I recently sent Stephanie of Porc Therapy an email about my experience with a fraternity initiation. It’s available here with great commentary by her, and later Dale Everett (and some extra contributions by me), but for those interested in reading the main text, I’m sharing it here:

At the university I attended, a third of the students were affiliated with fraternities and sororities. Considering also that it was a science and engineering school that likely had an unusually high number of people more inclined to stay in their dorm rooms than seek out social events, Greek institutions were very much central to the social scene. And so, in my freshman year, I participated in the rush process.

I had no interest in joining a fraternity that was known to haze, which is perhaps the reason I was initially attracted to the fraternity I ended up joining, which has a national policy against hazing (Despite the school having a no-hazing policy, it was well know that several of the other frats and sororities did in fact haze). I soon found myself making friends with a few of the brothers and some of the guys in my rush class, and ended up becoming an Associate Member, which is what this fraternity calls their pledges.

In general, there was indeed no hazing. There was some cruelty among members, but it was nothing more than one would experience living in a college dorm, maybe even less. What I want to share regards the brotherhood initiation ceremony of this supposed anti-hazing fraternity.

The initiation starts with the Associate Members stripping down to their underwear. Decades earlier, this was done naked, but that is one of the few parts of the ritual that has been altered. The Associate Members then enter a dark room and are soon given a skimpy robe to wear. From here, most of the ceremony is your standard fare of hocus-pocus nonsense, except for one part during which each member is taken individually into the dark room.

When you enter the room, the only light is from an oil lamp reminiscent of the genie’s lamp in Alladin. There are seven brothers in robes that obscure their faces in a semi-circle in front of you. Eventually, you are handed the lamp, and one of the robed brothers asks you to bring him the light so that he might spread it, or something to that effect, but when you approach him and attempt to give him the lamp, he keeps his arms opened out to his sides and won’t receive it.

Then another brother says, “No!” bring him the light, and mentions a less noble purpose, but it is obscured in cryptic language. He holds his hands in front of him, and when you give him the lamp, he pulls it toward himself, and blows it out. [Edit: this is not entirely accurate. See below for clarification.] For a moment, you are in complete darkness. Then all of the lights are thrown on, and the fraternity’s educational chairman, wearing a suit, walks briskly through the room, grabs you, and leads you away to one of the brother’s bedrooms.

There, you are grilled about what happened, and what you did wrong. I was horrified during this experience, but some members are even brought to tears at this point. After being talked into admitting that you did something wrong, and convinced that you should apologize to the brotherhood, the educational chairman says he’ll go see if the brothers are willing to hear your apology. After a while, he returns, says they will hear your apology, and leads you back to the ritual room, where you are made to apologize to the brotherhood before the rest of the ritual continues.

This is entirely scripted, and almost never does an initiate do anything unexpected, throughout all of the national chapters. It’s an episode full of manipulation, subordination, and shaming, and unquestionably a clear example of psychological hazing institutionalized into an organization that claims to be against all hazing.