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
excerpt from Tuloso-Midway High School news story (Nueces County Record)
School officials at Tuloso-Midway High School are looking into a pair of alleged hazing incidents involving senior and freshman students.
Principal Ann Bartosh said the parent of a male freshman student contacted her last week about two alleged incidents that reportedly occurred on July 28 and 29 at the high school.
Here is my 1999 commentary in NCAA News:
Letter to the Editor — Magazine’s hazing treatment raises concern
The following is in response to an article in the September 13 issue of Sports Illustrated regarding hazing in athletics.
As a national advisor on Alfred University’s “Initiation Rites and Athletics: A National Survey of NCAA Sports Teams,” I believe that Richard Hoffer’s “Praising Hazing” essay in Sports Illustrated was deceptive, dishonest and potentially destructive.
It was deceptive because Hoffer labeled as hazing certain team-building activities (such as rookies carrying balls) that the Alfred survey had ruled out of the definition of hazing. He mocked and dismissed what the survey had dismissed — all for cheap laughs.
It also was deceptive because Hoffer gave as a bad example of hazing the taping of Cleveland Browns rookies to the goalpost. His column implied that pro players have the common sense to know when not to let things get out of hand.
Yet, sports fans know better. Witness the New Orleans Saints’ braining of rookies in a 1998 gantlet or the New York Mets’ loss of a player’s services in a 1999 initiation squabble.
Hoffer warns that high-school and college hazing activities ought to be forbidden, but he ignores the fact that younger, amateur athletes emulate the hazing they witness in pro sports. Plus, being immature, they take things to a dangerous extreme.
It would have been journalistically ethical for SI to run a rebuttal column mentioning the reports of high-school hazing-related sodomies/sexual attacks in Massachusetts, Texas, California, Washington, Pennsylvania and Canada as a counterpoint to Hoffer’s smirky column.
I also cry foul that Hoffer ignored the scary over-ingestion of alcohol during hazings at the University of Michigan (hockey), State University College at Potsdam (women’s lacrosse), and, yes, tiny Division III Alfred University, which (the writer failed to mention) did the survey in the first place because the school’s football team experienced initiation-related alcohol problems during the 1998 season (and suffered the 1978 death of a fraternity pledge who was hazed, in part, by varsity lacrosse players).
Finally, Hoffer’s column trivializes the deaths of Nick Haben (Western Illinois University lacrosse club) and John Davies (a University of Nevada football player who died in an alcohol-related hazing by a sub-rosa club of jocks).
The Sports Illustrated article trivializes the problems with alcohol specifically covered in the survey.
I find that destructive.
Hank Nuwer
Oh sure it’s innocent hazing. They wouldn’t make a player drop his drawers, grab a weiner with his buttocks, and eat if it it slips, would they? Would they?
John P. Lopez says so.