UT Austin Mobilizes the Houston Community on Hazing Prevention A D R I E N N E M U R P H R E Y, J . D .
The potential new members enter the fraternity house. Fear and uncertainty wafts through the door as they gather to attend the required “meeting.” The first thing they see is the new member trainer’s wooden paddle, a commanding sign of what’s to come. It sits on a tripod in front of the 25 bottles of liquor that encircles the foyer. The new members are asked to step inside the circle of bottles. The evening marches on with binge drinking, paddle beatings, and standing in the cold for hours in wet underwear. Do these individuals have a choice? They feel conflicted, but they remain silent.
While hazing is not new, the conversation about how to address hazing has evolved. According to the 2018 Hazing Prevention Consortium Survey, the shifting attitude against hazing and other high-risk behaviors started with college students themselves. Prior to this in 2017, as new anti-hazing conversations and ideas gained momentum across the country, a collaboration was underway between Dr. Soncia Reagins-Lilly, vice president for student affairs and dean of students at the University of Texas at Austin, and Robert Fondren, university donor, of the Fondren Foundation in Houston, Texas.
These questions linger in their minds, “Is this really the only way to build the bonds of brotherhood? Is this the trade-off for belonging to a fraternity?”
Dr. Lilly envisioned programs to educate communities about hazing and hazing prevention, and Fondren imagined a program that supported students with a local community approach. Together, they created the Houston Outreach Program to educate high school students, parents, administrators, alumni, and community leaders. “We wanted to help develop a program with UT Austin to educate the parents and their students in our community and to provide awareness to local leaders to create a support system for our students,” says Fondren. “As the program developed, and we learned more from the research, we recognized this wasn’t just about hazing. It was about giving students a voice and the tools to demand change. The Fondren Foundation’s interest was not only to affect change in Houston but to help create a model for other communities to provide awareness and
The answer is an unequivocal no; however, why don’t new members feel empowered to give that answer? For decades, universities across the nation have contended with hazing on their campuses. By 2017, a cohort of parents, whose sons died of fraternity hazing, garnered attention with their national efforts to end hazing. Lawsuits were filed. Colleges changed their policies. States revisited weak or non-existent anti-hazing laws to hold individuals and organizations accountable for hazing behavior, including outlawing coerced consumption of alcohol and imposing stringent reporting requirements on universities.
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