Hank Nuwer, Author; Hazing Deaths Database Journalist Hank Nuwer tracks hazing deaths in fraternities and schools. Nuwer is the Alaska author of Hazing: Destroying Young Lives; Broken Pledges: The Deadly Rite of Hazing, High School Hazing, Wrongs of Passage and The Hazing Reader. In April of 2024 and April 2025 , the Alaska Press Club awarded him first place in the Best Columnist division.
He has written articles or columns on hazing for the Sunday Times of India, Toronto Globe & Mail, Harper's Magazine, Orlando Sentinel, The Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times Sunday Magazine. His current book is Hazing: Destroying Young Lives from Indiana University Press. He is married to Malgorzata Wroblewska Nuwer of Fairbanks, Alaska. Nuwer is a former columnist for the Greenville (Ohio)Early Bird and former managing editor of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner in Alaska.
Nuwer was named the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists columnist of the year in 2021 for his “After Darke” column in the Early Bird. He also won third place for the column in 2022 from the Indiana chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. He and his wife Gosia, recently of Union City, Ind., have owned 20 acres in Alaska for many years. “The move is a sort-of coming home for us,” said Nuwer. As a journalist, he’s written about the Alaskan Iditarod sled-dog race and other Alaska topics. Read his musings in his blog at Real Alaska Daily--http://realalaskadaily.com
Moderator: I just came across this interesting article on hazing. Here is an excerpt. I have written to the Archives at Duke University for additional details.
“At Duke University last year, a fraternity pledge named Einer A. Palmgren, stripped and painted with shellac, was inadvertently ignited and had to be hospitalized for severe burns.”
More on the story here. I checked 1920 census records. Einer was four and living with his family in North Carolina in the 1920 Census.
–Moderator Hank Nuwer
An editorial in The Southern Illinoisan makes an impassioned plea in defense of athletics. One paragraph buried near the bottom gives me concern:
“And hazing — or bullying — was likely just as prevalent in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s. Instances have not decreased — or increased — in the past 50 years. What has changed is society’s tolerance of it. It is encouraging that incidents of hazing are now in the spotlight and are discussed openly. It is possible that it would be easier to turn a blind eye if competitive athletics moved outside of public schools. Look at the NFL.”
First of all, the first best survey on athletics supported by the NCAA wasn’t completed until the late 1990s. There is no way to “likely” say that hazing was as prevalent in the 1940s. Did it exist then? Of course, but no one knows with any certainty it was “just as prevalent” in those days.
Yes, it is true that society’s tolerance has changed. But in addition to the education efforts by authors, advocates, educators and enlightened professionals in athletics, the severity of hazing certainly has gotten the public’s attention. Certainly, very few teams in the 1940s through 1960s could have capped a lid on the staggering number of sexual hazing cases that have been reported since the mid 1990s (and in increasing number the past ten years). Nor were there any athletic hazing deaths until the mid-1970s (although one football player named Nolte McElroy was electrocuted in 1928 while being hazed by Delta Kappa Epsilon).
Finally, I just don’t get the meaning or logic behind these two sentences: “t is possible that it would be easier to turn a blind eye if competitive athletics moved outside of public schools. Look at the NFL.”
–Moderator Hank Nuwer
Excerpt: from the Philippine Star
MANILA, Philippines – Police investigators have identified four suspects in the death of a former student of Southern Luzon State University (SLSU) after hazing rites in Tagkawayan, Quezon last month.
According to an ABS-CBN news report, the victim, Ariel Enopre, 24, was able to tell his parents that he underwent hazing in Barangay Mapulot in Tagkawayan last Oct. 17.
Senior Inspector Reynaldo Reyes, chief of Tagkawayan Police, withheld the names of the four suspects pending the filing of charges against them.
The alleged hazing rites, supposedly conducted by the Tau Gamma Phi fraternity, were held on Oct. 17 but the victim kept it secret from his parents.
His parents later learned about the hazing.
Police said at least 11 people were involved in the fatal initiation rites.
Enopre, a former Information Technology student in SLSU, stopped studying this semester.
This was written by Conlan Campbell, 18, for the St. Olaf student newspaper.
Excerpt:
High school freshmen, as a general group, are impressionable. Because of their malleable minds, it is not a huge leap to assume these students, who are fourteen or fifteen years old, are taking in their environment as they formulate a paradigm through which to view the broader world. This process is something lauded in terms of high school sports: kids are offered a small, tight-knit community to build confidence and understand how to operate in a group. The issue in Sayreville is that the football team is not a safe place for freshmen to formulate worldviews. It is where the older and more powerful are free to bully and subjugate their younger teammates, while the community looks on with ambivalence, or even worse, contempt.
Reports of hazing among the freshmen on the Sayreville football team include being held down while upperclassmen violently attack them, and being subjected to a very disconcerting, possibly sexually-charged “fondling,” where individuals were purportedly penetrated through pants with a finger. A system that allows this kind of treatment is broken. Compounding the issue, the students being bullied are seemingly encouraged to justify the beatings and the “ass-taking,” as the students call it. Investigators had difficulty ascertaining an accurate conception of events because accounts were skewed among different students. Many who experienced the hazing were willing to say that it was just a joke, or that the upperclassmen were simply messing around, while few were willing to state that they had a problem with it. These results aren’t hard to believe with the controversy regarding the case in the surrounding community and with the cancellation of football for the year, for which the freshmen are being blamed.
This case illuminates the public response to this clearly damaged football-playing subgroup. The public only sees the team when it wins games. The high schoolers enjoy seeing their points rack up and putting a little statue into a case, or perhaps hanging a banner on the wall of the gym. When they meet students from other schools, they can compare their home teams, and having the better record is a little bit exciting. Maybe these students, their families and others in the community start to become prideful and like to go cheer on the team with a two-dollar hot chocolate in hand. Then, once football is part of the local identity, the 15-year-olds joining the team aren’t just impressionable teenagers; they are a deciding factor as to whether all the football players get to proudly parade around the homecoming assembly instead of just sitting in the bleachers.
– See more at: http://manitoumessenger.com/opinions/2014/11/07/football-hazing-reveals-vicious-learning-cycle/#sthash.CaiBw8oi.dpuf
Moderator: By obfuscation and refusing to let the local community know the facts, the public has concluded the Hughson High School football hazing scandal is so much worse than it was.
So what did happen? Beats me. The school’s administration still is talking with both hands covering the mouth. The Stanislaus County police have been equally uncooperative with Fox 40 media.
We do know Coach George Harp was missing from the sideline for last night’s game against Ripon High School.