[DeltAlum]

FYI, From Fraternal News

Thoughts As Alfred University Bans Its Greek System

By Hank Nuwer

"The call came in the middle of the night. Eileen Stevens's son was
dead. She was alert and numb at once, her flesh no longer part of
her. She wanted to hang up. She wanted the caller to stay on the line
forever. She wanted to know what had happened and how. But most of
all, she wanted the call to be a dream, a very bad dream.

The pain in the caller's voice, the small break in his professional
manner, revealed the truth, told her the worst had happened. She was
ready to bargain with God. The devil. The caller himself. Take my
life, my soul-take me. I've lived. But make it untrue. Take me, not
Chuck. But Chuck was dead."

So begins my 1990 book Broken Pledges: The Deadly Rite of Hazing, the
story of the death of Chuck Stenzel. Chuck was an Alfred University
student who died pledging Klan Alpine, a local AU fraternity. In a
bizarre hazing ritual called "Tapping Night," Chuck was locked in a
car trunk with other pledges, handed alcohol, and then later made to
play deceptive alcohol games with fraternity members, calculated to
make the pledges dead drunk by midnight.

Chuck, a strapping athlete with longish wheat-colored hair, was put
to sleep in the house, just before midnight on a tick mattress, and
died from an alcohol overdose on February 24, 1978. The theme of the
party, a Klan Alpine member (older and wiser and sweaty-soaked as he
talked) told me was, "Don't Stop Till You Drop." In writing Broken
Pledges, I interviewed Klan Alpine's undergraduates, their advisers,
and alums, including the last people to see Chuck alive. To a person,
they were decent men who spoke with their names on full record, in
hopes of preventing another fraternity death. The parents spoke to me
candidly, as did present and former AU administrators and faculty.

I concluded then that Alfred University, a small private school in
New York's Southern Tier, couldn't have handled the 1978 fraternity
death any worse than it did. An AU administrator and a local district
attorney conducted a so-called investigation without interviewing
many witnesses, and some crucial post-death statements by school
administrators, by their own admission, did not hold up as fact under
scrutiny. There were no arrests of fraternity members or alums who
attended the Tapping Night party where Chuck died. The only result of
this 'investigation' was a temporary suspension of fraternity
activities. The case might have embarrassed the school even more,
had not the entire Chuck Stenzel file prepared by that district
attorney's staff disappeared from the Allegany County (N.Y)
courthouse archives. (The then D.A. defended his investigation and
his decision not to press charges in the Stenzel death.)

*************************

While writing Broken Pledges, then President Richard Rose told me
point-blank that he'd taken bad advice from attorneys and had avoided
Stenzel's mother in the days and years following Chuck's death. If he
could go back in time, he said in a face-to-face interview, he would
have followed his heart and talked to them as a plain father to a
plain mother. Rose's decision to go on the record and criticize his
decisions took courage, but he did so unflinchingly when I
interviewed him.

In addition, in the past decade, Alfred University has reversed its
actions 180 degrees and has become as proactive in stopping hazing as
any school in the country.

Chuck's mother, Eileen Stevens (she took a new last name when she
remarried), began an anti-hazing organization called the Committee to
Halt Useless College Killings. Among other accomplishments, Stevens
agitated for a strong New York State anti-hazing law. She got it
passed after years of lobbying, and then embraced the fraternal
system by speaking at hundreds of colleges and universities. Her
message was simple: "Return to the ideals of your founders. They
would be turning in their graves to see young men and women dying
from hazing."

All this ancient history has been dredged up again. On May 20, 2002,
Alfred University announced - as has Williams, Colby and Bowdoin in
recent years - that it was discontinuing its fraternity system.

Continuing incidents involving alcohol and pledging were too much for
AU's trustees to forbear. Zeta Beta Tau member Ben Klein was found
dead in a frozen creek behind the chapter house, after having been
beaten by his fraternity brothers for revealing chapter rituals to
ZBT members at Syracuse University (the criminal investigation
continues). Additional hazing incidents, similar to those that had
killed Stenzel in 1978, involved the Klan Alpine fraternity. Ongoing
alcohol/pledging incidents - including post-party auto fatalities or
injuries to fraternity and sorority members - continued over the
years and resulted in suspensions to half of AU's sororities.

On May 20, 2002 then - Alfred University trustees announced their
decision to shut down all local and national fraternal organizations,
which had existed on campus for nearly 90 years. They did so with
full knowledge that some alums would withhold financial contributions
and that undergraduates would protest.

Certainly the fraternities and sororities should have seen the action
coming, and could have worked harder to clean up their collective
acts. In 1999, Alfred University embraced its once bitterest critic,
Eileen Stevens, and awarded her an honorary doctorate. "That event
has haunted both Mrs. Stevens and Alfred University for more than 20
years," said then President Edward Coll. "I believe, and the Board of
Trustees agreed, that it was time for a reconciliation."

In association with the National Collegiate Athletic Conference
(NCAA), researchers from Alfred University conducted studies on
athletic hazing and conducted another study on high school hazing.
The school's administration welcomed criticism on their studies, and
welcomed my input on the NCAA study when researchers were preparing
questions. Mrs. Stevens was also an adviser to AU researchers Dr.
Norm Pollard and Dr. Nadine Hoover.
The death of Zeta Beta Tau member Ben Klein this past February
horrified trustees and the AU researchers on hazing.

Public relations seemed the smallest of concerns. A young man was
dead, and the chapter members who had beaten him - incredibly - sat
back and drank beer and watched as rescue workers combed the bushes
in search for the missing Klein. (The AU chapter members' puzzling
and unsettling actions occurred in spite of demands for reform issued
from the Zeta Beta Tau headquarters that has lost other young men to
hazing and/or alcohol since the 1970s).

And though the death of Chuck Stenzel occurred in February 1978, that
loss still devastated Mrs. Stevens, AU administrators, and some
fraternity/sorority members, including Klan Alpine alums.

For what it is worth, having a fraternity background, I'd hoped the
AU administration might bounce the worst offending chapters and keep
the other fraternities and sororities. I'd recommended in print that
the school keep its system, and instead, launch a national commission
to study deaths and near-deaths involving fraternity and sorority
members and party guests on campus. I'd heard from Alfred
undergraduates and alumni by e-mail, who pointed out, in sometimes
emotional and sometimes reasoned arguments, that their
fraternity/sorority experience at AU had enhanced their lives.

Thus, I don't fully agree with Alfred University's current decision
to ban all fraternal organizations on campus. Yet, I wholly
understand the reasoning of the AU board of trustees. The board,
significantly, had some members with a fraternity/sorority
background, and tellingly, it had a key trustee with a corporate
background in the insurance industry. He presumably had risk
management facts about AU and national fraternities and sororities at
his fingertips. Perhaps the decision might reduce liability in the
Klein death-that's too early to tell.

In turn, the AU trustees could look us all in the eye and ask a tough
question: Would we want to call a mother in the middle of the night
to tell her that her child has died in a fraternity or sorority
initiation - or drowned in a creek after chapter members had beaten
him?
I know my answer. What would you say?

The losses of these family members weigh like stones on the soul. And
while I have no idea how the ZBT undergrads feel at Alfred
University, I have talked (for publication and informally) over time
with the past two ZBT national executive directors and one member of
the national council, and they have been forceful in their assurances
that they want - that they insist - on reform and safe chapters. I've
also talked firsthand to Klan alum, who were not only devastated by
Chuck Stenzel's death but frustrated because undergraduates continued
to drink and haze.

Actually, I share their frustration. As I write, Klan Alpine is on
suspension for injuring a guest and for conducting pledging
activities that constituted hazing (and which were reminiscent of
those that killed Chuck Stenzel). Also on suspension for alcohol
infractions and pledging violations were Sigma Chi Nu and Theta Theta
Chi sororities. Other fraternity chapters in recent years at AU have
been in trouble, and yet these, and some other chapters, have been
involved admirably with charities and that makes the shutdown all the
more serious and worthy of close study by other schools.

When I write about hazing, I tend to look for behaviors I consider
risky or unhealthy, as opposed to making conclusions by "judging"
people on their rightness or wrongness. AU's administrators clearly
indicated that the ZBT chapter involved in Ben Klein's death
certainly engaged in risky, unhealthy activities. Does this make it
any easier for the healthy, risk-free fraternity and sorority members
and alums to accept the loss of their chapters? Not one bit, I know,
and I empathize with those folks - though not with any chapter that
engaged in risk-taking activities while trumpeting their chapter as
"responsible."

The lessons of the Alfred study are clear for other private schools
and for members at those institutions.. The committee did not act in
haste. It met often and welcomed input. It could not entirely be free
of emotion since one young man had died in a hazing and another died
under mysterious circumstances with the blows of the brotherhood
imprinted on his body.
Private and public schools of higher education are cracking down, no
question, since the early 1990s. I see firsthand the tighter rules at
Indiana University, and I hear second-hand the tightening of alcohol,
drug and hazing restrictions at schools such as Duke University,
Trinity (Connecticut), San Diego State, and so on. The number of
deaths has become appalling, and working in student affairs has
become highly stressful for those administrators who have had to sit
the night in an emergency room chair with a family, wondering if a
kid who had been healthy as a horse just hours earlier will live or
die. Likewise, I've spoken and corresponded with many fraternity and
sorority executives over the years, and I have no doubt that they are
horrified by alcohol- and hazing-related deaths. Too many executives,
for financial, personal or board/alum pressure reasons, keep too many
chapters active that are walking time bombs.

The bottom line is that the number of deaths on college campuses
related to alcohol is astounding. The bottom line is that the
National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse says that underage
drinkers are twice as likely to have gotten drunk in the preceding
month compared with adult drinkers (27.7 percent vs. 13.5 percent).
The group also estimates that 5 million high school students binge
drink monthly. These statistics tell colleges such as Alfred that the
problem isn't going away, but will be at the doorstep with each new
class. Finally, the bottom line is that Alfred University decided
that continuing the fraternity and sorority system was a risky,
unhealthy thing to do.

And that decision sends a clear, unwavering - and yes - sobering
message to the rest of America's private colleges, and perhaps to its
state universities, as well. Like it or not, they and I hear that
message now.

Bio: Hank Nuwer writes frequently about Greek safety and reform
issues. His latest book is "To the Young Writer." He was a member of
a fraternity that was forced to go local by order of the State
University of New York chancellor many years ago and he maintains
contact with other members of his chapter.

Disclosure: I've also in the past conducted an unpaid seminar with
the then-suspended ZBT chapter at Indiana University at the request
of a Dean Michael Gordon of IU, who oversaw the chapter's no-nonsense
rehabilitation).