Might sound weird, but if I am being completely honest...
 

... I have to admit that I kind of like the idea of hazing.

Now, that's not to say that I like all forms of hazing; but I do believe there can be some useful applications of hazing. Personally, I like the idea of being put through something possibly uncomfortable or unpleasant to earn something I consider of value. I mean take military boot camp for example, some of the sh!t that takes place is considered hazing; but it's not without purpose. I think that a fraternity or sorority who puts new members through similar types of rigor could build some strong characteristics and bonding in their initiates; so long as there is a true and legitimate higher purpose.

Ultimately, many hazing rituals can be viewed as symbolic references to life experiences. Sometimes life 'hits' you, and if you're a punk then life is going to F you up, but if you can learn to take those 'hits' and still continue on with what you've set out to accomplish there's value in that.

I would like to have a set of fairly hardcore rituals and exercises specifically geared toward preparing initiates for tough conditions that may arise during their college tenure and early stages of their professional careers, even their personal lives and relationships; all that are fun, stressful, painful, tiring, emotional, embarrassing, motivating, and inspiring. Maybe some people will get hurt, maybe some people will want to drop-out, maybe some people will have emotional breakdowns, but in the end their brothers are 100% committed to everyone making it through and being better because of it, and they will love each other for it. Is that so wrong? Am I just crazy? Is this just some fantasy I have conjured up in my head? I don't think so, I think there can be 'responsible hazing'.

PS - I'm not greek (yet), but I plan on pledging when I transfer from CC.

While I agree that the definitions of hazing can be kind of ridiculous, I don't agree with your logic. If there is something that has a risk of causing some sort of harm to the person, it is wrong, simple as that. The military trains you to kill somebody who is trying to kill you, a fraternity tries to train you to be a better citizen and person. They shouldn't be using the same techniques.

It is not a wise idea to hand over the mental health of a group of 17-19 year old students to a group of 18-23 year old students and expect them to "educate" them in ways that are psychologically sound. Military training has lots of oversight. Drill sergeants are older members of the military who are trained to be drill sergeants and who have other drill sergeants and officers looking over their shoulders. That isn't going to happen on a college campus. Furthermore, we're not really looking for the type of conformity or obedience in our members that the military needs in theirs. We want leaders, not foot soldiers.

If you allow even mild hazing, some one is going to take it too far, and a student will get hurt or die. It's a terrible idea.

I think you should wait until you are at a university and have a bid in your hand before you try to decide what is right for an organization you will never understand unless you are a part of it.

Just saying.... in my opinion hazing is NOT necessary to bond a pledge class together. At all.

Why would a coed social club haze anyway? If you let a member join your club but refuse to let them join another activity in the club and only keep one member status because of their sex that kind of sounds like hazing to me.

Old Row, our sorority (and chapter) does NOT haze in any way. I think that you were misunderstanding the situation and thinking that the social club and the sorority chapter were one entity. Which they are not.

That's what I am not understanding. You created the coed social club because your school wouldn't recognize you as a sorority, but if a guy joins your club then he will be denied joining Beta Sigma Phi which was really the reason for you started the club in the first place. Telling some members they can't be part of another related organization that others are welcome in only because of their sex is like hazing because it makes different membership statuses.

Dear socalmarci,

Please don't join a fraternity or sorority. We don't want members with this mentality. If you're hellbent on hazing and being hazed, you might enjoy ROTC or the military. Hazing does not prepare anyone for a professional career or membership in a single-gender organization. It does violate your university honor code, fraternity policies, and jeopardizes the organization and the well-being of our valued members.

In closing, please don't call us. We won't call you. Best of luck in your life and sadistic view of the world.

Best wishes for a more mature outlook as you matriculate at a four-year university,
The Greek Community

Mother of God, you're an idiot. Symbolic references for life experiences? You have no grip on reality, do you? The COLLEGE EXPERIENCE ITSELF is what will help prepare you for the rest of your life. Do you think non-greeks are incapable of coping with the tough shit life will push because they were never hazed? Studying alone and excelling in your classes alone can be fun, stressful, painful, tiring, emotional, embarrassing, motivating and inspiring. You don't need hazing to experience those things in college! If someone gets hurt or has an emotional breakdown due to HAZING, that is NOT FUCKING COOL. AT ALL. EVER. EVER. One person getting hurt is not worth everyone else having a "fun" hazing experience. 100% committed to "making it through" and then loving each other at the end of it all? Are you kidding me? When some groups try to justify hazing as a way to "weed out the weak?" Are you a masochist? What unicorn piss rainbow do you live under? You aren't greek, so yes, yes this is some crazy fantasy you have made up in your head.

I would like to see a clarification of hazing that is a little more realistic than "anything you would require a pledge to do that you wouldn't require an active to do is hazing" but I get the sneaking suspicion that the OP thinks things like sleep deprivation or things that would cause fear for ones' safety, whether real or not, is ok. And it's not.

I don't know if you're crazy, but you seem to be very poorly informed and immature. While some definitions of what constitutes hazing can go overboard, there is no such thing as responsible hazing. Responsibility and hazing are mutually exclusive, especially when you're talking about pain, embarrassment and the possibility that some people might get hurt. Period.

I completely get the desire to mark life passages. I get the desire to feel like you've accomplished something when time for initiation finally comes. I get the idea of preparing in symbolic ways to face challenges and take on greater responsibility. These things can be accomplished, and accomplished much more effectively, without hazing.

Yep. It angers me when people think "pledging" and "hazing" are synonymous. In the OP's case though, it doesn't seem like she wants pledges to do things for the sake of learning about the brothers or sisters, the organization, and the campus/national Greek community (which is what pledgeship should be). It sounds like she wants to do them just to do them.

33, I got the impression the OP was a male b/c of the use of the term "their brothers". +1 to your response.

I can only speak from my own personal experience, but OP, you do NOT want to be hazed. For the org I was pledging (non-NPC but still greek-lettered) I was fine with learning national history, chapter history, and district history, doing service events and jumping through all sorts of non-hazing hoops, but the moment my class was hazed I lost all trust and respect for the group and the people in it. It destroyed any desire I had to join a group that would treat me in that manner, and no amount of coaxing by my class could get me to stay with it. Being hazed made me realize that I wanted nothing to do with a group who would treat me that poorly, and that it wasn't worth it.

It's not worth it. A social club with some letters on it is not worth your physical and emotional well-being and dignity. And considering you have never been through it before, I would advise you to keep your opinion to yourself from now on.

I agree completely. But it did seem to me that the OP really is talking about hazing, not just pledging:

Quote:

Originally Posted by socalmarci (Post 2214331) I would like to have a set of fairly hardcore rituals and exercises specifically geared toward preparing initiates for tough conditions that may arise during their college tenure and early stages of their professional careers, even their personal lives and relationships; all that are fun, stressful, painful, tiring, emotional, embarrassing, motivating, and inspiring. Maybe some people will get hurt, maybe some people will want to drop-out, maybe some people will have emotional breakdowns . . . .

This all sounds to me like a very romanticized and unrealistic view of hazing that focuses on perceived benefits (and proving manhood) and dismisses risks, not to mention legality.

socalmarci, I am old enough to have pledged when concern about hazing was just really starting to be an issue. I was hazed. It was relatively mild as hazing goes -- nothing life threatening or really dangerous (though as others have said, with 18-22 year old guys, it's not too hard for things to get out of hand), and nothing that "scarred" me in any way. But it was definately hazing -- stressful, tiring, emotional . . . .

What did it teach me? Nothing. What did it prepare me for? Nothing. Which may be why, after my pledge class, we just let those hazing traditions fade away, without any intense discussion and without any pressure from our national office. Few brothers saw any point or value in it. As I said above, there are other, more effective ways to accomplish goals of bonding and loyalty.

There are degrees of hazing. Doing laundry or buying food for members is typically considered hazing but it's just something that happens. I would never have new members suck bananas as I saw on Dateline one night. Also, my bf fraternity made pledges come out in th middle of the night to recite the Greek Alphabet. Most hazing is innocent, but innocence turns bad quickly when you say run across campus naked and now the student has indecency charges on his record. Hell Week is barely politically correct, by that time we were suppose to know all songs, founders, and symbols, and would be called out anytime in middle of the night. For Hell Week, we had to stay in the house which I'm sure if a girl said she didn't want to, would then be called hazing

I'm generally not a fan of the slipper slope defense, but in the case of 18-22 year olds, I think it has to be considered. Being made to recite the Greek Alphabet, no, that's not harmful to anyone, but everyone of us here can think of 15 ways to turn that utterly benign act into something terrible, dangerous and/or illegal. Maybe if the rules was, anything you want to do to a pledge has to happen in front of the president of the school, then it would be something. Then a lot of the playful stuff would probably be just fine. But I wouldn't even trust that responsibility to a chapters alumnae/i, because you know some 40 year old wanting to relive his youth would think it's perfectly fine to waterboard a freshman.

You can't give people that much control over other people without strong institutional controls. It brings out something dark in them.

I went to college in the late 80's and early 90's. There was quite a bit of hazing on both campuses I attended. (Mostly fraternity) Some of it was harmless and silly. A lot wasn't and I knew one guy that had to go the hospital. The problem was with three types of members: 1) guys who were drunk and didn't have good judgment about what they were doing to the pledges and were belligerent when called on it; 2) guys who were sober but didn't really think through what they were doing to other people (not malicious, just lacking in empathy); and 3) guys who enjoyed hurting the pledges and got off on the petty use of power. The third type was dangerous, more common that I would have thought, and perfectly happy to turn "Hell Week" into a recreation of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

I'm constantly surprised by things that are banned under the rubric of "hazing." I know that if its banned, though, it must have gone bad somewhere. It's like silly laws against ridiculous stuff. If there is a law against keeping a cow in an apartment in a city, it means that some idiot kept a cow in an apartment at some point in that city and the city council had to pass an ordinance to make them stop.

A lot of things people say are banned because of hazing are actually banned because of risk management. The two mean different things but are lumped together as the same thing in some people's heads, or it gets communicated incorrectly.

Hazing? Being a Greek and in the Army(Enlisted when I was 17, pledged last semester) what Greeks and civilians, predominately the Media, call Hazing is just bullying and trying to show they have a little bit of power over someone else and they want to use it while they can. When I rushed Chi Psi, all I had to do was know the Greek Alphabet and a couple of stories from my Fraternity's past, that was it. I think the media has degraded the word Hazing from what it actually means to just some jackass that wants to hold a little power over someone.

I don't know how many other military men/women are on this site, but from my experiences, the Hazing, using the term loosely, I had to go through from Basics, Advanced Infantry Tactics, and even in Afghanistan has scarred me. But what it accomplished was making me able to hold my Rifle and pull the trigger when it counted. Because of my Hazing I was able to survive in a warzone while I watched my military Brothers and Sisters die in the line of duty. I will admit I "hazed" Greenhorns to prepare them for combat, something that I needed to be sure that they wouldn't crack under the pressure and end up dead in a combat zone. And I'm sure when I go back to Afghanistan next week, I'll be "hazed" and I'll "haze" some Greenhorns. But in the Military we don't Haze, we Condition people. -.-

From what I have seen in my Greek life so far, its just High School bullies that never grew up still bullying the pledges. Hazing in its true form is to not build brother/sisterhood, but to take someone and break them down to the point of losing their Identity and Humanity, then rebuild them into something else. There is no point in a Greek Soceity to "haze" someone. There's no logical explanation to it, and no reason for it. /endrant

armyguy94,
thank you for your service.

I don't understand how this keeps coming up. Chapter Presidents don't (read: shouldn't) make the general members do his/her laundry. Why are pledges expected to do it? How does it "just happen"?

What's there to gain from that?

I don't feel like anything in Greek Life, especially when it comes to pledging/new member ed, "just happens." There is rhyme and reason behind every step of it.

Not a popular opinion, I know, but I also think that some level of hazing is acceptable. For women joining sororities I think that dressing up in funny or cute costumes on Big Sis reveal night is FUN!! But for example, at my daughter's school (Big, public in CA) her chapter considers this hazing! I have only heard of two incidents of unforgivable hazing within sororities,,,one occurred at U of Wisconsin and one at University of southern Cal.. For Fraternities for men, EVERY SINGLE man, young or old that I have EVER met experienced some form of hazing!!! Even though every organization proclaims that they don't haze. THEY DO!!! I strongly object to anything that endangers life or limb and or any activity that is humiliating. But, for men joining fraternities, some activities can really help to bond the group. Plus, with men's fraternities, there is that element of having to prove how badly you want to be initiated.

I am now waiting for the onslaught of criticism regarding my post....

go ahead, I am sipping my glass of wine and I am ready!

I stand by my opinion.

I agree that hazing has become the "zero tolerance" of university education. I've been told of events/traditions that are scrapped because "someone" "might" consider them a form of hazing.

However, my spouse was (I believe) hazed unmercifully; he has NO USE for his fraternity. When I mentioned that my nephew was investigating greek life on his campus, and should I let nephew know he has a family connection to that fraternity, spouse said "He doesn't want to be a XYZ." (I finally asked him why he didn't resign, and he implied that was more effort than he was willing to put forth for the fraternity.) When "brotherhood" events cause that reaction, they certainly do nothing to help the cause.

Exactly. The problem is not that some level of hazing is acceptable but nevertheless is prohibited. Hazing is not acceptable. Period.

The problem is that too often some things are labeled as hazing when they really aren't hazing.

I feel like this would be a good place to teach collegians some critical thinking skills. "Oh, you want to do X? What's the worst possible thing that could happen if you do X? How might a member or pledge feel if made to do X? What are the benefits of activity X?" and so on...