Hazing Discussion Continues

According to Old Chapel, on Feb. 2, a team party aimed at welcoming the first-year female swimmers crossed the line from innocent initiation to hazing — with both the male and female teams responsible.

On Feb. 8, the College ended the women’s swimming and diving season for good with the exception of the first-years. Members of the men’s team — who did not “initiate” any members — each received a letter of reprimand from the College and notifications were sent to their parents.

Director of Athletics Erin Quinn said that hazing will not be tolerated in his department.

“You show up, make the team, work hard, and there is no place for initiations,” Quinn wrote in an e-mail.

But a member of the men’s swimming and diving team said that hazing occurs frequently at the College. The swimmer, who was present for the hazing of the first-year women and who has since received communications from the administration and his teammates, is not named in this article because of the risk of retribution from the administration.

“[Hazing] is not only happening throughout the athletic department, but technical hazing is happening from a cappella groups to comedy groups to really most groups,” he said. “The swim team just got in trouble for it."

To Karl Lindholm ’67 — who retired last year after 34 years of service to the College in many positions, including dean of students — widespread hazing within student organizations is nothing new. Lindholm said “hazing” was even part of his first-year orientation in 1963.

“When I came to Middlebury there was freshman ‘hazing’ conducted by the Honor Society during freshman orientation,” he said. “It involved learning the school song and the freshman boys had to wear little beanies and the women had to wear bibs.”

Lindholm said that there is nothing inherently dangerous about initiations as long as they are transparent and they do not involve either secrecy or alcohol. Reports of hazing in the last five years have mentioned both secrecy and alcohol.

“In my experience as a dean, hazing escalates,” Lindholm said. “The group that has been hazed decides to be better at it the next year.”

The swimming and diving teams have dealt with suspensions related to hazing in the past. In January 2003, the upper-class women were withheld from their first two meets because of hazing allegations, and in 2006 the men’s season was canceled for breaking the team’s alcohol policy.

But the swim team is not the only student group with harassment on its record. In 2008, the administration also suspended men’s a cappella group Stuck in the Middle (SIM) for part of the spring semester for hazing violations.

Since the incident, SIM has strived to be come a leader among extracurricular student organizations at the College. The group expanded the conventional reach of a collegiate performing group in 2009 by touring in Japan and a recent track featured on a college a cappella compilation album was nominated for the Contemporary A Cappella Recording Award’s (CASA) best folk/world song.

Additionally, in the years following the suspension SIM has voluntarily shared their initiation procedures with the administration, a step few other groups have taken.

The College’s five social houses — Delta (ADP), Kappa Delta Rho (KDR), Omega Alpha (Tavern), The Mill and Xenia — have also faced scrutiny since ADP was granted “provisional” status after hazing violations in 2002.

William Guida ’12.5, president of Xenia — the College’s substance-free social house — understands why hazing might be attractive to organizations.

“You want to feel as though people have made an effort to associate with you and I can see why it is such a big part of the college social house stereotype,” he said.  “But I think that it’s overblown.”

Guida said he has never heard of anything happening at the social houses to “make his hair stand on end” and he has supreme confidence in the safety of all social houses.

“If I were to have a little brother come to Middlebury, and he were to say he wanted to pledge to a social house, I wouldn’t ask which one because I’m not worried about anyone in particular,” Guida said. “I would feel comfortable with anybody I love pledging to any social house they wish."

Since 2000, every social house must submit their rush procedures — plans for initiating new members — to the Inter House Council (IHC). The president of the IHC, the adviser to the IHC, the faculty representative and the staff representative must approve the rush procedures.

President of Omega Alpha Tavern Matthew Hedgpeth ’12 believes the initiation approval process is beneficial oversight and said he would support submitting initiation plans even if not required. However, he believes that other student organizations should be subject to the same rush approval that social houses are.

“I don’t have a problem with [the administration] knowing,” Hedgpeth said. “However, it does seem a little ridiculous that we have to report our day-to-day activities when other organizations can go on with whatever they please.”

Running initiation procedures by the administration might not be appropriate for all organizations, however. Dean of the College and Chief Diversity Officer Shirley Collado said that social houses and other organizations like sports teams cannot be bound by the same rules.

“The process for new members joining a social house and the process for those students participating as new members of a sports team or student organization are not totally comparable,” Collado said in an e-mail. “The criteria for membership on a team or in certain student organizations is often a specific interest or skill, such as an athletic talent or an ability to sing.”

Lindholm — the academic liaison for the baseball team — argues that the skill it takes to make a varsity team and the teamwork it takes to win make team initiations unnecessary.

“Some groups will say they do it to create this group identity and I can understand that,” Lindholm said.  “But with athletic teams, there is so much natural bonding that takes place on the field without having to resort to hazing.”

Football captain and two-year baseball captain Donnie McKillop ’11 agreed, saying that hazing new team members corrupts team unity, which is vital to winning on the field.

“Cutting loose and getting to see personalities off the field is huge for team bonding and it strengthens the locker room,” McKillop said. “You want to be close as a team, and if players aren’t comfortable that’s not going to happen.”

McKillop said he keeps team social settings from involving hazing by limiting class distinctions and involving everyone on the same level.  He also said he emphasizes the freedom of choice to everyone at the first social events during the season to ensure that newcomers to the team understand that participation is voluntary. To McKillop, the first line of defense against hazing is the leadership in student organizations, and he thinks the administration could have more faith in team captains — instituting a check-in system like the one social houses work with would be overkill.

“It will be a burden to the administration dealing with paperwork and too much controlling of the students,” McKillop said.  “There needs to be more freedom and trust than that.”

But Gus Jordan, executive director of health and counseling services, believes that expanding the rush approval process to other student groups could reduce hazing incidents in the future.

“As a senior captain, you don’t know the hazing laws in the state of Vermont and it’s not your job to know that,” Jordan said. “Asking teams to describe their initiations would make sure that you as a captain or head of an organization are not accidentally erring on the side of hazing because the consequences are enormous.”

According to Jordan, an extra checkpoint between planning an initiation and acting it out would help protect both the organizers and members.

“The extra rule would say, ‘Hey, just tell us what you’re doing so we can check with you,’” Jordan said. “You have a much more robust way of protecting students, particularly our new students who are arriving on campus and just reaching out to join these organizations.”

And protection is necessary for both the instigators and the first-years in a hazing situation. The male swimmer said the most recent hazing incident was emotionally fraught for everyone involved, and it has split the women’s swimming and diving team between anger at the administration and optimism for the future.

“Some of the captains have been handling it well and some of them are really pissed off saying, ‘We didn’t do anything wrong,’” he said.

At this point, the administration’s focus is on moving forward and preventing future incidents.

“Reporting hazing after it has occurred is important, but it is more beneficial to students to prevent hazing,” Collado wrote in an e-mail. “We want our hazing education efforts to teach students how to step up and speak out before or during these incidents to prevent them from happening.”

Collado said that the College will revamp its hazing education agenda, pointing to the University of Arizona’s Step-Up program as a good model. The Step-Up Program teaches students to identify and interrupt problematic behavior such as sexual assault, substance abuse, academic dishonesty and hazing.

“We want Middlebury to be a community in which all members feel a sense of responsibility to take care of each other and to intervene in the moment when they see potentially harmful activities taking place,” Collado wrote in an e-mail.

But Jordan — a licensed psychologist in Vermont — points out that hazing intervention can be an impossible decision for a student to make.

“Students may feel they have to participate in order to be accepted and thus they are stuck with two bad choices: either stop the hazing and [risk] not being accepted, or go through an experience that is embarrassing and potentially harmful,” Jordan said.  “That’s a really awful choice for a person who wants to fit in.”

On the same note, Lindholm said that peer pressure combined with determination to make a team can lead students to put up with almost anything.

“I think peer pressure is more powerful than any element of choice,” Lindholm said. “That’s why hazing is so dangerous.”

Jordan has dealt with hazing cases as both a judicial affairs officer and as acting dean of the College during his 15 years at the school, and he believes that it is often hard for students to see when initiations cross the line to hazing.

“It’s very hard to tell the difference between an appropriate and an inappropriate practice when you’re in the middle of things, but if you step back, you can always see when it crosses the line,” Jordan said.

Despite the administration’s plans to expand hazing education in the future, the swimmer believes Old Chapel is missing an educational opportunity in the present.

“I’m not saying that [the administration] should have swept it under the rug, but by the way they’re dealing with this, they are not really educating us in why hazing is bad,” he said. “They’re not putting an end to hazing on campus, just making people be more discreet and making people want to go off campus which is much more dangerous.”

Vermont has some of the strictest state hazing laws in the country, and the College’s hazing policy must comply with state law. In issuing punishments to the swim teams, Associate Dean of the College Karen Guttentag wrote in an e-mail that “team and individual sanctions were based on our Handbook policy and athletic program expectations.” The College’s leeway to take an educational stance over a punitive one is limited by policy, but the swimmer called the College’s policy, which states in Section 2 of the student conduct section of the Handbook that a “student group may be found culpable upon satisfactory evidence that the organization did not discourage or did not take reasonable steps to prevent hazing by its members or affiliates,” too broad.

“Under the policy, the boys who showed up for a minute and left are just as guilty as the girls who organized it, and that’s a blatant problem in the College’s hazing policy,” he said. “There is no good level of what punishment is good for what crime.”

Quinn said that he will work with Collado and her staff in the future to make sure every athlete has a full understanding of the rules and consequences regarding hazing.

“We will review and revise our athletic department policies and education programs, and make sure these guidelines are clearly understood by all Middlebury students who want to compete on our teams,” Quinn wrote in an e-mail.

Whether the solution to hazing at the College is “bystander intervention,” as Collado hopes to promote, or more frequent communication between student organization leaders and members of the administration, McKillop emphasized the progress made by simply raising awareness of hazing on campus, even if it took a few   student athletes’ mistakes.

"It's like when you learn through mistakes as a kid — you get the trust you deserve and earn,” McKillop said. “Right now we have a little less because of an incident but the awareness is higher now and with time people will see the bigger picture and the trust will be back."