Alumni express mixed reactions to hazing case

By Tom Owen, The Dartmouth Staff

Published on Wednesday, February 1, 2012

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Despite the strong hazing accusations recently leveled by Andrew Lohse ’12 against his former fraternity in a Jan. 25 opinion column, alumni interviewed by The Dartmouth said they generally do not view hazing as posing as significant a threat to the College community as Lohse suggested. Several alumni said that although they experienced a wide variety of fraternity initiation activities while at Dartmouth, they would not characterize those activities as hazing.

John Mathias ’69, former Alumni Council president and a former member of Phi Delta Alpha fraternity, said he never participated in or witnessed any initiation activities that he would consider hazing.

“I was actually the rush chair at Phi Delt, and we didn’t haze our pledges, period,” Mathias said. “Certainly nothing that even approaches what was in the paper.”

Mathias said that although he is not able to speak for other fraternities, he is certain that stories of hazing would have reached him through campus conversation. He also said that drinking beer as part of a pledge initiation “wouldn’t surprise him,” but that fraternities did not engage in activities similar to what Lohse described.

“If you have to chug a beer, is that hazing?” Mathias said. “If you have to chug two beers, is that hazing? Those things happened, but whether those physically degrading things happened or not, I never saw it. I didn’t do it, and we didn’t do it.”

John Daukas ’84, president of the Association of Alumni and chair of the ad hoc Committee to Support Greek Letter Organizations, said that during his time as a member of Kappa Sigma fraternity — now Chi Gamma Epsilon fraternity — and throughout his work with CSG, he has not considered hazing to be a major campus problem.

In 2010, CSG members met with College President Jim Yong Kim, former President James Wright, College deans and administrators involved in overseeing the Greek system, fraternity and sorority presidents and Greek organization members and reported their findings in May 2011, according to Daukas. Although the committee identified a number of challenges facing Greek organizations, including poorly maintained physical plants and binge drinking, the report did not conclude hazing as an issue.

“We didn’t hear from anyone that we spoke with that hazing was a problem,” Daukas said. “We did a good deal of outreach, and it wasn’t an issue.”

Daukas described pledge term activities in the early 1980s as mostly light-hearted and humorous. Many fraternities made pledges carry awkward objects such as a wrench, sledgehammer, lunchbox or cane. Some new members carried “pledge kits” with miscellaneous trinkets. Daukas recalled that while he was a pledge, he carried a book that all the members of the house had to sign, an effective method of learning the names of older members.

A less benign practice that was falling out of favor during Daukas’ time at the College the “pledge raid,” in which brothers would kidnap pledges, drive them away from campus and drop them off in far-flung locations or at women’s colleges. Many fraternity members called for an end to the practice due to its hazardous nature, according to Daukas.

“My attitude about hazing, and I hope this is still the case, is that the sort of people who went to Dartmouth had enough self-confidence that they wouldn’t put up with hazing,” Daukas said. “Dartmouth students should be capable of just saying, ‘I don’t need this garbage.’”

Daukas said that hazing detracts from the community-driven purpose of Greek organizations, which should help foster lifelong friendships and serve as campus social spaces.

“The theory that I’ve heard about how going through traumatic events all together will make them closer — I think that’s a load of junk,” Daukas said. “I love the Greek system, but it is not a place for doing dehumanizing and embarrassing things.”

More active alumni involvement could help minimize hazing on campus, according to Daukas.

“If hazing is going on, there’s got to be a rapid cultural shift,” he said. “Some people may say, ‘It’s always gone on, it’s always been this way,’ and they’ve got to get out of this mindset.”

A more recent alumnus and a former member of Alpha Delta fraternity, John Harlow ’04 said that he was “surprised” by both the level of peer pressure and the graphic content that Lohse described in his editorial.

“I never experienced being made to do things I didn’t want to do,” Harlow said. “I don’t think it’s any secret that Dartmouth students drink more than is healthy, which goes for Greek organizations too, but the details [of the editorial] seemed pretty bizarre and foreign.”

Harlow said that initiation practices could theoretically be valuable experiences for new members but that in practice they often do not serve a beneficial purpose.

“The idea behind it is positive, because you’re asked to spend a lot of time with these people ­— some who you know, some who you’re just getting to know — and you have a common bonding experience,” Harlow said. “But [fraternities are] run by 21 and 22-year-olds — which is usually a great thing at Dartmouth, [and] I really cherished the amount of student run organizations where there were opportunities to be a leader — but people can make big mistakes at that age, and when there’s a bunch of alcohol involved, there’s going to be consequences.”

Clark Griffiths ’57 Th ’58, who was a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity as an undergraduate and has advised the organization as the trustee since 1962, said that Lohse’s allegations were unmerited and that the house has met the expectations of the national organization and of the College.

Griffiths acknowledged that some initiation activities take place at SAE but said that Lohse’s motivation for making such accusations against his former fraternity was his anger at being suspended from the chapter, the national organization and the College.

“Our policy has basically been that you don’t have brutal hazing, to a certain extent, for years and years,” Griffiths said. “Hazing was a thing associated with ‘Hell Night,’ which happened just before you were actually initiated. It’s never been a very good thing, but I think that what’s been published was exaggerated because he was ticked off at the fraternity and at the College.”

Griffiths said that SAE started a new alumni advisory committee in April, which has been investigating the allegations. The brothers have been “very responsive” to the committee and that the committee is under the impression that the allegations were false, according to Griffiths.

“I don’t think that hazing was an issue at all in the last initiation,” Griffiths said. “I can’t really speak to what happened prior to that, but I don’t think that it was ever quite as bad as Lohse made it out to be.”

Griffiths described his ‘Hell Night’ in 1954, which he said was “nothing terribly serious.”

“The paddling wasn’t that bad — freshmen used to have to run through a line of seniors to be paddled,” Griffiths said. “You would also be blindfolded and they would put an oyster in a cow’s stomach and you’d eat the oyster from the stomach. It was pretty goofy stuff.”

He also described how new members would take a trip during their pledge term, which he remembers as “spectacular.”

“I played the accordion and my friend played the bagpipes, and he had to wear a kilt, and we had to go down to Smith [College] and get our pictures taken in front of five dorms playing our instruments,” Griffiths said.

Griffiths said SAE pledges are increasingly engaging in service work, including serving meals at David’s House, which Griffiths sees as a much more positive process than hazing. He also said that Lohse’s actions should not represent the character of the fraternity as a whole.

“We’ve had some great brothers and some not-so-great brothers,” Griffiths said. “Lohse falls into the category of not the kind of guy we really wanted.”

Liz Leonard ’04, who was unaffiliated while at Dartmouth, said that students occasionally discussed hazing, but since fraternity members were usually secretive about pledge term activities, there was a lack of serious, ongoing campus dialogue about the issue.

“I remember people saying that they were sworn to secrecy,” Leonard said. “Part of the bonding experience was that nobody knew about it.”

Leonard said that the campus rumors related to hazing did not amount to the level of Lohse’s allegations. She remembered hearing that one organization’s pledges were forced to drink milk as fast as they could until they were sick, which she described as “not something you can condone” but not as traumatizing as the graphic activities described in Lohse’s article.

Leonard also said that alumni, whether they were affiliated or not, maintain such a high degree of loyalty to Dartmouth that they typically remember their undergraduate years as more happy than they actually were.

“It’s been almost ten years, and all of my friends look back with rose-colored glasses,” Leonard said. “It was -12 degrees at noon when I was a senior, but you tend to brush those things off. Whether you were entrenched in the Greek system or not, you look at it as just another experience.”