to sign a contract or a student life agreement that bans hazing. At religious colleges like Point Loma Nazarene University, students sign a lifestyle agreement pledging to abstain from hazing, alcohol, sex, and drugs, and risk expulsion for violating it.

Murray State University in Kentucky cites state law in its anti-hazing Greek-life contract.

The law “prohibits any action or situation which recklessly or intentionally endangers mental or physical health or involves the forced consumption of liquor or drugs for the purpose of initiation into or affiliation with any organization,” the statement reads.

The university itself punishes those who participate in hazing, which is “any on-campus or off-campus activity which results in mental or physical harassment, humiliation, degradation, ridicule, shock, endangerment, physical disfiguration, excessive fatigue, danger to health or the involuntary consumption of alcohol or drugs.”

Other universities that prohibit hazing in any form include New Mexico State University and the University of Dayton in Ohio.

College Fix contributor Samantha Watkins is a student at Point Loma Nazarene University.

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