*****
The small private Midwest school had been my dream
choice, made possible only with a generous financial aid package, based on my
test scores, my hard-earned grades, and the financial need of being the oldest
of four children of a factory worker and a stay at home mom. I was so happy to
be able to attend there, and I imagined it would be a real academic experience, unlike
our sports-crazed high school. I was excited to be living in an old
dorm with two big rooms for my three roommates and I. We all wrote each other that
summer of 1968, excited at the upcoming trimester. And then I arrived on campus, and I found in my packet of materials, instead of the laptop
students these days receive, a maroon cap, referred to in almost reverential terms, both then and now, as "a beanie, an important tradition at this college." This cap was my first personal introduction to the experience of hazing.Not my first knowledge of hazing. That came in junior high, when I learned that the ninth grade choir required an “initiation” that involved demoralizing and uncomfortably disfiguring (though not physically endangering) rites such as having rotten eggs rubbed into one’s hair while wearing diapers and having photos taken of the embarrassment. This was all in good fun, as they say, under the auspices of the choir director, an adult of the type my sister and I used to call “Friend to the Teenager,” adults who cared more about being friends than being adults, who were into all the gossip about who was dating whom and what we thought the hottest rock song was. Fortunately, I didn’t make choir but was in band, and our band director, who was not a “Friend to the Teenager” but a musician and hard worker, would not allow any such thing.
I had no idea that college would involve any such thing before I arrived on campus, so I was surprised by it, and though I had reservations about the process so great that I could have been a Hilton Hotel, I was assured by all the administrators (most faculty were not so keen on it either) that this was going to be great fun! All first year students were to wear the beanies at all times so everyone would know we were “frosh.” But not so they could help us make any adjustments. No, so they could scream across the street or in the frosh face, “What’s wrong with you frosh? Can’t you wear that beanie right?” or some other supposedly mild demeaning insult. Whatever you answered to that was wrong, and many upperclassmen expected you to answer respectfully by saying “Yessir” or “Yes ma’am,” as though they were your drill sergeant. Many screamed like drill sergeants. I was not accustomed to being screamed at.
And it wasn’t just on the street. I recall one
particularly odious sophomore woman who was attractive , with long, straight hair which would be the
envy of any 20 year old today and a large-nostril nose, a bit, I have to say,
pig-like looking. She worked in the cafeteria, and every time I came through
the line where she was dishing up salad, she’d harass me: “Better get that
beanie pulled down, frosh!,” “What did you say, frosh? Don’t you mean, ‘tossed salad, please ma’am’?” I would try to case out which line she was on and go to
any other.
I just wanted to blend in, not be called out, and to
wear a beanie meant to be called out, without warning, at any time. And if one
chose not to wear it? One was called in. A committee appeared at one’s dorm
room, with the threat of a formal hearing if one did not wear the beanie.
I know, I know. This was all meant in fun. Over and
over, I was told what fun this was. And I know it was not the alcohol-abusing,
death-defying harassment perpetrated by Greek organizations. However, it was
campus-wide, it was perpetuated by the adults on the campus, who quashed any
complaints by repeating how much fun it was, how it provided a bonding
experience that nothing else would. How it was a cherished college tradition
that freshman had endured for decades for the first six weeks of school, after
which there was a big bonfire, which freshman had to build and circle around in
the dark, and then the next day, presto, change-o, we didn’t have to wear the
beanies any more.
Our parents were told not to let us come home during
that six weeks. My parents would have let me come home any way, but I was
determined to try to fit in and get invested in my studies, which I loved. But
any time I was outside of class or my dorm room, whether in the library, at
meals, or crossing the street, the hazing could begin and I spent the six weeks
with my stomach in knots most of the time, waiting for the next small public
humiliation.
I have to say, for me, and for many freshmen I knew,
it was not a bonding experience. Two of my three roommates left at the end of
the year, and I was becoming distressed at the college’s general emphasis on
amusement over academics. And while I am relieved, I am not amused today to
read on the college’s website that “Hazing is not a tradition….Hazing is not a
ritual,” which I was told in 1968 over and over again that it was both.
Still and all, I hadn’t thought about that very
stupid hat for a long time, until I
read Kim
Stafford’s latest book, 100
Books Every Boy Can Do, explores his memories of his older brother,
Brett, who committed suicide in middle age. The book is written in part for what can be
learned from the brother's life and death. It happens
to touch on Brett’s experience with freshman hazing at Grinnell College. Brett
hadn’t mentioned it to his family at the time, but Stafford recalls now that
years later, when helping his brother create a new resumé, Brett refused to
list his year at Grinell. And after his brother’s death, Kim learns while
visiting Grinnell that terrible hazing incidents were delivered up on the
freshmen during Brett’s freshman year there, especially on the men. Kim writes:
Stafford’s latest book, 100
Books Every Boy Can Do, explores his memories of his older brother,
Brett, who committed suicide in middle age. The book is written in part for what can be
learned from the brother's life and death. It happens
to touch on Brett’s experience with freshman hazing at Grinnell College. Brett
hadn’t mentioned it to his family at the time, but Stafford recalls now that
years later, when helping his brother create a new resumé, Brett refused to
list his year at Grinell. And after his brother’s death, Kim learns while
visiting Grinnell that terrible hazing incidents were delivered up on the
freshmen during Brett’s freshman year there, especially on the men. Kim writes:
I understood that my
brother, though a year older, was always too young, too tender, too much the
saint. Those were the years of Vietnam, soldiers, a kind of free love for which
my brother’s Midwest heritage had not prepared him, and his first long
departure from home into a world he could not manage.
No one in my family would ever call me a saint, but
my mother had always said that I had her father’s tendencies to be overly
self-conscious, and that nails why the hazing was such a trial to me. I wanted
to come to college and quietly succeed. I felt self-conscious enough as it was, some of it due, I now realize to being a first generation college student.
I did not need someone to be shouting out my difference from all corners of the
campus in sudden, unexpected times, and with disrespect. I could not manage that place. But I came to
feel that I had to if I were to graduate from college, which I wanted to do
more than anything. The first in my family to go to actually obtain a degree,
I felt that fitting in was very important to succeeding there. I was wrong and eventually found other cockamamie unfitting profs and friends, but not that first year.
After the initial beanie experience, all the hazing on
that campus came out of the Greek organizations, and I knew I would never join
one. However, at that time Greek life (to use an oxymoron) was the only life on
campus. By the historical account now at my college’s website, 80-90% of the
students there in the 1960’s belonged to its local sororities and fraternities.
I had excellent grades and when pledging offers came into me at various times from
four or five of the six sororities on campus the Dean of Women Students,
definitely a “Friend to the Teenager” type, called me in three semesters in a
row to ask why I didn’t want to pledge. If it was dues, she offered, the
college could help me out with that. Every semester, I would say no thanks,
politely, and not get into debates with her, but if I had, I would have told
her that in addition to the hazing issue, I thought sororities were against
everything I had learned in church about loving everyone (and not just the ones
with enough money to be in your club). But then, I lost a lot of my religion at
that church college.
However, I could not transfer. At that time, a
transfer student would lose financial aid for one year, at least lose the
government student loans that LBJ’s “Great Society” had worked for kids like
me. It had seemed like an enormous gift as I headed off to college, but when I
tried to transfer, it became my golden handcuffs, binding me to the college in
ways the beanie did not. As the oldest of four children, I had a sibling coming
along every two years, and I could not afford to lose a year of financial aid.
By my sophomore year, I went into home mode, heading the two hours back to my
parents’ house every other weekend, battening myself down with my studies on
the off-weekend.
*****
I eventually graduated and continued for years after
to be overly self- conscious, to experience bouts of depression and even
suicidal tendencies that I am now happy to have left behind. And while I don’t
think those first six weeks of college damaged me forever, they did
alienate me from the college where I had to spend the next four years, and left me
totally opposed to hazing in even its mildest forms. I know many people find
such private and public humiliations fun, especially with the thought that in
the coming years, they can be the perpetrators rather than the preyed-upon.
Such people believe that I am quite the spoilsport.
And I know that hazing has
been reduced today, purportedly even at my undergraduate institution (which I
will never be able to call my “alma mater.”) But I also know that the emphasis has
been on preventing physical harm, since that leads to death, which is so messy
for colleges to clean up after. Hank Nuwer, a professor at Indiana's Franklin
College, who wrote "Wrongs of Passage: Fraternities, Sororities, Hazing,
and Binge Drinking," when asked his opinion on bringing beanies back said
to The Christian Science Monitor, “No
one ever died from a beanie,” and stated that keeping such a tradition was just
a great way to build solidarity. So even he, the expert on hazing thinks it's just fine to bring back the old humiliations.
I beg to differ. While few if any people have "died from a beanie," death does not have to be the only reason for getting rid of traditions that involve the harm and humiliation of any kind of hazing, including enforced hat wear and all the heckling that goes with it.
