History of hazing

How fraternities have influenced team sports

By Katie Czenczek, Staff Writer

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article about hazing and its application to sports. To follow up on this topic, I thought that it would be important to go back to where it all began. Ancient Greece, said to be the creator of European democracy, also had an influence on what we know and hate today as hazing. It turns out the Great Thinkers of that time also forced new students and teammates to binge drink at a raging kegger.

In a report created by Hank Nuwer, a professor of journalism at Franklin College in the United States, it is revealed that Plato was allegedly one of the first to observe hazing. Back when toga parties were just called parties, students were treating each other just as terribly. In 387 BCE, “Plato commented on the savagery of young boys” that attended his lessons. By this time, the Olympics were alive and well in Athens. Often fraternities would establish their own sport teams to play against one another.

Nuwer’s report also highlighted how Justinian of the Byzantine Empire “decreed that the hazing of first-year law students must be ended.”

Martin Luther, not to be confused with King Jr., even held a personal account of his own experiences with hazing at Erfurt.

It appears as if hazing started with the introduction of fraternities, and later, sororities. It was in educational institutes where higher learning was expected to be conducted, that hazing became what we know it is to be today. I think that this is an important distinction to make because the majority of hazing incidents on sports teams occur on both college campuses and also within high schools.

For all of the older historical cases that report hazing incidents, all of which had ties to educational institutes. This may be due to team sports only being organized by students and not yet established on their own, but I do still find it puzzling that this pattern has still continued well into the modern era.

I believe this is due to the hierarchy set up from a school’s structure of freshmen, sophomore, junior, and senior. New athletes often do not get the same respect as seasoned athletes get even at the professional level, and I believe that it is an even more dramatic line drawn between rookie and veteran in college and high school sports.

The line drawn between veteran and rookie, or hazer and hazee, sets up a power dynamic that leaves the rookie having to do the veteran’s every bidding. If you ever want to see how much power can influence a person’s treatment of the said “lesser person,” take a look at the Stanford Prison Experiment. I believe that a similar phenomenon is occurring when veterans haze rookies. This predominately occurs due to fraternity and sorority culture influencing college team sports. Initiation ceremonies come first from sororities and fraternities, as established by firsthand accounts within history, and later bleed into teams like a poison.

The Greeks have influenced us in many wonderful ways: The Olympics, theatre, the baseline for Western philosophical thought, and trial and jury. I just don’t believe that we need to take on all of their practices. One of which is hazing new teammates on high school and college teams.