This is probably the most comprehensive, yet brief, history if hazing, I have read on the net. It s from the Kappa Sigma ideabank
http://www.kappasigma.org/ideabank/historyhazing.html
No source for it is given.
HISTORY OF GREEK HAZING
To most fraternity men, hazing in its various forms is regarded as a perpetual problem -- regrettable in many ways, but like the common cold, always with us. In actual fact, this widespread impression is completely mistaken and misleading.
Hazing is a comparatively recent development in fraternity life, foreign to our basic principles, and increasingly harmful to us every year.
Hazing as we know it has its roots in Europe, for it is certainly not an American invention. To understand what happened in this strange story, one must keep in mind three words -- penalism (Europe), fagging (G.B.), and hazing (U.S.). While related, these are also different in some very important ways.
Penalism, on the European continent, goes back to the Middle Ages; we have detailed descriptions of it from the early 1400's. "The underlying idea ... was that the newcomer to the university was an untutored, uncivilized man, who had first to be polished before he could become a regular member of the university; before he could taste the sweets of a student's life he should suffer hardships." says one authority. To make the "freshman" aware of his proper mode of behavior, he was subjected to weird dress, physical abuse, coarse jokes and extortion of money or dinners for the hazers. He was called by the French a "yellow beak" or bec jaune, a name later contracted to the Latinized word "beanus" -- apparently the origin of our U.S. term "beanie" (the green freshman cap once worn), and about the only clearcut American borrowing from Continental practices.
In the 1600's this ceremony was accepted as an official act by a number of European universities, which even required that to receive a masters degree the student must produce an official statement that he had successfully completed it. Yet penalism was dangerous, with many serious injuries and some deaths recorded. Parents were much afraid of this barbarous custom. As the medieval period ended, and the modern industrial era began, penalism was abolished in the 1700's.
Fagging was strictly an English practice which began to take clear shape about the 1770's in the English aristocratic prep schools, and to a lesser degree in Oxford and Cambridge. Also a form of "shaping up the freshmen," fagging differed from penalism in its emphasis upon personal menial service, and drudgery. Each upper-classman selected a "fag" from among the new boys, made him run errands and clean up his "digs" or quarters, and administered physical punishment along with verbal abuse to the miserable fag. Justified as a means of teaching humility and proper behavior, fagging led to bullying, permanent injury, deaths, and suicides, also.
Penalism was a one-event initiation of sorts, but fagging was a round-the-clock year-long proposition which seemed to go on forever, with no way to get even until you got your own fag several years later. Fagging reached its high point in the nineteenth century, but has disappeared in the twentieth.
Hazing, although it had some slight use in English nautical circles (crossing the Equator, etc.), is regarded by the English themselves as an American word and practice which became prominent only after 1850. It stressed horse-play and pranks, not personal service (like fagging); it was erratic and occasional, rather than an everyday affair.
Probably it derived from frontier crude humor, like the chivarees (chari-vari) originally. But it also could turn violent and produce injuries and deaths. Nevertheless we should remember that there was a basic distinction between the two: American hazing stressed crude pranks, while English fagging centered upon personal servitude of a very undemocratic kind.
The first American colleges in New England and Virginia had neither penalism nor fagging. Instead they had dozens of strict rules for freshmen, borrowed from English practices, but enforced by the faculty rather than by older students.
At Harvard, these college laws required that freshmen run errands for all upperclassmen, never be "saucey", to obey every upperclassman's order,"... and not to urinate on the college wall or the upperclassman's 'cusjohn'" This was typical of all Eastern schools. However, such laws were dropped or ignored in the new Western colleges (west of the Hudson( after Independence.
Pranks and student violence were plentiful, but on a free enterprise, unsystematic basis -- smoking out, demands for free beer, hoaxes and the like.
About 1850 or so, hazing on a class basis -- that is, hazing of freshmen by sophomores, usually -- began to develop in the Eastern colleges. It had developed even earlier at the military academies -- West Point and Annapolis, and their college imitators. This tendency was greatly increased by large university populations and the use of athletics in the 1880's.
Large numbers made students search for some means to build class unity, and sports teams seemed to require school spirit for psychological motivation. Hazing was one answer, and it became a new American college tradition at the Ivy League and older state university institutions. This was not exactly fagging, though rather compatible with much in fagging (class unity, school loyalty, etc.).
Almost immediately an anti-hazing reaction occurred, very obviously by the 1880's. Opposition to hazing was motivated chiefly by two convictions. First, hazing seemed much too imitative of European practices and too opposed to American democratic cultural traditions. Second, it was considered a step backwards toward medievalism and even barbarism at a time when moral reform and Progressivism were the wave of the future. Nevertheless, hazing spread rapidly, amidst noisy and intense controversy, and the universities did not really take steps against it until the 1940's and 1950's.
For over a century, hazing was virtually unknown in American college fraternities. As products of the American Revolution, fraternities prided themselves upon being peculiarly American, different from and an improvement upon European college life. Moreover, fraternities founded between 1825 and 1890 were very much religiously influenced, and they considered fagging and penalism both undemocratic and vaguely immoral.
Pranks and jokes there were, but altogether separate from fraternity ideals and practices. Neither moral education, supplemental mental education, or brotherhood seemed compatible with hazing, and fraternity men before 1870 were hardly aware that it existed. Until the Eastern anti-fraternity colleges, and the pro-German state universities began to encourage hazing in the 1880's, that is.
Fraternity men learned about hazing from the freshman-sophomore class battles, and from the football and other sports rallies designed to promote school spirit and unity.
One finds very few mentions of hazing in fraternity circles before 1890 and the big university era. After all, chapters which were rarely larger than twelve members, which had no pledge period, which preferred not to pledge freshman, which lacked houses and whose initiations were seldom highly developed were unlikely to make much use of hazing.
All this suddenly changed in the 1890's. Nearly every national fraternity "discovered" the hazing problem in its own ranks, and denounced it harshly as contrary to all fraternity ideals and past tradition.
But the fact was that hazing was widespread and growing, against the will and legal sanctions of the alumni. Gradually, fraternities learned to say as little as possible about specific hazing tragedies, while continuing to assault the general practice.
By the 1920's, this procedure was stereotyped into ritual soul-searching at NIC and Dean of Men's Conventions, and the undergraduates now believed that hazing was invented by the Founders -- secretly, of course.
Hell Week took seven days--the formal initiation took thirty minutes; reflecting their relative importance in campus life. The deaths went on and the adverse publicity along with it.
Surprising to some, less surprising to others, fraternities for women went through a similar experience during this same period of years, 1880 to 1940, albeit in a milder and more ladylike form. Mock initiations and "riding the goat" were the common outlets for sorority hazing. Apparently there were no deaths, but the evil effect upon idealism and dignity were the same.
It will probably surprise nearly everyone to learn that the relative importance of fraternities in the college hazing picture was quite minor until the very end of this period. Military hazing drew most of the press headlines, magazine articles and congressional investigations prior to the 1930's. Athletic and freshman class hazing was a close second.
There were sectional differences, also, with most cases in the Northeast and South. Consequently, fraternities got off comparatively lightly with the public, the parents of their future rushees.
Since World War II this picture has altered subtly, but drastically for the fraternity system. Without any great change in the amount of Greek letter society hazing (in fact, it declined somewhat), circumstances combined to make it many times more harmful than had ever been true before. Here are some of these circumstances:
1. State legislation against hazing began to appear early in the 20th century, and became fairly general by 1950. For the first time, hazing itself was illegal, rather than only deaths or injuries resulting from hazing.
2. By 1950 hazing of freshmen had ceased, and even the military academies seemed quiet. Instead of being 5 percent of the hazing population, college and high school fraternities became more like 83 percent. Thus fraternities now seemed to be the only hazers.
3. Anthropologists entered the scene, with the rediscovery of VanGennep's work on rites of passage describing adolescent initiation rites of primitive savage tribes. Books like Thomas Leemon's Rite of Passage in a Student Culture pictured the details of a 1963 Hell Week as a college throwback to savagery.
Meanwhile, deaths still continue, and efforts to eliminate Hell Week have been unsuccessful -- unsuccessful in putting a final end to initiation deaths and serious physical injury or moral outrage, that is. For how is it possible to say that the problem is solved because "there are so few deaths," when the fraternity system went through its first century and more with no deaths or injuries whatsoever?
Why has it been so hard to eliminate Hell Week and hazing? First, we have lacked the imagination to come up with an equally or more interesting alternative to fill the vacuum left by hazing abolition. Second, the unwillingness of fraternities to attack the problem systematically and openly. Fraternities did not die because of secrecy and privacy: why should we expect them to put an end to hazing?
Thus we find ourselves in the 1970's, regardless of hazing statistics, in a position where suddenly the fraternity reputation for hazing is the most extensive, and the least tolerated by public opinion, since our origin. Mostly this is the result of the three factors just mentioned, factors we can do nothing to change.
Consider the present public image of fraternities (for hazing is the only fraternity activity which has easy nation-wide publicity), and what a horribly negative, unattractive thing it is. We are associated with primitive barbarity, savagery, torture. We are considered a symbol of immaturity and uselessness, an association of students who refuse to grow up and accept responsibility. We are regarded as a dangerous, violent organization by most parents, hypocritically saying we have abolished hazing while every year we kill some of their children by illegal, and hence criminal, random activity.
We are the only such organization, in the public view, for everyone else has given it up, for twenty years. What a handicap to bring to rush, or to negotiations with personnel deans, or conversations with parents!
All this for the sake of a practice borrowed from American frontier crudeness, from European medievalism and an English upperclass snob affectation (fagging). It is insane. Only our own ignorance can account for this disaster.
WOW!!!!
Linear Mode
