Hi, my name is Hayden Myers, and this is my third blog post about my ideas on what’s going on with fraternities today. After two blog posts, extensive research, and having a story of my own, I have finally posted a new blog about what my final opinions are about what needs to  be done with fraternities. I started off by explaining why I though that fraternities should be shut down for good, because the only experience that I had with fraternities was my parents telling me that they’re a terrible place filled with alcoholics and idiots who party too much, and to put the cherry on top my neighbor was hospitalized because the first day at a fraternity he was hazed. I my second blog post I explained why fraternities should be given more strict policies to make sure that things like hazing can’t happen again. Now, I have made my third and final blog post, finalizing my ideas on fraternities, and after a lot of thinking, I have realized that people will find a way to torture and kill these people no matter what, even if they don’t want to, it will happen, and there is nothing that anyone else can do to help stop this. The only way is to get rid of the source of the problem.

If that wasn’t obvious enough, that means that the only solution for saving lives in any college fraternity in America is to ban the fraternity, period. Now, it took me a while to come up with my opinion on whether fraternities should be shut down or just restricted. What pushed me to the edge is that all of the hazing deaths that I have researched about proved that alcohol was the biggest factor in hazing deaths than anything else by far, but it would be illegal to ban someone over twenty one from drinking, and even if alcohol was limited or banned in the fraternity, the party would probably just be held somewhere else. I felt like I was getting closer and closer to a conclusion until I remembered something, I had read an article that I linked in my second blog post, which explained that fraternities were created so the kids with a lot of money(upper-middle class- rich) could get away from the kids who had less than them. An argument for this would be; “well that was a while ago, they don’t do that anymore”. While that argument is understandable because fraternities hide most from the truth, real studies that are mentioned in that article explain how if two people wanted to join a fraternity and they both were the exact same person, the fraternity will most likely choose the one who has more money, or seems to have more money. I simply cannot support these discriminatory acts. Because of these points, I believe that fraternities should be shut down for good.

I decided to make a change, but how would I do that? I made a change by making an instagram account posting my own drawings of all of the people killed by fraternity hazing in 2017. I did this for three reasons; honor those who lost their lives, show how evil hazing is, and to show that even though it was a terrible year for many people, it shed light on the biggest issue with fraternities, and has now pushed people to make the first steps into a safer environment in the learning place, and has led to websites like these! Proving everything that has been said throughout this post. This may seem like a conclusion to my “rant” but it is not, there are still many steps to be taken to reach our goal, sign petitions, make websites, social media, march, rally, email, just do whatever is possible to save lives and give a better name to colleges. I wish that I could have made the extra step to try to share my social media platform with more people, through email, social media itself, just anything, because what’s the point of making a protest hub, with nobody to know that it’s there.

This is my Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/

A little while back I posted a blog post about fraternities and their problems, but I have done more research and interviewed a few people, and I have updates. I interviewed two people, one who is director of fraternity and sorority affairs at a college that I will not mention for anonymity reasons. The other was Jake Sisco, the assistant director of admission at Wellesley University, and was a member of Kappa Sigma fraternity at MSU. With my new information I am back with a second blog post explaining everything that I have learned since my first post.

In my first post I stated that fraternity brothers aren’t real brothers, and that fraternities should be shut down. I also stated that my neighbor was hazed, so it was pretty obvious that at that time that I had some bias against fraternities. Since then, I have put my biases to the side, and tried to look for some of the good aspects of greek life, rather than focusing on the bad things about fraternities. Of course, I will include bad things, because fraternities aren’t all good or bad.

In my first blog post I explained the reasons behind why I think fraternities are bad, what is bad about them, and why they should be shut down. I used evidence from Timothy Piazza death related to fraternity hazing that happened a year ago. Seems very well backed up right? Well all of the things that I said in that post were true, but the internet has a way of doing things where it filters all of the most popular things to pop up first, and the most popular things are usually bad things about fraternities, which casts a negative stereotype over fraternities. In this post I will be speaking the truth about fraternities to the best of my ability.

http://www.ttujournalism.net/classes/j4370/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2015/12/HazingInUS.jpeg

Chart for hazing in the U.S. Shows how many people are hazed per year, deaths, and who realizes that they are being hazed when it is happening.

As I stated in my first blog post fraternities were created to get the rich kids away from the poor kids, that is true, but fraternities were created a while ago, and that has evolved, now fraternities welcome people based on how dedicated they are to greek life, and as both of my interviewees told me, hazing happens a lot, but most fraternities see initiation as a celebration of new members, rather than a test or a “haze”.  In fact, Jake told me that the worst thing his fraternity ever did to initiate people was make them solve a puzzle in the dark, which is not very bad compared to the other things that have happened during an initiation to a fraternity.

https://images.complex.com/complex/images/c_limit,w_604/fl_lossy,pg_1,q_auto/s6lzwdmrf7puawqg23xx/fraternity

Initiation to a fraternity

I asked Jake and the other person I interviewed to tell me what happens in order to prevent anything bad happening in a fraternity, and what is done as a punishment to the people in a fraternity. They told me that fraternities can be monitored, they can be dry fraternities, meaning that alcohol is not prohibited, and a few more things that you would expect. A way to stop bad things from happening again, was an “actions have consequences” approach, where depending on how bad something was, there would be punishments from “no parties for the rest of the year”, to expelliation from the fraternity or the school, or for things like the Timothy Piazza case that I talked about in my first post, there can be criminal charges against the other fraternity members. This shows to be careful when in a fraternity and to be careful when looking for a fraternity to join. From these two interviews I can take away that bad things happen because of fraternities, but fraternities are not all bad, as most of them unite people, and show brotherhood, my wise words would be to be careful with what kind of fraternity you are joining.

Fraternity Brothers aren’t real brothers

I was walking home from school one day when I got a call from my mom saying that one of my friends was in the hospital, I asked why and my mom said that when he was going into college he decided to join a fraternity and was hazed. He drank to much beer and had to go to the hospital where he could have died. My friend is also my neighbor so this hit me pretty hard. Ever since then I have been very serious about the end of fraternities.

Hazing is an “initiation” to a fraternity using sexually humiliating, physically abusive, and/or forcing alcohol types of strategies to the hazing victim to show brotherhood to the fraternity, but it is really just torture. Hazing consists of the other fraternity members handing the person being initiated so much beer that it could be lethal, and some fraternities paddle whoever they are hazing which leave very explicit marks on the victim to such an extent that the victim can die from that as well. Hazing is a huge problem because hazing occurs 76% of the time when somebody new joins a fraternity which is 3% more than in gangs.

http://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/file.php?path=/images/CQ_Researcher/r20040109-whohazesmost.gif - This is an image of the percentage of people who get hazed when they join one of these social groups.

A huge misconception about hazing is that people think that it is a very rare occurrence that doesn’t do much damage to a person or society when it is committed, but in actuality hazing happens a lot, and when it happens it does hurt. As in almost every fraternity hazing happens when new members join, most times that this happens the victims get sent to a hospital, and at least one hazing related death per year with seventy deaths since 2000, so hazing is getting worse. Somebody named Timothy Piazza who was a member of the Beta Theta Pi Fraternity died because of hazing last year. Timothy  was given eighteen beers in 82 minutes, Tim fell down the fraternity houses stairs, fractured his skull, went through irreversible traumatic brain injuries, had his spleen ruptured in multiple ways which caused extensive internal bleeding and hemorrhagic shock. Tim then died after being left at the bottom of the stairs for twelve hours. This incident not only killed Timothy, but ruined every other fraternity “brothers” life because themselves and the Beta Theta Pi fraternity have been charged with 850 charges including involuntary manslaughter. The shocking part bout this case is that the fraternity that Timothy joined was a “reformed” fraternity, which means that it has a strict behavioral policy, a no alcohol policy, and adult supervision with security footage. This was shocking to me not because they weren’t supposed to do these things, but because nobody knew this was happening, not even the adult who was supposed to be supervising the fraternity members. After I researched this case and others like it I became shocked because I thought that what happened to my friend was the worst that it could get, but I became scared and thought about “what if that happened to my friend?” I would have been devastated if my friend died, which made me devastated when I heard that many other people have died and made me hate fraternities even more.

https://www.unilad.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/111007_brandbox_americanpie.jpg.CROP_.rectangle3-large.jpg - Picture of students being hazed or “running the gauntlet” at a fraternity.

Fraternity deaths are getting more numerous which makes fraternities get more known which reveals more of the horrifying truth about fraternities to the world. Right now people are considering shutting down fraternities because of all of the deaths that fraternities have caused and the side effects of fraternities that affect the members, such as, being more likely to become a rapist, alcoholic, drug abuser, and much more.

Help fraternities get noticed so all of the deaths and ruined lives can stop. Fraternities are very close to coming to an end such as Timothy Piazza’s fraternity, and some schools are already banning fraternities from their campuses. We can help shut fraternities by working together and maybe even getting into contact with schools. Stand up against fraternities!

          http://s1.ibtimes.com/sites/www.ibtimes.com/files/styles/embed/public/2017/05/15/timothy-piazza.PNG - Picture of Timothy Piazza, the person who died at the hazing incident at Beta Theta Pi Fraternity.

If you would like to see my annotated bibliography, click here.