About men; about cold beer, willing women, hazing, conformity - about fraternities

Washington Monthly, Nov, 1988 by Jason DeParle

Outside of Hell Night, pondings were the mainstay of Delt hazing. The Duke campus is blessed with lovely gardens. The gardens are blessed with a pond. Delt pledges were blessed with being heaved in it whenever there were enough brothers on hand to drag them off. And vice versa. (Cease-fires were called on the coldest days.) The purpose, we were told, was to build brotherhood: the threat of being hauled away encouraged you to move in packs. At best, this was tiresome. It meant a semester of sneaking around campus like a Baghdad thief, scouting the quad before emerging from the library. Given that pledging occurs every other semester, this fills fully one-half of a Dest's college career with the worry of abduction. That alone is reason enough to quit.

At worst, the pondings produced the exact opposite of the spirit they intended. Tempers flared. Punches landed. Our attempts to pond one brother sent him to the emergency room for stitches on a cut above his eye. As the semester progressed, so did the frustration of the ponded, and the clashes grew increasingly physical.

So did the weekly pledge meetings, where the number of requisite push-ups was growing. One evening a pledge entered the chapter room without making the mandatory D-T-D sign above his head; a brother slammed him into a wall. "Get out there and do it again, pledge," he said. I was at an offcampus party that semester with my tie-dyed friend when an unusually nerdy Delt, a future neurosurgeon, demanded that I join him in a chug contest. I won. "Pledge," he said, pouring a beer on my head.

The humiliations of hazing are said to build bonds, forge a collective identity. The theory goes like this: If you and 12 buddies have had cornflakes stuck to your crotch and ducks defecate in your hair, and only you and your 12 buddies, then it gives you something in common. This is true, of course. But one suspects there are better ways to share experiences-like starting a soup kitchen or going on a camping trip. Duke offered a student-run wilderness course that, like Outward Bound, offered challenges and bonded its participants with rituals like ropes courses and trust falls, rather than humiliation. For all the talk of togetherness, fraternity hazing is probably at least as divisive as it is uniting. I doubt my pledgemate had too many brotherly feelings about being slammed into a wall. I certainly was not eager to embrace as a brother the jerk who threw beer on me in front of my girlfriend. Those resentments don't disappear when a pledge pin comes off.

The truer appeal to hazing may simply be that it gives you a chance to dump on someone with immunity. Where else, outside of fraternity life, could the neurosurgeon pretend he's Conrad Dobler? There's a little bit of punk in most of us that delights in the powerlessness of others, and hazing sets it free-too free by the witness of various coroners' reports. Hazing doesn't just offer immunity from retaliation; it offers immunity from self, too, from conscience. The hazer can think, "I'm not really do ing this; the group is." The film Fraternity, Row, which appeared a year before Animal House and which got none of the recognition it deserved, masterfully depicts the dynamics of hazing. A reformer pledgemaster wants to ban it, citing the ugly aftertaste. "The stuff Preston pulled divides us still," he pleads with his brothers. No one denies that Preston, their former tormentor, was a creep. But now it's their turn, and the chance to pelt the pledges is just too tempting.