Greek members from various fraternities and sororities were shown how hazing can harm their new members and collective reputations at a presentation in the Chumash Auditorium on Oct. 20.
The keynote speaker was Michael Ayalon, an expert in hazing prevention from Greek University, an organization that says it speaks with fraternity and sorority communities all over the country.
The event last Monday was titled “Unity without harm: hazing prevention for a safer organization,” and was part of the Fraternity & Sorority life and Campus Health and Wellbeing’s hazing prevention week for students of all clubs and organizations on campus.
A major reason students join fraternity or sorority organizations, according to Ayalon, is to find support. He argued that if new members are hazed, then they can feel unsafe around fellow members, whom they are supposed to rely on.
“Hazing specifically deals with safety needs,” said Ayalon. “If the new members don’t have safety, and they are being hazed, that could be mental or physical abuse, then they are never going to be able to get to belongingness and love.”
Additionally, he made the case that hazing creates stereotypes that can deter new members.
“How many great students here at Cal Poly are not here in this room and they never ‘go Greek’ because of the stereotypes of Greek life? We know people just like that on this campus. They refuse. Even if I gave them a Porsche and Super Bowl tickets, they’re still not going to join,” Ayalon said.
He also touched on hazing’s physical danger, especially if it involves alcohol, referencing data that suggests nearly 82% of hazing deaths being a result of alcohol poisoning. Ayalon said that he hopes to remove alcohol from the new member process entirely “if nothing else.”
To illustrate how deadly hazing can be, he projected cases of college students who allowed drinking during rush and forced it upon potential new members, which led to their untimely deaths. Some examples included a fraternity at Clemson University and a sorority at the University of West Georgia.
However, one case he said bothered him the most was a former fraternity at the University of Buffalo in which a hazing-related incident accidentally led to the death of a new member. He attributed the student’s death, which he said he thinks about every night, as the reason why he speaks out against hazing.
According to Hazing Info, a website that provides data related to hazing, nearly 75% of fraternity or sorority members in the U.S. have experienced some form of hazing. The site also reports that over 330 people have died since 1838 as a result of hazing.
In attendance at the presentation was anthropology and geography sophomore Sam Stein, the vice president of recruitment for the Sigma Phi Epsilon Fraternity.
Though Stein agreed with Ayalon, he thinks that personal conversations are better at conveying hazing’s harms. For him, a conversation he had at his fraternity’s national conference with two mothers, whose sons died as a result of hazing, cemented his rejection of hazing.
“Their sons actually died in hazing incidents. So hearing them, talking with them, shaking their hands, hearing their story and how their sons had been killed by hazing, really reinforced this belief in me,” Stein said.
Stein said that Sigma Phi Epsilon does not haze new members or believe in the practice. He argued that hazing does not create strong brotherly bonds.
“I don’t think you can create true meaningful connections by breaking somebody down, forcing them into a mold,” Stein said.