Hank Nuwer, Author; Hazing Deaths Database 
President Henry Pritchett, MIT
President Pritchett, fairly new to his office at MIT, attended a cane rush, which he later said was even more dangerous than football, the sport that had then claimed many victims due to a play called the flying wedge. Hugh C. Clarke died and another participant was seriously injured in the deadly class fight. –Hank Nuwer, Hazing: Destroying Young Lives author
I kind of knew it was a fun time turning into an anger driven time.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
COLLINS: So how could girls or anyone, for that matter, do this to their own classmates?
Hank Nuwer is the author of three books on hazing. The most recent is titled “Broken Pledges.”
He’s joining us now this morning from Indianapolis.
Thanks for being here, sir.
HANK NUWER, AUTHOR, “BROKEN PLEDGES”: Thank you.
COLLINS: I want to ask you, let’s put in perspective for a moment this incident. We know this has been going on for a long time at this school, but how widespread is this sort of violence?
NUWER: Well, we know that publicly by tracking incidents we can get anywhere from 35 to 50 incidents a year. But that’s sort of a tip of the bucket as to what’s really occurring in numbers. Studies by Alfred University show that among athletes, for example, about 44 to 46 percent will tell you that their hazing started in high school or junior high school.
COLLINS: And we’re kind of used to hearing about it at the college level and between men. But the high school level and between girls, why is that happening? Is this a trend?
NUWER: Well, I think more than a trend. I think we’re seeing societal activities that are shifting and changing. In the ’80s, you rarely heard about cases of hazing incidents or hazing deaths. There were two hazing deaths in sorority reported up to the year 2002. And there were two reported in 2002, and a lot more incidents involving paddling or actually branding by young women and so forth.
I think as women gain parity in the workplace, gain status with men, we have to watch out and be aware as educators that some adverse rituals may be creeping into our initiations.
COLLINS: Hank, we’ve been talking this morning a little bit about the fact that the incident did happen off school property, so we’ll hear, I’m sure, in days to come statements from the school officials about their responsibility.
What about the responsibility of the parents?
NUWER: Well, it’s interesting, in terms of the school first, in that a lot of attorneys tell schools to distance themselves if they have too much of a duty to care, if they get too involved, that they may be responsible.
In terms of the parents, it’s a whole lot of responsibility to work through the PTA, to be aware, to have educational programs that try to head this off. And if parents see their son or daughter heading off in a football shirt with paraphernalia, a pellet gun, for goodness sakes, then they need to step in and halt it. It should have never gotten to this stage.
COLLINS: All right, Hank Nuwer, we certainly appreciate your insight.
NUWER: Thank you.
COLLINS: Author of “Broken Pledges,” coming to us from Indianapolis this morning.
Thanks so much. TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com
Language: ENGLISH
Highlight: A court delays the California recall because of punch card ballots. Hurricane Isabel could hit land this week.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
ANDERSON COOPER, HOST: A court blocks California’s recall election. What happens now?
Hurricane Isabel, how bad will it be?
Osama bin Laden: why can’t the U.S. find him?
A toddler is dead, her brother clings to life. The prime suspect? Their father.
An Air Force top gun survives a fiery crash.
Arnold and Maria get the Oprah treatment.
The new material mommy?
ANNOUNCER: Live from the CNN broadcast center in New York, this is ANDERSON COOPER 360.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
COOPER: Hey, there. Good evening. Thanks for joining us. We’ve got a lot ahead tonight.
COOPER: They called it water torture. It’s not just this one underground fraternity that hazes, not by a long shot. Remember the girls on that Chicago high school football team, the powder puff team they called it. Well, it’s average, ordinary young men and women who do it. The question is, why?
Hank Nuwer is the author of “The Hazing Reader.” He joins us tonight from Indianapolis. Hank, thanks for being with us. I’m sorry it’s under these circumstances.
You know you heard from the pledge in that piece who said, “I wanted to walk away, but I didn’t.” Why don’t pledges just say, this is ridiculous.
HANK NUWER, “THE HAZING READER”: Well, we live at a time where status and wanting to belong would be very, very important to a young person, and that person is seen others of status get into the group and supposedly they have endured a lot of rituals. So this person goes through an ordeal and expects to get respect and status by going through it.
COOPER: Remember that powder puff football game, or whatever it was they called it. I think we have some video of that. You know, there were plenty of people just standing by on the sidelines watching this.
You know we talked about the pledges. Let’s talk about the people, the fraternity members and the people who were around them who were watching it. Why don’t they at some point step in and say, enough is enough?
NUWER: Well, in my new book, “The Hazing Reader,” we talk about group think, and people that are the bystanders tend to watch it because they either, number one, think that the group members are good people and they wouldn’t injure anyone or, number two, they’ve bought into the system and allowed these people to haze for them as sort of representatives of them. In terms of fighting this then, that 80 percent or so of bystanders would be the people we have to reach in early education programs so they do step in.
COOPER: But how do you reach these people? Because I mean this school in particular, where this young man died from this so-called water torture, you know they had a hazing hotline, they had education programs. This fraternity was apparently underground, but it wasn’t as if they had stuck their head in the sand. They were out there talking about hazing. That doesn’t seem to be enough.
NUWER: No, it isn’t enough. And I think that I would like to see people, in my opinion, reach into bullying programs as early as the first and second grades. What we are seeing…
COOPER: You’re saying it starts with bullying?
NUWER: Yes, I believe it does. I think that students are very, very aggressive, do not learn how to play at the early age. And so they turn to crime and violent behavior and sort of rituals like hazing in order to belong. And we are seeing that it kind of escalates over time.
COOPER: Yes, it certainly does escalate. And I think of this other video from Las Vegas, this gang or so-called gang, the 311 click (ph), who were basically videotaping themselves beating up somebody. I mean, it does veer into illegal behavior.
NUWER: It is totally into illegal behavior, and I think part of the frightening thing is that certainly police who work with gangs and so forth are not surprised by this. The point is, unless it gets on a video, we tend to overlook it. We have this sort of, we love a gladiator mentality in this country.
We have it in the media. We encourage it by the kind of shows that we have on television. And it’s certainly — these younger people are coming into it. The fights in Las Vegas came after something called the bum fights, in which bums were paid to engage in fights.
COOPER: Yes, I certainly remember those. Hank Nuwer, appreciate you joining us. I’m sorry we only talk about this stuff when there’s death. But I do appreciate you shedding some light on it. Thanks very much.
NUWER: Thank you very much.
TRACY SMITH: Champion`s senseless death sparked a national outcry over hazing–the same outcry as earlier last year after the hazing death of George Desdunes at Cornell; and in 2009 after the hazing death of Arman Partamian at Geneseo State. The same outcry that has come with chilling regularity every year, for decades.
Since you`ve been covering this not a year has gone by where someone hasn`t died of hazing?
HANK NUWER: Since I`ve started covering it in `75, yes, there`s been a death every particular year. Would I be very surprised if 2012 goes by without a death? Yes.
TRACY SMITH: Hank Nuwer is a professor at Franklin College in Indiana, who`s spent the past forty years documenting every hazing death in the United States.
What is hazing?
HANK NUWER: Well, hazing is anything that is required of a newcomer by veterans in a group that you have to go through that may be silly, demeaning, or dangerous.
TRACY SMITH: And the record of dangerous even deadly hazing stretches back more than a century.
HANK NUWER: The first verifiable incident clearly is 1873 at Cornell University. It`s the death of Mortimer Leggett, who was the son of a civil war general and hero.
TRACY SMITH: For the next hundred years more deaths followed sporadically. But about thirty years ago, Nuwer noticed a disturbing trend.
HANK NUWER: Alcohol is the big discussion group–
TRACY SMITH: The one constant in eighty-two percent of hazing deaths, Nuwer found, was massive quantities of alcohol–part of a growing culture of binge drinking at colleges across America.
HANK NUWER: We`re talking levels which would be approaching basically half of– of your blood system being filled with liquor. In the death of Chuck Stenzel, when I interviewed the pathologist and went to the room where he did his autopsy, he basically said his brain was swimming in alcohol.
TRACY SMITH: Chuck Stenzel died at Alfred University in New York in 1978, and the community was so outraged they passed the state`s first anti-hazing law–one of forty-four states to do so.
TRACY SMITH: The Starkeys realize they may never be able to stop kids from drinking, or hazing. But they hope they can stop them from dying. They`re lobbying for amnesty laws for kids who call 911 about a drunk friend, and they`re teaching students how to recognize the signs of alcohol poisoning through their program “Aware, Awake, Alive.”
SCOTT STARKEY: We need to stop hazing. But maybe a– a baby step there is to get them to stop treating alcohol like a toy and using it as a tool for hazing.
TRACY SMITH: For the Starkeys, and for hazing expert Hank Nuwer, it`s all about trying to save another family from the unthinkable.
HANK NUWER: That`s the call that comes in the middle of the night, the visit to the emergency room when you know your son or daughter doesn`t have a lot of time, I would like to imprint that on the memory banks of every parent in the country so that they would demand more of our colleges and of our students themselves. We can do better.
National Public Radio Tell Me More 11:00 AM EST
November 29, 2011 Tuesday
MICHEL MARTIN: And now, we turn to an issue also involving violence, but much closer to home. In Florida, a drum major with Florida A&M University’s marching band died recently, and police suspect hazing played a role. Funeral services for 26-year-old Robert Champion are scheduled for tomorrow. In the wake of Champion’s death, Florida A&M has called for an investigation, and canceled all upcoming band performances. The university has also fired its longtime band director, Julian White.
Now, many people are probably familiar with hazing allegations directed at fraternities and sports teams, but many were surprised to hear that hazing may play a part in other groups, like a marching band. So we wanted to know more about this, so we reached out to someone who has studied the topic of hazing extensively. Hank Nuwer is the author of several books on hazing. He’s also an associate professor of journalism at Franklin College in Franklin, Indiana. Thank you so much for joining us.
HANK NUWER: Thank you.
MICHEL MARTIN: How did you get interested in the whole subject of hazing?
HANK NUWER: Well, I was a graduate student at the University of Nevada, Reno, when a death occurred in 1975, in October. The death was of John Davies. And a lot of us simply walked by while that hazing was done. And then a second one, at a bar; and then in a third one – was done in the middle of nowhere; and John Davies died, and another pledge had brain damage. So I contacted Human Behavior magazine to write about the group dynamics – the group-think involved – and got the assignment.
MICHEL MARTIN: Now, is this something that is a particular feature of life on some campuses, more than others? For example, I think many incidents involving HBCUs – historically black colleges and universities – have gotten public attention. But does your reporting indicate that this is something that tends to happen on HBCUs more than others; or are all institutions – or are some institutions more likely to have this than others? Is there a through line?
HANK NUWER: Definitely, some are more likely to have it than others. If you have a culture of hazing, it usually goes back many, many years. And if you take an institution such as Florida A&M, it’s not only been a series of horrific hazing incidents that have cost a lot in terms of civil suits, but they’ve also had fraternities involved in hazing beatings. And in fact, Florida, which has about the toughest hazing law in the nation – with making it a third-degree mis – third-degree felony – has had people sentenced for two years in a Kappa Alpha Psi beating.
MICHEL MARTIN: What are we talking about? When we talk about hazing, what are we talking about? And why does it persist? You know, what’s it for? What’s it about?
HANK NUWER: Well, hazing has a lot of different nuances, as we can see from this case here. It’s usually thought of as anything silly, demeaning or dangerous, that’s used to welcome people into a group. But over time, we have seen it morph where accepted members of a band – or accepted members of a group who are seen as messing up, not measuring up, disrespecting the house, have been punished. And we’ve seen, at the high school level, serious hazing incidents including sexual assault, that have been done to cause someone to quit the team, not to bond with the team.
MICHEL MARTIN: Are there institutions – you just told us that there are just – institutions where this just seems to go on. But are there any commonalities within these institutions where this goes on? For example, I did mention the role of race, and you seem to be telling me that it isn’t race-specific; it’s not HBCUs versus others. But there seem to be certain institutions where this goes on. Why is that? Is there a – sort of a strong tradition, where…
HANK NUWER: Sure…
MICHEL MARTIN: …people feel that if you don’t measure up, you have to go – that kind of thing? What is it that seems to make certain institutions more vulnerable to this than others?
HANK NUWER: Unfortunately, hazing is an equal opportunity disgrace. I mean, we’ve seen problems with the Latino groups, Asian groups, African-American, historically white fraternities that have become integrated. And we’ve had deaths in all of them. What seems to be in common is, a group has a certain amount of status. And the members within that group that have status, are looking for power in some way, shape or form – be it an athletic team, band, or fraternity or sorority.
The power in a group-think type of mentality, where everybody is willing to do anything to keep the esprit de corps, leads to individuals acting as they would not act ordinarily because they’re in the group. That leads to people beating others, making them do forced drinking, taking them on scavenger hunts while they’re intoxicated, etc., that they normally wouldn’t do.
What it also results in, is dishonesty afterwards. That’s why it’s hard for police to investigate it. The groups close ranks, they circle the wagons, they come up with stories. And they have a sort of dysfunctional attitude that makes them step back from what they did, and not see it until years later.
MICHEL MARTIN: If you’re just joining us, I’m Michel Martin, and this is TELL ME MORE from NPR News. We’re talking about the tradition of hazing in institutions, in the wake of the death of a band member at Florida A&M University. Authorities allege that hazing is implicated in that death.
We’re speaking with Hank Nuwer. He’s an expert on this. He’s written several books about hazing, and he joins us from member station WFYI in Indianapolis. So professor, is there any record of institutions successfully stopping this practice? What would…
HANK NUWER: Yes.
MICHEL MARTIN: What would stop it? What works?
HANK NUWER: Well, right now – and I’m an outgoing board member – there’s a group called HazingPrevention.org, that has really tried to unify schools nationally in terms of athletic hazing, or fraternity and sorority hazing. And one of the group members was present as an adviser, after a death at Plattsburgh State. And she very actively went after the sub rosa chapter where the death occurred – by water torture, incidentally. There were criminal charges placed. Unfortunately, they were not able to get an alum who had kept this group together. He managed to get off.
But they have been putting on – number one, hazing education programs. Number two, when they had a group, Sigma Tau Gamma, caught hazing for a minor way – making members swallow a nickel – they took immediate action. And that’s what you need – education, immediate action, and repeating it semester after semester because the group changes all the time.
MICHEL MARTIN: And finally, professor, you know, if you’re a parent, or a caregiver, about to send your child off to a school, and you get a hint of this kind of thing going on with some group that your child may want to join – I mean, some of these bands, some of these groups are legendary; they have traditions going back generations, and people very much want to be part of it. How would you prepare your child not to become a victim of something like this?
HANK NUWER: There is – I keep a hazing page. If you go to HankNuwer.com, you’ll see a list of incidents. If there is a culture of past lawsuits and stuff, be careful. Do your research, and definitely check in on your son or daughter every day.
MICHEL MARTIN: Hank Nuwer is the author of several books on hazing. He’s an associate professor of journalism at Franklin College, and he was kind enough to join us – as we said – from member station WFYI in Indianapolis. Professor Nuwer, thank you so much for speaking with us.
HANK NUWER: Thank you, Michel.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)