Thursday, February 20, 2014

Fraternity members seek to maintain safe initiations

A little more than five years after a ritual hazing took the life of an Aggie freshman, Utah State University fraternity pledges are moving into the second of their own eight-week chapter initiation process.

As they do, Friday’s announcement that homicide charges would be filed in the death of a 19-year-old fraternity member in New York is giving members of Utah State’s Pi Kappa Alpha, Sigma Chi and Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternities even more reason to reflect on the loss of Michael Starks.

Starks, a pledge for the now-defunct Utah State chapter of Sigma Nu, died of alcohol poisoning in 2008.

“After Michael’s death, the thought process that went into designing the pledge programming was severely looked into by each house to ensure that something like that will not happen again,” Pi Kappa Alpha president Ryan Wray said. “Even now, more than five years later, we have frequent meetings talking about hazing and making sure that everything we do has a real purpose and will have a positive effect on the pledges.”

Starks was reaching the end of his first semester at Utah State University and coming into the final weeks of his pledge period with the fraternity Sigma Nu when, on Nov. 20 of that year, he was taken with another Sigma Nu pledge by Chi Omega sorority members to an off-campus house. There, he was stripped down to his underwear, painted Aggie blue and white, and given vodka. An hour later, Starks was taken back to the Sigma Nu fraternity house and put to bed.

In the early hours of Nov. 21, Starks was found unconscious and not breathing. Paramedics arrived but failed to resuscitate Starks, who had a blood alcohol level of .373. He was pronounced dead at the hospital.

There are three different categories of hazing. "Subtle" hazing is an embarrassing or humiliating situation. "Harassment" hazing includes physical or emotional discomfort. "Violent" hazing is most commonly related to binge drinking like in Stark’s case, or beatings and brandings as in the case of Chun Deng, the student at New York’s Baruch College who died on Dec. 8.  

Seeking to prevent similar situations, Utah State University’s Campus Policies for Organizations bans “all forms of hazing, pledge day, and/or pre-initiation activities which are defined as hazing.”

Steven Whitten, who pledged Sigma Chi in the fall of 2013, said that when he was going through the pledge process he never felt pressured or uncomfortable with his soon-to-be fraternity brothers.

“I wholeheartedly trusted my pledge brothers to look after me,” Whitten said. “Every activity the actives put us through was purely constructive, entirely optional and included the participation of the whole chapter.”

Pi Kappa Alpha recruitment chairman Nick Lyle said that each fraternity treats its new members in different ways.

“Michael was a Sigma Nu pledge. I don’t think it’s fair to pool all the fraternities together because of that incident,” Lyle said. “When I pledged Pi Kappa Alpha I was never worried about being hazed because Pike has a no hazing policy. Joining a fraternity is a fun way to socialize and to give back to the community and I think a lot of pledges lose sight of that because the first two things they think of when joining a fraternity is partying and the worry of being hazed.”

Wray agreed.

“Going in I had many stereotype ideas about fraternities in my head, and I remember thinking that if anything like that happened to me I would have quit,” he said. “At the end of the day, we need to accept that bad things can happen. We need to learn from the mistakes our peers have made and make sure the same things don’t happen again like in Michael’s case.”

Cailey Chaney, Matthew Thomas, Morgan Pratt, Cristina Johnson and Kylee Hopkin contributed to this report.


No comments:

Post a Comment