By Hank Nuwer
Editor’s Note (2026): This chapter originally appeared in 1918. References to laws and statistics reflect the state of knowledge at the time of publication. Since then, Congress enacted the Stop Campus Hazing Act, and additional research has expanded our understanding of prevention. In addition, Hank Nuwer’s Hazing Deaths Database Clearinghouse information is accessible at HazingInfo.org, where you can access, interact with, and download data on all recorded hazing deaths from 1838 to the present. HazingInfo, the University of Maine, University of Washington and Hank Nuwer are pleased to announce that the hazing deaths database is live on the HazingInfo website. The Clery Center and Stophazing and the University of Maine’s Elizabeth Allan have united as a formidable activist force.
Every single year, 1959-2026, the United States has seen someone or several people perish due to a pernicious and often deadly practice that dates back to the founding of the first collegiate fraternities in the nineteenth century.
In spite of growing antihazing sentiment, laws against hazing at the federal level and in forty-four states and campus crackdowns, hazing persists as a rite of passage and tradition in colleges and universities across the United States and Canada. This chapter examines the roots and manifestations of hazing in university-based fraternities and sororities in the United States. It includes a discussion of university policies and practices to curtail it by national fraternal organizations and antihazing activists.
Best hazing-prevention practices include the encouragement of bystander intervention to halt hazing as it happens, along with the mandating of alcohol-free fraternity houses, putting an end to the pledge period, delaying rush until a student’s second semester, putting responsible live-in adults in Greek houses as supervisors, offering orientation for parents on signs of hazing and substance abuse, transferring governance of the Greek system from self-governing interfraternity councils to university control, and requiring transparency of all schools by publishing all infractions on their websites in easily accessed locations. Also needed is accountability, namely prompt and even harsh action to expel or suspend a chapter as soon as hazing acts are verified, as occurred in January 2017 when Delta Tau Delta suspended its Indiana University chapter for hazing, and in February of 2017 when Penn State shut down its Beta Theta Pi chapter after pledge Timothy Piazza died accidentally on bid day.
Passage of federal legislation against hazing in 2024 was meant to give prosecutors a potent weapon, but as of 2026, the law is being ignored by many universities and by the stripped-down U.S. Department of Education. The bill garnered widespread congressional interest owing to the diligent activism of families who lost their children and who had the facts about hazing to use as an argument for passage of the law. One deduction to make from the passage is that universities need to revise their web and print publications, deleting or rewriting all hyperbolic accounts of Greek Life if such information gives students and their guardians a false portrait of fraternities and sororities with regard to risks and student safety.
On the other hand, there are a substantial number of Greek groups that provide a safe, nurturing home-away-from-home environment, stressing comradeship, philanthropy, values, scholarship, and other laudable aims of founders. Their schools and national organizations must support such chapters, but even exemplary non-hazing groups must not rest until hazers in their midst no longer are welcome at the table.
How does one know if a fraternity is responsible? Trust Aristotle, who wrote this: What are its habitual actions? In short, to know the behaviors is to know the chapter and whether or not it is responsible. We pull for the characters in a book or movie because they truly want something above all else. The chapter that wants to continue hazing will trumpet that it is hazing-free, but in reality its behavior will not end until the chapter’s charter is yanked and its members are expelled.
Defining Hazing
The number of serious researchers devoted to studying and highlighting hazing is still limited, but the subject is attracting increasing study from social scientists and other academics concerned with trying to end the unabated string of deaths that have occurred every year from 1969 to 2017 in fraternal chapters, as well as in other collegiate clubs, bands, and sports teams. An updated list of all deaths on campuses from hazing can be found at HankNuwer.com. Scholarly research on hazing as late as 1978 was confined primarily to abnormal psychology and education journals and dissertations. Today, excellent research is conducted by scholars in psychology, ethics, history, education, folklore, popular culture, sociology, literature, athletics management, student affairs, and on and on.
What exactly is hazing? Researcher Aldo Cimino defines the term as “the generation of induction costs (i.e., elements of the experiences necessary to be acknowledged as a ‘legitimate’ group member) that appear unattributable to group-relevant assessments, preparation, or chance.” He uses calisthenics being required by a fraternity as an example of hazing and cites automatic accrual theory to explain why higher-status fraternities with more and better benefits for a pledge can demand far more severe tests of hazing than a chapter with less status and fewer benefits can expect.[1]
Most higher education institutions in the United States use the definition of the practice of hazing devised by the Fraternity Executives Association and endorsed by the Fraternal Information Programming Group, the leading fraternal organization addressing risk-management issues. According to these organizations, hazing is “any action taken or situation created intentionally, whether on or off fraternity premises, to produce mental or physical discomfort, embarrassment, harassment, or ridicule.” All higher education institutions and all national and international fraternities and sororities in the United States publish strict policies forbidding hazing. Umbrella groups such as the North-American Interfraternity Conference, National Panhellenic Conference and National Pan-Hellenic Council vociferously condemn hazing.
Hazing also meets a definition of bullying if fraternal members put newcomers through tortures intended to make the pledges, neophytes, or associate members quit a chapter, as opposed to the usual hazing methods of putting newcomers through stressful and illicit conditions in order to welcome them eventually into the group. When hazing gets carried away to include elements of torture, the gap between welcoming a newcomer and bullying him or her appears wide indeed.[2]
The term hazing has been used by journalists, educators, legislators, and researchers to fit conduct such as performing silly tasks or errands on up to paddling a pledge or requiring the guzzling of alcohol alone or with other neophytes. Hazing becomes difficult enough to define in a generally accepted legal sense, and it becomes near impossible when lawmakers attempt to define the term, especially if they are looking at a single highly publicized case, such as the Piazza tragedy, instead of a wide range of hazing cases. Additional public debate needs to address when the line gets crossed between a pledge participating willingly and being coerced, often to protect other members of a pledge class that get punished when one pledge displays defiance.
Not surprisingly, undergraduates have a simple classification all their own. They refer to “big H” hazing and “little h” hazing. As a consequence, many fraternity and sorority members view bottle exchanges, drop-offs of pledges in the country, lineups, and other events as “little h” offenses. However, even these “little h” activities have at one time or another have resulted in serious injury or death as participants cross lines and reject boundaries and civility.
Hazing: Cross-Culturally Widespread and Persistent
Early research work by Lionel Tiger of Rutgers University promoted the term “male bonding” and made a case for the evolutionary aspects of hazing from his neo-Darwinian perspective. In 1969, in his book Men in Groups (revised in 2004 by Tiger as “Males Courting Males” in The Hazing Reader), he focused on hazing in male fraternities as a means of addressing and explaining some hazing activities he witnessed firsthand at McGill University, a Canadian institution of higher learning. Tiger states that men attracted to high-status groups, actual or perceived, are attracted in part because they define their own self-image from attractive, higher status males. In groups such as fraternities that haze (and not all do haze), Tiger states in that the males staunchly try to defend the status quo by incorporating new members willing to show they are a suitable “fit” by performing and successfully participating in whatever hazing practices the group deems appropriate. These practices at the chapter level can be crude, even demeaning, and run counter to what the national or international umbrella fraternal groups may approve. Thus, all the over-the-top practices in a chapter get hidden away in hazing episodes done clandestinely, behind closed doors, and out of sight of advisors and national executive officers.
Tiger stresses that the ability to consume copious amounts of alcohol, in the presence of other fraternal values, is a common bonding practice carried out by some fraternities and other high-status male groups such as athletes. In “Males Courting Males,” Tiger also observes that many fraternal chapters that haze require members to participate in activities that appear homoerotic in nature, requiring pledges alone or in the pledge group to be fully or partially nude during one or more hazing sessions and occasionally assuming submissive poses in front of dominant senior members. Once initiated, the pledge is given the opportunity to buy a costly ring with the fraternity’s Greek letters on the stone, and the ring is worn on the finger traditionally reserved for a wedding ring. There also are pins with the fraternal insignia reserved for females that members find attractive.
Tiger’s observations on the need for new fraternal members to achieve a “clubby” bond with senior members have echoes in the well-established “groupthink” theory of researcher Irving Janis.[4] In 1999 I adapted Janis’s term to “Greekthink.”[5] The basis for groupthink and Greekthink is that the clubby nature of groups noted by Tiger reflects the overarching quest for camaraderie and a desire for harmonious relationships seen in high-status groups such as fraternities, even rising to a US president’s inner circle of advisers and cabinet members, athletes, and so on. Which may not be so surprising given that Inside Greek U author Alan DeSantis counts seventeen US presidents since 1877 that claimed fraternity affiliations as collegians.[6]
Groupthink neatly sums up fraternal organizations and their compulsive need and appreciation for camaraderie and the approval of current members, and even much older alums, whose presence at several hazing incidents in which a pledge died I noted in Broken Pledges. Groupthink captures the behavior of members performing acts of hazing in a group that, prior to joining, they as individuals likely would have dismissed as deplorable. Groupthink also explains why fraternal members can display a delusional belief in their own invincibility while encouraging or ordering hazing activities in order to foster group unanimity. The groupthink theory espoused by Janis also explains the deception, denial, and dishonesty that hazing chapters often demonstrate after a risky practice leads to serious injury or death and an associated investigation. Janis’s extensive study in group dynamics further points out that the group’s excessive need for solidarity colors the judgment of its members, leading them to approve and carry out activities such as hazing and alcohol overconsumption that, if exposed, can lead to that hazing chapter losing its charter. The cost of losing that charter includes the consequence that the university and its national organization order individual members to disband for anywhere from a year to forever and lose the privileges and status of membership during that ban. Yet, in spite of so much to lose, hazing continues, and also continues to attract media coverage and legislative attention.
Because actual acts of hazing are so widely different, ranging from beatings to drinking extravaganzas to nude groping and lining up to take verbal abuse, it is difficult to point to a single behavioral cause of hazing. Many hazing researchers refer to “The Effect of Severity of Initiation on Liking for a Group” by Elliott Aronson and Judson Mills as of crucial value. The two researchers established through experimentation that hazing leads to tighter group solidarity because severe initiation practices cause initiates to appreciate and like the group more than do initiates who are simply invited to join a group without hazing-like demands and sacrifices.[7]
Another observer of hazing behavior is James C. Arnold, who applied the work on cults by Margaret Thaler Singer, author with Janja Lalich of Cults in Our Midst, to fraternities.[8] Arnold asserts in his long essay “Hazing and Alcohol in a College Fraternity” published in Nuwer’s The Hazing Reader that many fraternities fall under the category of “addictive organizations.” Such groups quite convincingly are compared to individuals obsessed with alcohol, for example, and are similar to a dysfunctional family unit. In short, the chapters that haze use cult-like systematic manipulation and coercion to effect psychological and social influence. In particular, cults and hazing fraternities alike purposely engender enforced dependency by instituting ways and means to make potential members and new members spend the majority of waking and sleeping hours in the company of current members and their fellow newcomers. Such organizations promise the new initiates enduring abuse that if they only persist all will be well in the end, and they will experience many incentives once awarded membership when the time of trial expires.
In addition to his essay in The Hazing Reader, Arnold undertook close participant observation as a doctoral student over a long period of time under the supervision of George Kuh, well-known Indiana University Professor of Higher Education and Director of the National Institute for Learning Outcomes Assessment (NILOA). Arnold on many occasions observed his study chapter perform acts of hazing and alcohol abuse while he performed research for his dissertation on higher education at Indiana University.[10] He was allowed by the local fraternity chapter, its national organization, and Indiana University to have nearly complete access to such fraternity customs as rush, in which attractive newcomers get invited to the house for inspection under party conditions and then are given a “bid” if enough members agree they possess the “right stuff” for membership.
Sometimes, the bid results in a good fit, and sometimes it results in conflict when an independent thinker among the new class of pledges raises concerns about the illicit or even illegal behaviors that the newcomers must brush away. The desired outcome of hazing is to achieve 100 percent pledge-class unity—that is, the class becomes fully and wholly subservient to the wishes of the veteran members. Ironically, to get the “trust” of the pledges, the senior members may lie, deceive, and deny all responsibility, noted Arnold. What occurs during the stress and chaos of a pledgeship marked by hazing is what ethnographer John van Maanen refers to as “cultural learning” for a group.[11]
In its barest form, the pledgeship involves full indoctrination of the new members and total obeisance on the part of pledges as a socialization practice. Members justify their poor treatment of pledges and force them to endure oft-squalid living conditions for weeks under the justification that everything asked of the pledges serves some important bonding purpose, observed Arnold. The chapter he lived with even used such terms as “responsible hazing” and “responsible drinking” that were oxymoronic since from rush until initiation the chapter’s behavior was flagrantly irresponsible and reckless. In the end the outward result of an entire chapter as a model of control is a hazing chapter that Arnold stresses must live with “denial, dishonesty, self-centeredness, [and] confusion.” All this is done by a group that projects what Arnold says is an “illusion of control.”
All hazing chapters strive to admit members who respect the status quo and work to maintain the often illicit and even criminal behaviors that mark homogenous Greek chapters. Nothing incurs the collective wrath of a hazing group’s members more than a pledge that refuses to cower and reports hazing to the school or police or who quits pledging and rejects future membership in that hazing group. Arnold establishes that the group treats the unhappy quitter as a pariah with disdain, anger, and even threats. Conversely, male fraternity pledges—away from the security of family and home—who buy into the addictive chapter mentality then get rewarded by the senior members with a supply of alcohol, parties, and access to desirable women who tolerate or even support the practices of the addictive chapter. Arnold says addictive groups and members have a dualistic approach to perceiving the world. Everything is all right or all wrong, and pledges are told it is “our way or the highway.” Whatever good philanthropic activities the chapter supports are, in part, an attempt to cover up the confused, addictive nature of the chapter, Arnold concludes, citing the theories on the pervasive and persistent nature of addiction noted by The Addictive Organization authors Anne Wilson Schaef and Diane Fassel—that the national organizations and Greek Life staffs at colleges can make a difference if “they can turn away from a model of control and continued participation in an unhealthy system and through their actions demonstrate a healthier way of being.”[12]
Symbolic Interactionism Theory
Stephen Sweet uses a frame of symbolic interactionism to explain how some undergraduates attracted to hard-hazing groups will do whatever it takes to belong. Herbert Blumer’s symbolic interactionist construct, cited with regard to fraternal groups by Sweet, declares that human beings react to events because the events have meaning for them based on the social interaction they have with one another, and then they interpret those events with some selectivity—perhaps even outright justification and rationalization for activities banned by society. Blumer’s theory in particular fits when applied to fraternal group members whose concept of self is, at the time of pledging, being crucially shaped. Sweet notes that the fraternal rings, T-shirts, and paddles represent part of the identity pledges are accepting as they enter a crucial stage of their lives. In turn, the social relationships with those who already wear the colors and paraphernalia of the group they aspire to join can be a powerful lure to those young people who see enduring hazing as a necessary price to pay to get into an organization that has value. Conversely, says Sweet, those who quit pledging rather than endure not only suffer guilt because their pledge brothers will be asked to carry an additional burden, but they also lose a tie and part of their identity by forgoing all connection to the chapter they already may have sacrificed much for during early hazing.[13] The research by Thomas A. Leemon, who lived with a fraternity chapter for one entire pledging period to observe it, demonstrates that fraternity chapters very deliberately in the hazing process set out to manipulate and to alter each pledge’s concept of self.[14]
The work of researcher Ricky L. Jones also takes a close look at hazing in his book Black Haze: Violence, Sacrifice, and Manhood in Black Greek-Letter Fraternities. Jones postulates that veteran fraternity members in hazing chapters love their pledges even if they put them through beatings with canes, fists, and paddles. While not every African-American Greek chapter hazes, the heaviest hazing chapters, according to Jones, demand the ability for pledges to withstand such sacrifices to demonstrate their readiness and willingness to maintain the group. Significantly, physical hazing at the chapter level is fundamentally the exact opposite of the relatively tame requirements for initiation that the national organizations put out in pledging manuals. Jones persuasively argues thatdemonstrate a requirement to endure physical challenges and a demonstration of sacrifice on the part of initiates. While the physical hazing may be a part of the black membership process in groups that violate their national organization’s mandate to be hazing-free, it is also very much present in the rites of even some integrated chapters or all-Caucasian chapters that have seen new members hospitalized with physical injuries.
Jones, himself a member of a black fraternity, has become a nationally known antihazing activist, particularly outspoken in his objections to hazing of a severe physical nature.[15] Psychologist Susan Lipkins, in her book Preventing Hazing: How Parents, Teachers, and Coaches Can Stop the Violence, Harassment, and Humiliation, maintains that even short-term hazing can lead to long-term, even lifelong, psychological and physical consequences for hazing victims. Short of death, psychological trauma due to hazing may be even more pernicious a problem than physical injuries. The latter nearly always heal, while traumatized victims report an inability to get on with their lives in normal fashion due to the afflictions of hazing, according to Lipkins.[16]
Hazing in U.S. Universities
Hazing in fraternities and sororities in the United States involves expectations of senior members that potential new members—often called pledges or associate members—will perform stunts that demean, degrade, or endanger them. Those that endure the group’s humiliation prove their willingness to conform to a perceived status quo. The members that insist newcomers endure such barbaric initiations claim they are merely protecting established tradition and ensuring group solidarity. They maintain that hazing weeds out potential members that lack the wherewithal to do anything the fraternal chapter asks of those who seek membership. It also establishes a senior pecking order in which new members learn the rules of precedence and a need to respect both senior members and alumni.
Thus hazing is common, albeit forbidden, among fraternities and sororities whose reason for being at educational institutions is to instill a lifelong commitment to leadership, community service, and the worth of lasting friendships and mentoring. This general “mission” coincides with functionalist theories of rites of passage extending back to Arnold van Gennep, the first prominent researcher to note similarities in initiation rituals from society to society.[17]
Hazing in university and college fraternities and sororities is an illicit rite of passage (against the rules of the institution) that provides opportunities for veteran members to include or exclude new members on the basis of a variety of trials that involve varying degrees of physical and psychological stress. In all too many cases, the theory of social exchange put forth by psychologists Harold H. Kelley and John W. Thibaut describes the recurring reality. According to this theory, newcomers submit to whatever torture or trials are asked of them, comforted by the assurance that all abuse will cease after the organization declares them full members. During the next cycle, the new veterans get to turn the tables and haze the next set of newcomers.[18]
All new pledge classes experience much of the same brutal hazing their predecessors endured. Hazing can increase in intensity if members are inebriated or inclined toward sadism. After initiation, the hazed become the hazers and return the ordeals they experienced in equal or greater intensity and measure to the next pledge class. The rule of reciprocity in social psychology dictates that newly initiated members will keep watch over their pledge-class members to make sure they all replicate the ordeals on the new pledge class that they once had experienced. Many a fraternity and sorority member has felt the displeasure of peers for being too soft on neophytes. A rare but occasionally lethal form of hazing occurs when veteran members for shortcomings of one kind or another punish an initiated member.
Deaths of pledges in Greek organizations have occurred under bizarre circumstances as the database of hazing deaths attests. Some have consumed lethal amounts of alcohol, being required by members to fill garbage pails with the collective vomit of new members. Some have perished after being dropped off far from campus (with victims dying in falls, in auto accidents, and by drowning). Some have endured hours of strenuous exercise in steam rooms with fatal results. Some have died after being on the receiving end of beatings with paddle, fists, or cane. Pledges and new members Tim Piazza, Gabe Higgins, Chad Meredith, Harrison Kowiak, and Gordie Bailey all died pledging fraternal chapters—in all cases veteran members delayed calling 911, and in some cases actually castigated other members who suggested calling emergency services.
History of University Hazing in the United States and Abroad
Rampant hazing in medieval European universities, such as the fifteenth-century practice of penalism, developed over the following two hundred years into sometimes-savage hazing practices quite similar to the aptly named hell nights of today’s hazing fraternities and sororities. In France and Germany, the hazed pledges donned a foolish cap similar to the beanies worn by pledges until nearly all national groups began outlawing them as symbols of hazing around 1979. At Cambridge and Oxford in England, physical beatings and enforced servitude among even the aristocracy was carried out in a custom known as “fagging,” where new boys on campus became the manservants of older students.
Hazing deaths weren’t always historically attributed mainly to fraternities, however. Rather, they were a greater problem in so-called “class hazing” that pitted first-year students against upperclassmen. (While female class hazing existed, not once did a death occur to either a first-year or second-year female, but a female cook did perish in 1894 when an undergraduate piped chlorine gas into a class party to disrupt it). Eighteen of the twenty-five hazing deaths of males that occurred on US college campuses from 1838 through 1927 were a result of freshman-sophomore class hazing excesses during battle royals, pranks, and organized fights to capture class flags, but not because of fraternity hazing. Fraternity hazing has claimed the lives of seven young men 1838–1927, according to the appendix of deaths in Broken Pledges.[19]
During the late 1920s, thanks to more awareness on campus and an outpouring of condemnation of hazing by students themselves, hazing of first-year students included fewer battles for class flags and class pennants that had seen so much violence earlier in the century. From 1928 to March 2014, only two first-year class-hazing deaths occurred (a Cheyney State College beating and a University of Richmond accidental drowning), and the rest were committed by hazers in fraternities, sororities, athletic teams, and one band (Florida A&M University).
Fraternities and sororities often trace their origins back to literary and honor societies that flourished back in 1776. The first fraternity per se was the Kappa Alpha Society founded in 1825 at Union College in New York State. The first fraternities and sororities emulated early literary societies in their educational values, and their founders were students themselves who wanted to engage in intellectual debate as well as to socialize. In addition to establishing the solemn initiation rituals that often borrowed symbolism from Masonic initiations, the early fraternity chapters also hazed new members on occasion in ordeals known as “stunts.” Some stunts included riding a real or mechanical goat or tossing a newcomer in the air on a blanket. Injuries occasionally occurred as a result of youths getting carried away. Broken Pledges documents injuries to two University of Georgia Zeta Chi pledges that jumped out a window when an older member whipped out a pistol as a prank.[20]
The first US fraternity death was Kappa Sigma Society member Mortimer Leggett in 1873 at Cornell University. At least one newcomer has perished while enduring hazing every year from 1969 to 2017, which I’ve documented in my book Wrongs of Passage and an internet list of verifiable hazing deaths. There occurred fifteen collegiate hazing deaths from January 1, 2014, to the autumn of 2017.
Some years more than a single death have occurred in Greek organizations. Because some law enforcement officers lack a clear understanding of what hazing actually is, it is plausible that the number of hazing deaths on my list is lower than might actually be the higher total. Local school officials, police, and/or prosecutors investigating the incident wrongfully have dismissed more than one hazing death as a mere accident. Similarly, neither universities nor Greek national organizations are eager to claim a death as related to hazing lest that admission result in damages during civil litigation.
Hazing deaths are not limited to on campus or to fraternities and sororities, but those two groups have experienced the majority of incidents. In the United States, the vast majority of hazing deaths from 1838 to 2017 have involved newcomers in fraternities and, to a lesser extent, in sororities. Far more males than females have perished in Greek organizations because of hazing.
According to a University of Maine national survey conducted by Elizabeth Allan and her colleagues, about half of all students acknowledge that they belong to groups that haze. Thus, while hazing in sororities is often reported, it only occasionally rises to the level of an actual crime and is more likely to be addressed by the hazers’ institution as an infraction rather than by a criminal prosecution. It is important to note that deaths in local, unrecognized, or suspended fraternities have resulted in deaths at several institutions, including the University of Nevada, SUNY Plattsburgh, Chico State University, and SUNY Geneseo. Deaths by hazing also have been reported in countries such as the Philippines, India (where it is termed “ragging”), Japan, Canada, and Great Britain.
<A>Hazing and Alcohol Abuse<\>
Alcohol was consumed by fraternal chapters in the nineteenth century through 1939, but such factors as alumni, faculty, and administration supervision of chapters resulted in far less tolerance for drunkenness or using alcohol as a sort-of litmus test of new member readiness during hazing. Significantly, fraternities likely did not experience a single reported hazing death due to alcohol until 1940. That year, Hubert L. Spake Jr. died following a mandatory drinking session at the University of Missouri while pledging Theta Nu Epsilon. Clearly, with the escalating number of hazing deaths from 1969 to 2017 (compared to 1838–1968), a case can be made that the presence of alcohol has made hazing rituals far more extreme and life-threatening than they were when many chapters banned or limited alcohol consumption. For example, from 2005 to 2008, ten of twelve hazing deaths (83 percent) were related to alcohol abuse. From 2004 to 2011, sixteen of twenty-one hazing deaths (76 percent) were alcohol-related.
My research on hazing deaths demonstrates that the majority that occurred in Greek groups from 1970 to August 1, 2017, involve an overdose of alcohol. Other victims from 1873 to 2017, have died from beatings, car wrecks, pedestrian accidents, falls from buildings or high elevations, burns, drowning, choking, ingestion of many gallons of water or other liquids, and other causes. A small number of suicides have occurred immediately following hazing activities and are listed on the list of hazing deaths with the caveat that it is difficult to prove that a suicide was the direct cause of hazing since other factors must also be considered.
Here are six examples of hazing deaths due to alcohol from my “List of Hazing Deaths” maintained on my website:
NOTE:
- In 1980, University of South Carolina Sigma Nu pledge L. Barry Ballou choked to death after passing out at a ritualized drinking session attended by an alumnus and members.
- In 2007, Phi Kappa Tau pledge Gary DeVercelly Jr. died of alcohol poisoning during a hazing incident at Rider University. He was a baseball player from California prior to coming to Rider. His parents subsequently became hazing activists, board members of the Clery Center for Security on Campus, and advocates for strict governance of Greek houses.
- In 2008, eighteen-year-old Theta Chi pledge Harrison Kowiak of Lenoir-Rhyne University died following a physical hazing “game” that the school and local Theta Chi chapter were reluctant to term hazing. Harrison’s mother Lianne Kowiak became an antihazing advocate and winner of HazingPrevention.org’s Hank Nuwer Anti-Hazing Hero Award.
- In 2012, Pi Kappa Alpha pledge David Bogenberger, a Northern Illinois University freshman, died after being asked to chug copious amounts of hard alcohol. Police charged twenty-two individuals with crimes.
- In 2013, members of Baruch College’s Pi Delta Psi pleaded guilty to voluntary manslaughter and other serious charges after pledge Chung Hsien (Mike) Deng was beaten and died. Members refused to call 911 in a timely manner.
- In 2016, Nevada-Reno pledges were given enormous amounts of alcohol to consume as they cleaned house, watched strippers perform, and violated school and national regulations on drinking. Pledge Ryan Abele died in a fall. <\>
Laws Against Hazing
Hazing may be illicit (i.e., against the rules of a collegiate institution) or forbidden by state law. As of July 2026, hazing was illegal by statute in forty-four states, and there is a 2024 federal law regulating hazing. In most states, hazing is at best a misdemeanor offense. Florida has the strictest possible penalty among all US states, allowing a sentence of six or more years to be imposed upon conviction for felony hazing. As this article appears, the parents of a Southern University student killed in a hazining are advocating for an even more potent federal law, as well as a tougher hazing law in Louisiana.
Nonetheless, outside of Florida, California, and New York, the courts have traditionally imposed light jail sentences, often requiring merely community service or fining individual hazers and/or their chapters. Hazing can be hard to establish since these illegal actions often take place behind closed doors. The fact that Tim Piazza’s hazing was captured by security cameras from start to finish has added a dimension to the subsequent hazing inquiry seldom seen in the courtroom.
In addition, after a death or serious incident, uncooperative members refuse to share details of what took place when investigators interview them. This is why prosecutors for the state often file more easily proven charges, such as assault or serving alcohol to a minor, because hazing is a more difficult crime to prove in court. Felony convictions for repeated hazing beatings were imposed on a Florida A&M fraternity, and a Chico State fraternity member was convicted of a felony following the death of pledge Matthew Carrington who was required to drink so much water that his body chemistry was altered.
University Hazing Practices and Deaths
The increasing numbers of prospective members injured or killed by hazing reveals that prospective members stand ready to do whatever is necessary for acceptance into an organization. When a fraternity or sorority pledge fails to complete the pledge process, it can be a traumatic experience for individuals that fail to cross the liminal space, particularly if they feel less than full-fledged adults and must ask either their parents or school officials to intervene on their behalf.
Sororities have been connected to eight deaths of females and one death of a male in alleged hazing incidents. In 1970, an Eastern Illinois sorority member became the first female Greek member to die after she perished from effects of a head injury incurred in a vehicular accident after she had resisted being “kidnaped” by pledges that intended to abandon her in the country as a prank. Three female deaths have been attributed to drowning in dangerous ceremonial initiations, one at Virginia State and two at California State, Los Angeles.
A 2012 lawsuit launched by the mother of a deceased sorority pledge at East Carolina University maintained that the 2010 deaths of her daughter and a second pledge were directly caused by sleep deprivation due to hazing. According to that lawsuit, twenty-year-old Delta Sigma Theta pledges Victoria Carter and Briana Latrice Gather died in a car accident. In addition to the aforementioned two sorority deaths at Eastern Carolina University, one additional death occurred at Plymouth State University during an automobile accident while pledges allegedly were made to lie flat on the floor of an SUV that then overturned.
None of these deaths involved alcohol. However, in 2008, a total of twelve Chi Omega sorority and Sigma Nu fraternity members at Utah State University were charged with crimes following the alcohol-related hazing of eighteen-year-old Michael Starks. In addition, in March 2014, an alleged hazing incident involving Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority and Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity at the University of Connecticut resulted in the hospitalization of a sorority member admitted with a life-threatening blood-alcohol concentration, according to widely published media accounts and a personal email from the victim.
In addition to pledge deaths, so-called pledge “sneaks” routinely occur in which pledges haze senior members to retaliate for what they themselves have gone through and endured, and these have resulted in deaths at schools such as Eastern Illinois University, University of Texas, and University of Georgia. Such a practice of rebellion is often encouraged by the membership as a means of forging pledge solidarity. The latest example of the reverse hazing of members by pledges has been the death of Sigma Alpha Epsilon member George Desdunes who was “encouraged” by pledges to drink what proved to be a deadly amount of alcohol in a spurious question-and-answer session at his Cornell University chapter house in 2011.
As mentioned, hazing can also have serious consequences even without a death. Many male and female students have been hospitalized for acute alcohol intoxication, for example. Greek chapters have been punished for such behaviors as activities of a sexual nature, physical pummeling, verbal abuse, overwork, sleep deprivation, branding with chemicals, and a host of bizarre pranks intended to amuse veteran members.
To be sure, hazing can also involve activities that do not qualify as deadly or particularly demeaning, such as requiring a pledge to sing a song or carry a veteran member’s books. Nonetheless all national and international fraternal organizations ban these activities as well since the possibility exists that a rogue member or members might get creative with a relatively noninjurious act of hazing and take the activity to a potentially harmful level. In addition, what may seem like innocuous hazing to a perpetrator may be perceived as threatening to a newcomer. Fraternal leaders routinely refer to resultant psychological trauma as a type of “hidden harm.” Even the most stable of new recruits can break down when subjected to night after night of verbal abuse, subjugation, and sleep deprivation, particularly when forced to sleep on a floor in confined quarters and to leap up on the instant to carry out some inane errand that a veteran member has conjured up. These latter cases are examples of cult-like systematic hazing.[21]
Prosecuting and Preventing Hazing
From the first fraternity hazing death in 1873 to deaths in 1973, there appear to have been few arrests and no convictions of any consequence for fraternity and sorority hazing deaths.[22] And while the adviser in the 1974 shooting death for a hazing at Bluefield State was convicted and served time for killing a Tau Kappa Epsilon pledge, and a North Carolina A&T University fraternity member in 1987 received a two-year sentence for pledge beatings, it was not until 1999 that tightened state laws and increasing media attention led to observable and verifiably stricter enforcement, and a small number of arrests resulting in convictions. Most notable was the 2007 sentencing of nearly two years in prison for two Florida A&M fraternity men who pleaded no contest to felony charges of beating a Kappa Alpha Psi pledge; they served jail time but on appeal had the charges expunged from their records.
By 2010 more arrests and a handful of convictions for serious hazing cases began to get the attention of the press. For example, two young men were convicted of misdemeanor hazing in the 2008 death of Cal Poly Sigma Alpha Epsilon pledge Carson Starkey and received jail sentences of thirty days each. On the other hand, in the 2010 death of a Radford University fraternity pledge, the court punishment was merely $1,000 each and no jail time for five Tau Kappa Epsilon members in a plea deal.[23]
Other efforts curtailing hazing have been attempts by international organizations, such as Sigma Alpha Epsilon, to ban or shorten the pledge period. By March 2014, according to the website of the parent SAE organization, all pledging has ceased due to the deaths of ten SAE pledges. Another effective best practice was the dry house movement followed most conspicuously by all chapters of the large national fraternity Phi Delta Theta, which in 2000 removed alcohol from the premises of chapter houses, thereby eliminating the substance that has been linked to the most hazing deaths after 1970.
Civil lawsuits in the aftermath of an injury or death blamed on hazing have become quite common. The parents of Chad Meredith, a University of Miami pledge who drowned when forced to swim across a lake by older Kappa Sigma members, resulted in a $14 million judgment against those young men. The highest settlement ever paid by a university in a fraternity hazing death was $6 million in 2002 by Massachusetts Institute of Technology to the parents of Scott Krueger, who died of alcohol intoxication following a Phi Gamma Delta pledge party. The largest settlement in a hazing band death was $1.1 million by Florida A&M in 2015 to the parents of Robert Champion.
Prevention of Hazing
As might be expected, since deaths by hazing largely occur in fraternities and to a lesser extent in sororities, the main antihazing activists are parents of dead or injured pledges, undergraduate members, alumni, and national officers of fraternities and sororities. The two most influential organizations are the web-based StopHazing.org, created by University of Maine hazing researcher Elizabeth Allan, and the national group HazingPrevention.org, inspired and founded by Tracy Maxwell, a nationally known antihazing activist from Colorado.
StopHazing’s Allan is a professor at the University of Maine in Higher Education Leadership, one of the few academic programs offering a hazing studies concentration. She and former Maine colleague Mary Madden completed in 2011 a three-year research project on hazing with responses from 11,482 college students enrolled in fifty-four colleges. The survey response rate was 12 percent.
Slightly more than half of all respondents acknowledged participating in acts of hazing as members of student groups such as fraternities and sororities. In her essay for The Hazing Reader titled “Hazing and Gender: Analyzing the Obvious,” Allan notes that empirical research on gender differences is scant, but while a national survey distributed to Greek professionals found that 44 percent had to deal with reported hazing cases, the number of violent and otherwise physical hazings were far fewer than those committed by male students.[24]
HazingPrevention.org is a Georgia-based national activist organization dedicated to empowering people to prevent hazing in college and university student groups. HPO’s board of directors and numerous volunteers and small staff provide antihazing education through conferences, webinars, and training sessions. HPO sponsors its annual Hank Nuwer Anti-Hazing Hero Award that to date has honored mainly fraternity and sorority undergraduates who effected positive changes in their own chapters to curb hazing practices, but also it has honored the likes of former National Football League quarterback Peyton Manning and Lianne Kowiak, an antihazing activist and mother of a pledge killed in a Theta Chi hazing incident.
In addition to these two antihazing groups, there is a college archive that attempts to put all hazing scholarship under a single collection. Buffalo State College’s Butler Library has since 2006 sponsored an extensive Hazing Collection available without charge to hazing researchers and undergraduate students alike. Under the direction of archivist Daniel DiLandro, the Hazing Collection has set an eventual goal to house every hazing-related scholarly article, doctoral dissertation, master’s thesis, book, and miscellaneous research item for free use by researchers. Before the collection was established, one difficulty facing researchers was that the relatively small amount of literature related to hazing was scattered at widely separated libraries and institutions, making research an expensive, time-consuming challenge for researchers.
While a number of best practices to curtail hazing have been championed by a number of educators, no single solution has been found to stamp out hazing. Allan, Maxwell, myself, and other authors have argued that bystander intervention might have prevented specific hazing incidents from leading to serious injuries and deaths in a number of fraternity tragedies. Bystander intervention refers to the practice of emboldening those who witness crimes or potential criminal behavior to step in and take action to halt the behavior before it escalates. The writings and seminars by hazing intervention expert Alan Berkowitz and National Federation of State High School Associations spokesperson Elliot Hopkins target bystander intervention as an important means of stopping a hazing activity before it reaches the point of no return. In addition, a great many US educational institutions use social norms data in an attempt to discourage binge drinking and hazing by stressing to undergraduates that such unacceptable practices are anything but normal. In an attempt to sway behavior changes, there have been marketing campaigns such as posters in college classroom buildings and residence halls.
Other education experts, including Christopher Bollinger, coauthor of Violence Goes to College, have argued for the value of substituting useful, benign group-building activities in place of hazing practices.[25] HazingPrevention.org’s Kim Novak of the Novak Institute for Hazing Prevention offers Greek Life professionals and administrators hands-on, scientifically sound strategies to make their campuses safer.
In 2013, the VTV Family Outreach Foundation, founded by the surviving families of a 2007 Virginia Tech (Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University) school shooting massacre, brought together nine experts (including myself) to create a new project termed “32 NCSI” (the 32 National Campus Safety Initiative), which has identified best practices for institutions to employ that counter violent campus behaviors such as hazing and sexual assault. A pilot program was initiated with a number of institutions to provide a voluntary rating system so that an individual institution not only can judge how it measures up in terms of combatting hazing and other behavioral maladies, but also to take steps to shore up areas where deficiencies appear to occur. In 2017 the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA) entered into a partnership with 32 NCSI.
As the number of deaths associated with hazing continues to climb, a trend of late has been the zero tolerance toward the practice by a number of institutions. In addition to the expulsion of chapters caught hazing, a number of universities also have created hazing task forces composed of faculty, staff, and, in some cases, outside experts.
For example, following the hazing death of George Desdunes, then Cornell University President David Skorton issued a clear warning to fraternal groups that the new hazing policy was zero tolerance. The new no-nonsense policy resulted in nine fraternities cited and/or punished by Cornell for hazing from 2012 to March 2014, according to that institution’s website, and additional fraternities were reprimanded from March 2014 to August 1, 2017. In addition, Cornell established the Recruitment, Acceptance, Retention, and Education (RARE) Task Force, with one of its main agenda items being to find and research best practices for curtailing hazing in fraternities and other student groups.[26]
In California, following the alcohol-related birthday death of a Chico State University pledge that institution president Paul Zingg (now retired and a member of the AHA! Movement Board) termed hazing-related, all campus fraternities and sororities were suspended in November 2012. The unprecedented step was taken because of a rash of nonhazing-related deaths at the same time, as well as the fact that this was the fourth hazing death at Chico State. Likewise, Central Florida University, which had a near fatality during pledging for Kappa Alpha Psi, put an end to all pledging and fraternal social activities in 2013, concerned by reports that pledging activities had in some cases escalated into hazing, The University of Virginia ordered all pledging to cease immediately in 2013 or the offending chapters would be shut down.
If these hardline steps fail to work, universities should follow the example of Alfred University and threaten to ban Greek life if reforms are not authentic solutions. In 2002, following a number of hazing deaths in local and national fraternities, the Alfred board of trustees decided regulation of Greek groups was not working. Consequently, the board moved to shut down all Greek houses permanently. However, it is unlikely the majority of colleges will risk alumni outrage by banning fraternities and sororities. National fraternities and sororities vociferously defend the right of public universities to maintain a freedom of association, making it unlikely that any educational institutions (besides the occasional private college) will ever ban the entire Greek system. At present, besides Alfred, the handful of private colleges in the historic past to close their Greek systems included Middlebury College (1990), Williams College (1962), and Colby College (1983). A few private colleges, such as Bates College in Maine, never have permitted fraternities. The last public university to ban pledging for a semester was the University of Alabama in November 2012. A committee at the University of South Carolina in 2016 recommended a permanent ban on pledging, but the matter was tabled for one year by the veto of the USC president. In July of 2017, Harvard University debated a measure that, if passed, would phase out fraternities and sororities because of faculty objections to serious issues perceived to be associated with Greeks.
In the end, however, in spite of all these well-intended and laudable hazing prevention strategies, the demeaning and sometimes deadly rites of hazing clearly will continue until undergraduates and high school students themselves universally condemn and shame their peers who haze. Such a needed change demands nothing less than a nationwide paradigm shift.
Editor’s Note: Every generation inherits a choice: preserve dangerous traditions or create better ones. The future of hazing depends less on laws than on whether students themselves refuse to confuse cruelty with brotherhood. The author is writing this at age 80 after a fight against hazing that began in 1975 and a 1978 article for Human Behavior he wrote condemning hazing. If hazing is to end in his lifetime, far more needs to be done by universities, athletic departments, local and national fraternities and sororities, and individuals.
BIO: Hank Nuwer is an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks. He has written The Hazing Reader (Indiana University Press) and Wrongs of Passage: Fraternities, Sororities, Hazing, and Binge Drinking (Indiana University Press).
Editor’s note: In the eight years since I first wrote this encyclopedic entry in 2018, deaths directly and indirectly attributable to hazing have taken the lives of four-year-old bystander Marco Lee Shemwell, Joseph Little of Phi Gamma Theta, Collin Wiant of Sigma Pi, Nicky Cumberland of the Texas Cowboys, Andrew Walker of Kappa Sigma, Tyler Hilliard with Alpha Phi Alpha, Alexander Belatis of Theta Chi, Marlon Jacson of Kappa Alpha Psi, Noah Caleb Domingo of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, Sebastian Serafin-Barzan of Sigma Pi, high school student Anna Sophia Aslanian, Bae Castro of Chi Sigma Phi, Samuel. (Sam) Martinez of Alpha Tau Omega, Anthony Tsialis of Phi Kappa Psi, Rahat Jalil of Lambda Phi Epsilon, Justin King of Kappa Sigma, Dylan Hernandez of Phi Gamma Delta, Gracie LeAnn Dimit of Kappa Phi Alpha sorority, Lyon College baseball player James Gilfedder, Adam Oakes of Delta Chi, Stone Foltz of Pi Kappa Alpha, Lofton Hazelwood of Farmhouse fraternity, Bailey Broderick (pedestrian), Phat Nguyen of Pi Alpha Phi, Lamoree Leandra Moore, Luke Tyler of Theta Chi, James Madison University students Joshua Mardis, John Fergusson, Nicholas Troutman, Dartmouth College student Won Jang, football rookie Calvin Dickey, Sawyer Updike of Sigma Chi, and Caleb Mitchell of Omega Psi Phi. Don’t let even one more name join this list–Hank Nuwer.
[1] Aldo Cimino, “Predictors of Hazing Motivation in a Representative Sample of the United States,” Evolution and Human Behavior 34 (2013): 446–452.
[2] See also Aldo Cimino, “Fraternity Hazing and the Process of Planned Failure,” Journal of American Studies (December 2016): 1–23.
[3] Lionel Tiger, Men in Groups (New York: Random House, New York, 1969). Revised as “Males Courting Males” in The Hazing Reader, ed. Hank Nuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).
[4]Irving Janis, Victims of Groupthink (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974).
[5] Hank Nuwer, Wrongs of Passage: Fraternities, Sororities, Hazing, and Binge Drinking (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), xxiv–xxv.
[6] Alan D. DeSantis, Inside Greek U.: Fraternities, Sororities, and the Pursuit of Pleasure, Power, and Prestige (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2007), 6.
[7] Elliott Aronson and Judson Mills, “The Effect of Severity of Initiation on Liking for a Group,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 59 (September 1959): 177–181.
[8] Margaret Thaler Singer and Janja Lalich, Cults in Our Midst (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1995), 4–36.
[9]James C. Arnold and George D. Kuh, Brotherhood and the Bottle: A Cultural Analysis of the Role of Alcohol in Fraternities (Bloomington, IN: Center for the Study of the College Fraternity, 1997).
[10] James C. Arnold, “Hazing and Alcohol in a College Fraternity,” in The Hazing Reader, ed. Hank Nuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 51–105.
[11] John van Maanen and Edgar Schein, “Toward a Theory of Organizational Socialization,” Research in Organizational Behavior 1 (1979): 209–264.
[12] Arnold, “Hazing and Alcohol in a College Fraternity,” 105. See also Anne Wilson Schaef and Diane Fassel, The Addictive Organization (New York: Harper One, 1988).
[13] Stephen Sweet, College and Society: An Introduction to the Sociological Imagination (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2001). Revised as “Understanding Fraternity Hazing” in The Hazing Reader, ed. Hank Nuwer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 1–13.
[14] Thomas Leemon, The Rites of Passage in a Student Culture (New York: Teachers College Press, 1972).
[15] Ricky L. Jones, Black Haze: Violence, Sacrifice, and Manhood in Black Greek-Letter Fraternities, rev. ed. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2015).
[16] Susan Lipkins, Preventing Hazing: How Parents, Teachers, and Coaches Can Stop the Violence, Harassment, and Humiliation (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006), 19–26.
[17] Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage (Paris: Noutery, 1909).
[18]Harold H. Kelley and John W. Thibaut, The Social Psychology of Groups (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 1969).
[19] Hank Nuwer, Broken Pledges: The Deadly Rite of Hazing (Atlanta: Longstreet, 1990), 286–294.
[20] Nuwer, Broken Pledges, 119–120.
[21] Hank Nuwer, “Greek Letters Don’t Justify Cult-Like Hazing of Pledges,” Chronicle of Higher Education, November 26, 1999.
[22] Nuwer, Broken Pledges, 286–298.
[23] Hank Nuwer, “What’s the Life of a Dead Fraternity Pledge Worth?” Orlando Sentinel op-ed, July 11, 2012.
[24] Elizabeth Allan, “Hazing and Gender: Analyzing the Obvious,” in The Hazing Reader, 252–274.
[25] Christopher Bollinger and Hank Nuwer, 2009, “Hazing” in Violence Goes to College, ed. John Nicoletti, Sally Spencer-Thomas, and Christopher Bollinger (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas), 185–203.
[26] David Skorton, “A Pledge to End Fraternity Hazing,” New York Times, August 23, 2011.
