Excerpt: Broken Pledges: The Deadly rite of hazing Hank Nuwer (Longstreet Press, $18.95) In 1978, Chuck Stenzel, a healthy student pledging a fraternity at upstate New York’s Alfred University, obediently drank a pint of bourbon and three-quarters of a pint of Scotch while locked in the trunk of a car. Later, after following orders to chug even more alcohol and to fill a garbage can with vomit, Stenzel died. Hank Nuwer uses the Stenzel case-one that ultimately resulted in a tough New York State law on fraternity hazing-to investigate the persistence of such harassment not only at the university level, but in the world of professional societies and the military as well. The details are sufficiently horrifying to make good agitprop-just what Nuwer intends. B -Alanna Nash
Category: Hazing News
THE Ministry of Education has put an immediate stop to school outings and overnight camping trips arranged at State secondary schools to prevent hazing under the pretext of orientation for newly enrolled Grade 8 pupils.
Education Permanent Secretary Vitalis Ankama said his ministry had received numerous complaints from parents whose children had to wear refuse bags, nametags with words like “cockroach” and other derogatory descriptions written on them and had water poured on them.
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"Some of these schools arrange camping or sleeping out (trips) on the pretext of orientation where these practices are perpetrated," Ankama said in a statement yesterday.
"In addition, parents are forced to pay additional amounts of money at the expense of their children being abused by (school) prefects," Ankama said.
"All programmes of any school to allow learners to sleep out and camp out ostensibly for initiation purposes should be stopped with immediate effect," Ankama wrote.
"The Ministry regards the continuation of these unlawful practices in schools a serious matter."
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Adam Zwecker’s story at Cornell
Excerpt from Cornell Sun:
Effects of Hazing Last Long After Pledging Proccess
 Adam Zwecker ’04 stood tired and barefoot on shards of broken glass with the rest of his fraternity pledge class. For seven hours, Zwecker and his pledge mates had been pelted by eggs and forced to do push-ups by the brothers at his chosen fraternity, activities designed to initiate aspiring members into the organization. The exercise may sound extreme, but it was just another night of hazing for a pledge class in 2001.
“That was one of the nights when you go home and you wonder, ‘What the hell am I doing?’†Zwecker said. “The frat brothers tried to justify it by saying that it would build unity for us, but it was kind of just a stupid, gross experience.â€
Zwecker’s story is posted in detail at hazing.cornell.edu, a University-operated website designed to foster community awareness about the incidence of hazing on campus. Hazing incidents like those experienced by Zwecker would ultimately inspire Susan Murphy, vice president for student and services, to appoint a Task Force on Hazing in 2001. That group would eventually recommend the launch of the University’s hazing website four years later.
Along with an account of Zwecker’s experience, originally compiled by Zwecker himself as part of an independent study research project in 2003, the site also features a list of recent hazing violations and a mechanism for making anonymous reports of hazing to University officials. Tim Marchell, director of mental health initiatives at Gannett Health Services, played an integral role in the development of the website. He explained that hazing is an important issue that continues to affect the Cornell campus and that the issue needed to be addressed in the public sphere.