CAMPUS
The University Daily KANSAN
Hazing survives on campuses despite penalties
Gary Barber/KANSAN
Opponents work to ban practices that injure, kill
By J.P. Conroy
Staff Reporter
Fraternity hazing is a legacy that many inside and outside of fraternities want to see removed.
Sigma Alpha Epsilon, 1301 W. Campus Road, was suspended for two years in June as a campus organization for violations of KU regulations. Some active members were involved in hazing pledges, an SAE national officer said in June.
"If it talked, I would probably leave this school," he said. "It's like 110 (members of a fraternity) against one."
However, suspending KU fraternities that haze is difficult because knowledge of hazing only comes after individuals have come forward to the Interfraternity Council or to the University of Kansas.
A former pledge of a fraternity and former member of the Interfraternity Pledge Council, who asked not to be identified, said he left because of a hazing incident and had not come forward because he feared retribution. He would not on record about the hazing ritual because he said it could identify him to members of the fraternity.
He said after he left the fraternity a couple of years ago, his car's tires were flattened and he received prank phone calls off and on for over a year.
"I can't prove it was them," he said. "But I don't have any enemies at KU except for the guys in the house."
"I've talked to people from two other houses who went through similar hazing incidents and sometimes much worse."
"He described that it turned out to be a pretty big brawl. He mentioned that somebody had a black eye and a couple received minor injuries.
"It's like drinking and driving, only a small percentage do," he said. Glen Jewell, president of Alpha Kappa Lambda fraternity, 2021 Stewart St., said, "I had a biology class when I was a sophomore. My lab partner had mentioned he was in a fraternity and he had moved out. They had been putting time constraints on his studying and the previous night had been too much for him.
He said hazing did not reflect the entire KU fraternity system, but it had come to be synonymous with fraternities in general.
"I don't see how he could have faked it, because he was visibly shaken by it."
"The night before, the actives had come down and the pledges were told to defend a wall in their sleeping quarters by any means necessary. I asked him what would have happened if an active had gotten through to the wall. He didn't answer, but the implications were pretty severe.
Jewell said he thought it was one of a few isolated incidents at KU and that hazing was not a problem throughout the Greek system here.
Grant Tennessee, IFC president, said that fraternity members who wanted to register hazing complaints should call the IFC office or leave a message on their recorder. He said
the IFC would investigate the complaint on a confidential basis.
"We can't do anything until someone comes forward," Tennison said.
He said the judicial council would render a decision and would contact the fraternity's national headquarters, if hazing was involved. IFC would work with the national fraternity, he said, on any disciplinary action taken.
IFC was not involved in the SAE suspension, Tennison said. A member of the chapter filed a complaint with the University and it conducted a non-academic disciplinary hearing in May. SAE national fraternity removed the KU chapter's operating license, or charter, and placed it under a KU chapter alumni commission.
commissioner Scott Hartman, KU Interfraternity Council adviser, he said he hoped to do an orientation program for new fraternity members next fall to let them know what hazing was.
"The goal is for new members to know what's right and wrong." he said.
Elene Stevens, founder of the Committee to Halt Useless College Killings, in Sayville, N.Y., said recently that since 1978, there had been 29 deaths resulting from hazing incidents. She formed C.H.U.C.K. after her son, Charles Stenzel, died from alcohol poisoning because of a hazing incident at Alfred University, Alfred, N.Y.
Although only a small percentage of KU fraternities haze, the tragedies that could result from hazing have been documented nationally.
Stevens said her nationwide cause was to rid the Greek system of hazing. Anti-hazing laws, she said, have been passed in 19 states.
State Senate Majority Leader Paul Burke, R-Lawood, introduced an anti-hazing bill in late February, but he said he withdrew the bill that had been patterned after other states because he thought it was unreasonable. The legislation would have made hazing a misdemeanor, and victims could have sued for civil damages caused by mental or physical injuries received during hazing.
"Hazing, is a subjective term," Burke said. "The legislation was designed to provide a definition for hazing and to prescribe a standard procedure for dealing with the violations of it."
suspension of SAE and hearing of problems from other alumni from other KU chapters, he said, he may reintroduce an anti-hazing bill.
Stevens said the research she had done on hazing showed that about 98 percent was related to alcohol. Alcohol poisoning has been the No.1 cause of deaths related to hazing since 1972, she said.
Marchesani said, some pledge programs initiated military-style boot camp training. The practices of calisthenics and lineups began then, he said.
Burke, a KU SAE alumnus, said there had been a lack of support for anti-hazing legislation in the past. But because of the recent University
Her son died when he was locked in the trunk of a car and told to drink a pint of bourbon, a six-pack of beer and a fifth of wine before he would be released. The mixture of alcohols on the bottle to induce vomiting but proved fatal
Stevens said some other factors in deaths related to hazing were heat exhaustion after stringent exercise
Stevens, who has spoken at fraternity national conventions and at 253 schools, said she hoped anti-hazing legislation would give colleges and universities more authority to act against fraternities that haze, instead of having a hands-off policy
The purpose behind the practice was to unify new members, who came from a wide variety of backgrounds.
"Hazing does build unity in a pledge class," Marchesani said. "Because trauma does build unity."
"The night before, the actives had come down and the pledges were told to defend a wall in their sleeping quarters by any means necessary. I asked him what would have happened if an active had gotten through to the wall. He didn't answer, but the implications were pretty severe."
Glen Jewell
President. Alpha Kappa Lambda
sessions and pledges who were taken away from the fraternity blindfolded and made to find their way back and were hit by a vehicle or fall off a cliff. She said pledges being paddled too hard led to paralysis.
The 59 national fraternities that are members of the National Interfraternity Conference have gone on record opposing hazing. About 5,000 undergraduate chapters with more than 300,000 active members belong to the NIC.
Although the penalties for hazing can be as extreme as revoking a chapter's charter or expulsion of individuals from their respective fraternities, hazing still occurs.
Hazing, Stevens said, involves peer pressure and secrecy. Even after serious injuries, members' allegiance remain with a fraternity.
Most fraternity members take oaths of secrecy on their ritual practices and the meanings behind the ideology of fraternities. But if a local chapter has incorporated hazing into this process, knowledge of these practices usually only occurs when something tragic has happened.
In 1979 a fraternity pledge at Ithaca College, Ithaca, N.Y., died from heat exhaustion after going through hours of calisthenics and then being put in a steam room fully clothed. Stevens said.
Last year, Stevens said, a pledge was paralyzed when he was asked to jump blindfolded from a second story window of a barn onto a bale of hay at Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa.
"Hazing contradicts everything fraternities stand for." Stevens said. "These supposedly innocent pranks lead to tragedy. So we've gone beyond boys will be boys. Our statistics indicate people have died and that has nothing to do with brotherhood."
Bob Marchesani, assistant executive director of the NIC in Evanston, III., said hazing was a perverted tradition that the fraternity system did not even start. Hazing, he said, is first thought to have been called penalism in 14th century Europe.
After World War II, when soldiers returned to school and to fraternities,
because they were private organizations.
"The members of fraternities are students," she said. "Therefore, the schools have a moral obligation and responsibility to act accordingly when inappropriate behavior occurs."
"As mothers, we select a school carefully, pay tuition and send them off to school. We don't expect them to be held by the hand but be in good
David Ambler, vice chancellor for student affairs, said he did not think that anti-hazing legislation was needed or would be effective. Most universities do not want to return to the days, Ambler said, where the college operated as a parental guardian.
"Students come here legally as an adult and the University treats them as an adult." Ambler said.
"I think we already have adequate controls. What we need is to have more self-discipline by the fraternities," in adhering to their national fraternities anti-hazing policies.
Marchesani said the problem with anti-hazing laws was that they were too narrow in scope. He said the NIC had drawn up a model hazing law for states to follow, covering all organizations and not just the Greek system.
Some fraternities, attempting to lessen the need for anti-hazing laws, have changed the pledgeship program to an associate member program. Associate members are accepted as brothers in learning and they are involved in all chapter operations and activities except for ritual ones.
Bob London, associate director for chapter services of Lambda Chi Alpha national fraternity in Indianapolis, Ind., one of the first fraternities to adopt the associate member program in 1972, said the associate member program did not separate new members from old members or subordinate members who could be subjected to abuse.
John Hilliard, president of Sigma Nu, 1501 Sigma Nu Place, said, "I think hazing is a bunch of nonsense
"We can lose quite a few guys in rush on the whole because of some of the stories that are told."
Funds unavailable for equipment
Laboratory research falling behind
By Shawn Aday
Staff Reporter
In view of Chancellor Gene A. Budig's statement last month that KU laboratories are crippled by obsolete equipment, someone might envision aged machines full of vacuum tubes and dust.
"More and more of this country's finest research universities are being handicapped by growing inventories of obsolete laboratory equipment," he said July 15 in a prepared statement at the annual meeting of the Association of American Universities in Washington, D.C.
An example is the 300 Megahertz high resolution nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer that KU bought nine months ago. The price was $200,000.
But at the level of graduate research and higher, it is not the old age of obsolete equipment that raises eyebrows; it is its young age.
Spectrometers, which do not use nuclear power, help scientists identify the makeup of new compounds. For instance, a medicinal chemist can identify the molecular structure of a new drug and thus begin the investigation of how the drug will affect the body.
"The information we get from this one is so much better; that one is really obsolete for the work I'm doing," she said, pointing to the department's 10-year-old model, which is still in use.
Paula Martin, Havre, Mont., fifth year graduate student in chemistry, was operating the new spectrometer last month.
But the four science departments that use the 9-month-old spectrometer have proposed that the University of Kansas buy a new one, twice as powerful at 600 Megahertz, that would cost about $700,000. In the proposal, at least half of the cost would be shouldered by matching funds from the National Institutes of Health.
Marlin Harmony, chairman of the department of chemistry, said that the technology to build high-power spectrometers like the 300 had existed for about 10 years, but KU bought its model five years late.
"The 300 is really common these days," he said. "But the 600 is truly at the forefront. With it we could do experiments that very, very few people can do.
Richard Givens, professor of chemistry, said that some other schools such as the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif., already have the newer model.
Old equipment does exist. In fact, some of the same departments asking for the 600 Megahertz spectrometer are still using an ultraviolet spectrometer purchased in 1982. Givens said that professors and graduate students probably would continue to use it until the vacuum tubes, for which replacements can no longer be found, go bad.
"But if we don't get it for 10 years, we'll be at the tail end of research again."
But Sam Shanmugan, director of the telecommunications and information systems laboratory, said the
need for new instruments existed even in his five-year-old lab.
Even though the chemistry department has gained about $700,000 of equipment in the last two years, Harmony said, "We're constantly underfunded. It's a never-ending battle. If you relax for one year, you're two years behind."
Edward Meyen, associate vice chancellor for research, graduate studies and public service, said most money for graduate level research came from the federal government through agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Defense.
These agencies award grants to the researchers who can best put them to use. Harmony said. The costs of special instruments needed for a project usually are figured into the grant, but another university that already has some of those instruments holds an advantage, he said.
The race is against other universities as well as technology.
Likewise, a researcher who obtains instruments through one gain gains an advantage to receive more grants and more instruments. If the research is sound, the university's reputation will grow. It will attract professors who want to work on the leading edge of research and attract students who want the best education.
That hasn't been entirely the case at KU. Meyen said that six professors had left KU in the past two years for better career opportunities
elsewhere. He said he thought that one had gone to private industry, one to government research and the other four to other universities.
Meyen said it would cost $9 million to equip KU with needed, modern research instruments. Equipping the labs with some of the latest equipment that professors desire would cost $3 million more.
The figures are based on a detailed study completed three years ago and updated periodically by the office of research, graduate studies and public service. The study covers only pieces of equipment that cost more than $30,000.
Meyen said that the problem would not be solved by a one-time infusion of funds. Instead, it must be an ongoing effort. He cited a recent national study that said 25 percent of university research instruments were obsolete. Moreover, the study indicated that obsolete inventories grew by 5 percent a year, while investment was growing only by 2 percent.
The investments called for by KU's equipment study would be added to the $2 million spent annually by the University for research expenses. Meyen said the amount spent for equipment alone was not available
The figure of $23 million is from fiscal 1984, the latest year for which computations are complete. Meyen said that funds seemed to remain constant in fiscal 1985. Eighty-three percent of the $23 million was obtained from federal and state agencies
See RESEARCH, p. 5, col. 1
John Lechiter/KANSAN
The life of high-tech, analytic equipment can be very short. Nine months ago, four KU departments purchased a 300 Megahertz high resolution nuclear magnetic resonance spectrometer for $300,000. Today, a newer model is being requested. Paula Martin, Havre, Mont., graduate student, places a sample into the spectrometer.