Hank Nuwer, Author; Hazing Deaths Database

Burden is on students, not panelists, to change FAMU culture by Hank Nuwer

Like people, universities can have a span of life from birth to death.

Many colleges have closed their doors because of declining enrollments, inadequate endowments and mismanagement.

Scandals have injured other schools. In that, Florida A & M is not alone.

Penn State is reeling under the Joe Paterno-Jerry Sandusky pedophile scandal.

Southern Methodist University after years of football floundering has built itself back up after a disastrous Death Penalty levied against it by the NCAA.

 

Alfred University in New York came back from a horrific hazing death and a fraternity suicide after hazing by banning fraternities and diving into hazing research.  So a school CAN come back.

Those who love Florida A & M have a long road to traverse before this scandal comes close to going away. It may take a decade or more if all goes well. Unless a lawsuit filed against FAMU is settled, that court struggle could go on five years or longer.

The death of Robert Champion has seen admissions drop drastically, and the school will need to dig in its heels to resist those who see lowering admissions standards as an answer to the 800 or so student enrollment decline.

Worse, the ill-advised decision by school lawyers to shift blame from the school and hazers in band and Greek life onto the deceased Champion has created a public relations problem only slightly less devastating than Penn State has. There is no question in my mind that alumni of the school are asking “What were they thinking?”

There are Human Resource challenges. The school has to replace an ousted president and once beloved band leader. The school continues to play football sans the Marching Band that gave the school its greatest glory and its greatest shame.

The family of Robert Champion has articulately criticized the longtime hazing culture at FAMU that cost them a beloved son.
That’s why Thursday’s Hazing Town Hall panel at 2 p.m. on Sept. 20 in FAMU’s Alfred L. Lawson Jr. Multipurpose Center and Teaching Gym is so important for the beleaguered school. The panel includes individuals known for hazing scholarship, activism and social criticism. I am confident they will conduct themselves well. I am one of the panelists and pleased to try to be there participating as a great, or maybe once-great, institution attempts to come back from adversity and shame.

What remains to be seen is how FAMU’s student body itself will respond during the question-and-answer period following the moderator’s prepared questions. The school has endured a number of fraternity scandals and arrests resulting in jail time as a result of hazing. And no sooner was the school plunged into the abyss of bad publicity following Robert Champion’s death than the dance team at FAMU was accused of hazing and punished.

At the same time, the social critic and father of two men that I am feels the grievous loss suffered by the Robert Champion family. I recall the dismay I felt when I first heard how he had been killed.

With the eyes of America on Florida A & M ever since the death of Robert Champion, pressure is on students and alumni in the audience.

 

Have FAMU students really decided that they have learned from the death of Robert Champion, the suspension of band and dance teams, and the past arrests of fraternity members?

Florida A & M students and alums will demonstrate that answer on Thursday. They will do so by their actions and questions.

Confirmed hazers never lose an opportunity to make excuses and demonstrate self pity for the target rightly pinned on their backs. This week a student writer for the FAMU paper writes that she’s tired of hearing about hazing. Doesn’t she think the Champion family is a bit tired also?

I have no doubt that some in the audience will be past hazers. They have had time to search their minds and souls to decide if they really have accepted the school’s call for reforming the hazing culture.

Panelists including me will have a perspective to offer on Thursday, but only a perspective. It remains to be seen if the students and alumni that attend have changed behavior for real.

They are not only the ones who must offer a solution.

 

They ARE the solution. Or remain the problem.

 

In World War Two, America rallied behind a committed people. Those who went to war became known as the Greatest Generation.

 

Hazing has reared its ugly head in educational situations at least since the time St. Augustine was a student at Carthage in the Fourth Century. If Society today can at long last wage a successful war against hazing, it will be because of today’s youth coming together as a Chosen Generation.

 

Florida A&M officials are hoping — and expecting — a standing-room-only audience Thursday afternoon when the university hosts its first town hall on hazing this semester.

The 2-4 p.m. event at the 9,980-seat Lawson Center is mandatory for FAMU students, who outnumber the facility’s capacity by more than 2,000. And that’s before faculty, staff and the public begin taking seats.

Hazing has been in the spotlight at FAMU since last November, when Marching 100 drum major Robert Champion died after a hazing ritual on a band bus in Orlando. Starting next semester, FAMU students will be required to sign an anti-hazing pledge before registering for classes.

The interactive town hall will feature a half-dozen national experts in a panel discussion format followed by a question-and-answer session. James Bland, a Los Angeles-based 2008 FAMU graduate who in December 2009 created the website FAMU United for alumni to post their positive memories of the university and combat a torrent of negative attention for FAMU, will serve as moderator.

The panel includes two members of the university’s original national anti-hazing task force, Na’im Akbar and Elizabeth Allan. That task force was created earlier this year but it essentially disintegrated before holding its first in-person meeting. FAMU Interim President Larry Robinson, however, said he hopes to revive it.

In the meantime, Robinson is eager for a resounding turnout for Thursday’s event. The university has stressed its zero-tolerance rules for hazing while meeting with student groups, and has suspended one dance club indefinitely while it investigates allegations of hazing during the Labor Day weekend, but this marks the first forum this fall focused solely on hazing.

“One of my concerns is that you can never rest on your laurels,” Robinson said. “You can do a lot of good work, but you have to continue to look for opportunities to create awareness. I don’t think you can ever stop working on this issue.”

The other four scheduled panelists are attorney Rasheed-Ali Cromwell, Victor Gaines, founder and president of the Marching 100 Band Association, hazing researcher and author Hank Nuwer and FAMU student body president Marissa West, a member of Delta Sigma Theta sorority.

Here is a little contribution for HazingPrevention Week. You can sing it to the tune of “Old Shep” or you can use any tune you want. I’m not copyrighting it. Feel free to use as you wish. You can change it from Rookie Night to Hell Night and use for your sorority or fraternity. You can fix some of the meter if you wish as well. Happy Hazing Prevention Week.

Rookie Night

 by Hank Nuwer

When my boy Tom was a lad

He had him a pup

And they ran through the woods and the hay.

Wildflowers he oft carried

To the family plot where his mama lay buried.

But otherwise, he and Tramp ran wild all the day.

 

One night we had to visit the vet.

Tramp had run right where a rattler set.

The vet wanted to put him down

But my son begged him not to quit

And with Tramp all night Tom and that vet did sit

Y’know, my boy’s faith saved his young hound.

 

Ten years passed by too fast

Tom, he went to college at last

And wouldn’t you know that young fool

Told me he wanted Tramp with him at school.

Said the two of them would have them a blast.

So I said yes, what else could I do?

 

Now, you see I don’t have much education

I was off in Vietnam fighting for my nation.

So when he said he was playing club lacrosse      

I just grew quiet as a mouse

I was afraid he might have the wrong kinda fun

I’d kept him too protected; he’s my only son.

 

Then one fall day in the middle of the night

The phone rang and it gave me a fright.

It was Dean Such and Such speaking real polite.

I’ll never forget those terse words that he said.

He said we found your boy just now in his bed.

There was a hazing party; now he’s dead.

 

All his friends from the team came to his wake.

Truth to tell it was their necks, not their hands I wanted to shake.

How damn much can one man take?

But I saw the grief in their eyes

And I knew from all their sighs.

That they saw they’d made a grave mistake.

 

 

Tramp and I brought my boy home to our farm

We buried him next to his mama in the shade of the barn.

Now each and every night

Faithful Tramp sleeps there in the moonlight.

That dog’s gotten old and soon heaven will be his home

And there once again Tom and his dog can roam.

 

 

 

Sunni Solomon, the university’s assistant director of Greek life from 2010 until July, said in an e-mail, “My entire tenure from start to finish, I was scared to death that someone was going to die.”

 

Excerpt: One father cited text messages from his son, which could “only be interpreted as desperately reaching out for help.” He said they included descriptions of being forced to stand out in the cold in his underwear, prevented from sleeping for prolonged periods of time and not being allowed to leave the fraternity all weekend. “To be frank, I am shocked and mortified that this is allowed to go on at your institution,” he wrote.

One junior, who expressed great love for the university, relayed accounts from two pledges. One said her sorority threw pledges into a freezing shower where they had to recite the Greek alphabet. Another reported being forced to eat concoctions meant to make pledges vomit on one another and to hold hot coals from hookahs in their hands. The e-mail concluded: “Save the innocent and naïve who can’t seem to save themselves.”

Forced drinking, a staple of college hazing, comes up in a few reports. There also were reports of students’ getting frostbite from walking barefoot in the snow. One said pledges, blindfolded, driven miles from campus and relieved of their phones, were expected to find their own way home. Another said a fraternity branded pledges on the leg, back or buttocks.

Several reports claimed that some of the hazing continued even after organizations received warnings or after the university suspended pledging.

Officials at Binghamton — part of the State University of New York system — declined to say whether individual students had been disciplined but said 3 of the 53 sanctioned Greek organizations were currently banned from recruiting members. The university’s Web site says one sorority received a disciplinary warning, one fraternity was placed on probation and two fraternities remain under investigation.

Separately, two national sororities canceled charters of their Binghamton chapters in 2011 after a review of the sororities and the Greek culture on campus.

Part of the problem, university officials said, was that few victims were willing to come forward, so allegations were hard to verify. A number of the complaints, which were provided to The Times by someone alarmed at the severity of the hazing, came secondhand or thirdhand from worried girlfriends, alumni or parents.

Only 10 percent of Binghamton’s 14,700 students are members of social or professional fraternities and sororities, making Greek life a less dominant part of campus life than at some other schools. Mere numbers, though, do not tell the tale.

Housed, for the most part, in shabby, rambling houses and in apartments close to the bustling bar scene in Binghamton’s struggling downtown, Greek organizations are central to the campus’s social life. Most students go to parties there. With the distance from campus about three miles, the students are far from the eyes of administrators and the campus police. The problem is compounded by the presence of unsanctioned fraternities, some with rowdy reputations.

Although hazing is a crime in New York State, no one was charged in Binghamton. In April, the Binghamton police visited Alpha Pi Epsilon, also known as APES, an unsanctioned fraternity housed in a 9,600-square-foot Greek Revival mansion near downtown. There had been reports of nightly hazing involving “rigorous exercise, alcohol consumption, paddling and ‘waterboarding’ where the pledges were being hosed down,” a police report said. It added: “Information was also reported that some of the pledges had acquired pneumonia from the ‘waterboarding.’ ”

Sgt. Michael Senio said that without a sworn complaint from someone willing to come forward, the police could not enter the building where the occupants, according to the report, responded with “a lot of attitude and very little cooperation.”

Sergeant Senio said: “I can only speculate what was going on, but we could see the basement, which was like a disgusting-looking dark dungeon with hoses and standing water on the ground.”

Moderator: and might I add–great coverage by its student paper.