Hazing on 'Whisper': Victims Of Higher Education’s Institutionalized Violence And Sexual Abuse Share Their Horror Stories

Screen Shot 2014-08-21 at 10 — On Whisper, hazing victims share their horror stories. Whisper

On January 25th, 2012, Andrew Lohse spat in the eye of his Dartmouth fraternity’s vow of silence.

In an op-ed for The Dartmouth, the college’s student-run paper, the Ivy League senior shone an unprecedented spotlight on the horrific dark side of the Greek system, which Lohse characterized as “a public health crisis of the utmost importance.” None unfamiliar with the fraternity and sorority systems perched at the top of so many bastions of higher education could have anticipated how graphic his grievances would prove.

“I was a member of a fraternity that asked pledges, in order to become a brother, to swim in a kiddie pool of vomit, urine, fecal matter, semen and rotten food products,” Lohse began, “to eat omelets made of vomit; chug cups of vinegar, which in one case caused a pledge to vomit blood; drink beers poured down fellow pledges’ ass cracks; and vomit on other pledges, among other abuses. Certainly, pledges could have refused these orders. However, under extreme peer pressure, most acquiesced.”

To acquiesce to these savage demands would spell rejection from a fraternity system that promises brotherhood and, ultimately, power to its members. According to a Bloomberg report, approximately 25% of U.S. congresspeople and 40% of U.S. senators belonged to the Greek system while in college. Another report highlights how fraternity affiliation arms recent college graduates with everything they need to beat “odds three times steeper than acceptance into Princeton” and find themselves in internships where a 22-year-old can make over $100,000 a year.

Though the comments on The Dartmouth’s website in response to Lohse’s op-ed appear to have been lost, Rolling Stone has preserved a crucial bit of it: “Lohse, it was decided, was ‘criminal.’ His ‘blanket and bitter portrayal of the Greek system’ was not only false, complained one alumnus, ‘but offensive to tens of thousands of Dartmouth alumni who cherished the memories of their fraternities.” Another commenter warned any hiring managers reading the piece to avoid employing Andrew Lohse, on the grounds that “he [would] bring disgrace to your institution, just as he did when he embarrassed Dartmouth and [his fraternity.]”

[Lohse’s book on the entire ordeal is available on August 26, 2014, and an excerpt of it is available here.]

Character assassination isn’t the only form of reprisal for standing up to the Greek system. After Salisbury University suspended its chapter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon, the nation’s deadliest fraternity, one of its wealthiest alumni withdrew an astonishing $2 million donation from the university.

Institutions of higher education that allows fraternities and sororities which practice hazing find themselves mired in a conflict of interest, one where they cannot neuter abhorrent and deadly systems without risking public admonition from high profile alumni and significant blows to their bottom line.

But the horrors of hazing aren’t isolated to the Greek system. Last Sunday, the University of New Mexico condemned the actions of its women’s soccer team when a hazing ritual sent two of its players to the hospital. Though the University confirmed that freshmen girls on the team had been sprayed with windshield cleaning fluid, they denied an allegation that any were forced to strip naked any sprayed with urine.

“It’s kind of weird that somebody found out about it,” a UNM senior told KRQE, “I feel like it’s something that the soccer team, if it was happening, would try to keep secret and not get out there in public.”

Therein lies the fundamental evil of higher education’s institutionalized — and therefore normalized — systems of violence: that a tradition of volunteering for physical and sexual abuse is less strange than the exposure of its inner workings. To its participants, the real evil is not the threat of violence but the threat of getting caught.

Using an anonymous story sharing app called Whisper, current students and alumni of universities from all around the world recounted the horrors of their school’s hazing system without fear of reprisal. Though the accompanying artwork is tame, their stories are quite graphic.

[Whisper’s team uses a back-end managed certification system to ensure the veracity of these stories. Check the app out here.]

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