Punishment

[James]

This is not an easy issue. The reason why people haze is that hazing works. I said that before but didn't elaborate.

People sense the need to have tighter cohesive groups. They sense the need to make sure that NM have a strong appreciation for the chapter and are willing to commit a lot of time to it.

To do this they believe they need to create an intense, time consuming enviornment that forces strong identity within the pledge group and then have that extrapolate out to the rest of the chapter.

Now things start going wrong. In the male Greek World National Organizations have been reluctant, unwilling, or unable to develop sophisticated NM programs that use really good leadership/group technology to create positive fun ways that encourage intense bonding. And these ways do exist.

There is a great book called "Built to Last" that talks about the habits of visionary companies. And while its not a manual of how to do this stuff, it certainly covers the basic theory.

IBM was described as a company that had such a strong corporate identity that leaving it was like emigrating to another country. If you work for Proctor and Gamble you can go to any branch in the world and feel right at home, the PG way is that strong.

And these companies do not haze. But they do have memorization, songs, social events etc.

In the Greek world you often have younger members with very little experience in leadership, team building, or the other skills that make it easy to create intense positive environments. And yet they have to develop these programs.

I mean, would you hire someone with no experience or knowledge to do this for your company? Of course not. But you are often going to let this person decide the overall experience of your 10-100 person new member class. This doesn't apply by any means to every undergrad, I was kind of a wierd information mutant even as a freshman. But I would have known when I was over my head and asked for expert help.

So these people mean well and do the best they can, but where are they looking for knowledge? Movies they have watched, teams they may have been on (and they may not have been the best teams either) random ideas, some examples from other chapters, and any chapter tradition that might still be around.

This is certainly not an example of sophistication. Usually a chapter gets lucky if the person running the program is really organized and regimented, because then there is less chance that some really unauthorized/unsupervised activites somehow slip in, and I think those are the ones that lead to a lot of the nonesense.

I applaud the sorority Nationals' that have adopted some of the more leadership based programs. Some of the groups have actually gotten Expert input on it. However, unless they spend a lot of resources teaching others how to implement the program, its only so much paper.

You are unlikely to terminate a behavior by just trying to stop it, all you people that quit minor addictions should be able to relate, you need to replace it with other behaviors.

So until we start developing better programs, that have similar effects in bonding, and spend the time teaching them, hazing is going to keep on.