Student societies and their initiation ceremonies

[Forostar]

I often have a big mouth about what's happening abroad but I am also not the last to show some idiotic things from my own country. This time:  Student societies and their initiation ceremonies.

If you want to belong to a student society and it happens to be an old one with traditions etc. (called 'corps') you'll have to undergo a lot of crap. I live in Delft, and every September the center streets are flooded with new batches of students, partying but also doing less normal things. How's that in your countries?

Check this out:

Will Dutch students start saying no to initiation misery?

Groups of exhausted and miserable-looking young people in bedraggled and outlandish costumes being herded through the streets by gleeful captors: it’s a common sight at the start of the academic year in Dutch university cities. Students who want to join student societies – especially the oldest and most traditional ones known as ‘corps’ – are forced to undergo gruelling initiation ceremonies.

However, it seems that a new generation of students could be rebelling against the tradition of ritualised torture and humiliation. A poll of students in the northern city of Groningen found that two-thirds strongly opposed the practice of initiation rituals for freshers. Almost a third of them said they saw it as a reason not to join a student society at all. Although 34 percent of the 200 students surveyed took a positive view of initiation, less than half of these welcomed it as a fine old tradition to be preserved.

Every year there are alarming reports of excesses during what is known in the US as ‘hazing’. Famously in 1965, an aristocratic student in Utrecht died of suffocation with a bag of soot over his head. And in 1997, a Groningen first-year died of alcohol poisoning after being forced to drink huge amounts of Dutch gin.

Secrecy
The student societies keep the precise nature of their initiation rituals veiled in mystery, and freshers are sworn to secrecy. This video on YouTube, featuring students pelted with eggs and forced to crawl in the street, shows how reticent society members are to let their activities be filmed:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18jr-FmdhdY

The website ontgroening.com is devoted to student stories of initiation horrors. Practices range from teasing to protracted humiliation and torture. There are tales of freshers being smeared with excrement or made to eat vomit.

Sexual abuse
According to leaked reports, rituals have also included students being forced to have sex with a chicken or a goat, or swallow live goldfish – eliciting fierce protests from animal rights groups. Other practices include having students drink vast quantities of alcohol or water, or depriving them of sleep and food. The humiliation often goes as far as sexual abuse, and there are reports of female students being given the ‘date rape drug’ Rohypnol to make them more vulnerable.

A 1997 article in the newspaper NRC Handelsblad described students in Delft being immersed in iced water or hung by the wrists for hours on end. In response, Delft University of Technology cut back the funding to one of its largest student societies.

Sadism
Groningen students may take a dim view of the initiation tradition, but the system aimed at building camaraderie seems to be self-perpetuating. Despite the horror stories, the oldest student societies enjoy so much cachet that each year brings a fresh supply of young first-years so eager to be part of the group they are prepared to go through hell – and of seasoned society members ready to relish a spot of institutionalised sadism.

 

[Dr. Eddies Wingman]

At the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (earlier Norwegian Technical College or in Norwegian Norges Tekniske Høgskole), the different engineering studies have some quite varied initiation ceremonies. Some examples:

- Electrical engineering students have to shake hands with an old-timer who is equipped with a wired glove. I've heard it can be quite painful 
- The mechanical engineering students earlier had to shine the tram tracks in the city centre using toothbrushes  These days this is replaced with them having to do different tasks in public - these range from fun to almost humiliating
- The chemical engineering students were earlier forced to answer more or less impossible chemistry related questions - after which they would have to wear a hood soaked in salmiac for some seconds. Very unpleasant if they didn't know that they should hold their breath. This is now abandoned - instead they have to drink a solution which tastes bad and makes them pee blue fo the next 24 hours  In addition to this, they also have to do similar activities in public as the mechanical engineering students do. One variation is that some of them are sold as "slaves" to older students for a day - they can then be set to do trivial jobs like cooking, cleaning et cetera - and the money from the slave sale goes to charity.
- The marine engineering students are going through the worst trials these days. They first have to crawl around a gravel football pitch for some time, before being led down to the harbor where they have to swim in the harbor pool (the water in the Trondheim fjord is not very warm in September ...) before having to crawl through pipes filled with fish guts and other stuff that smells bad. All this to please King Neptune and his loyal followers ...

However, it should be pointed out that outright abuse isn't going on (to my knowledge, at least) - and definitely not things like sexual abuse, drugs or eating of excrement.


In addition to the initiation ceremonies for the particular societies, there is an annual tradition in Trondheim where first year students have a bath tub race across the river. The different societies compete with each other, sabotage of all kinds is allowed  The bath tubs are usually modified a lot and extended with floaters etc., and the event is quite colorful ...

 

[LooseCannon]

Well, Foro, initiation rituals have a different name over here, and possibly in the UK: it's called hazing - the ceremonial degradation of a human being in order to somehow convey a sense of fellowship.

 

[SinisterMinisterX]

What's the one called that sailors do the first time they cross the equator? That one is rumored to get pretty nasty sometimes.

 

[Cornfed Hick]

This reminds me of my favorite scene in the movie, Old School -- the one involving the cinder block and the manhole.  Hell, I'm chuckling even as I type this. 

Fraternity hazing in the U.S. usually just involves drinking and public nudity -- except the traditionally black fraternities, who make their pledges march in line carrying bags of bricks, and then get branded (literally, with a hot iron) at initiation.

 

[LooseCannon]

Okay, I'm home and ready to post properly on this subject.  Unfortunately, I don't think you're entirely right about hazing, cornfedhick.  While incidents of actual hazing are far down in the 21st century, many schools and institutions are still battling with it in the modern era.  When I worked for my Student Union at my school, one of my jobs was monitoring that sort of behaviour, and while a lot of it has been cut out, rather a lot has just been hidden behind closed doors.

During my 10 months on the job I investigated cases of paddling, sleep deprivation, and forced exertion.  In the five years up to that, there had been cases of that and more, such as defecating and urinating on individuals, a group masturbating over one or two of the new individuals (the infamous circle jerk), mind games (forcing a prospect to drink from a barrel they watched the invested members defecate and urinate into all week, without knowing it's been switched out), forced mass alcohol consumption, rape, bestiality, and a lovely thing called the dunk tank, in which a baby pool is filled with semen, feces, urine, and blood (yes, blood) and all the pledges have to immerse in it.

In 2000, a student had to run the swamp, a usual procedure done at that time by the residents of one house.  This year, the fellow (drunk) stepped on a broken beer bottle in the swamp, sued the school for like $6 million and won.  Probably because all the tendons in his ankle were slashed.  So that's pretty recent, actually.

And that's at one school of 4250.  My own initiation wasn't so bad, but it was still there, and it wasn't a pleasant experience.  There's a lot of people with mixed experiences.

 

[Perun]

German student corporations have a long tradition. In fact, I checked Wikipedia, and the German term, Studentenverbindung, seems to be a proper English term for it.

They started back during and after the Napoleonic Age, the forming of a German nation was progressive and the way of the future, and they set out to found the new intellectual elite of such a nation.

They were the key thinkers of the 1817 student revolts in what was to become Germany; they later were the organisations that supported the revolution of 1848/49. In 1870/71, they finally achieved their goal.

And that's when they stopped thinking. Basically, they radicalised intellectuals to fight in the trenches from 1914 to 1918; universities with strong and powerful student corporations were the first ones with national socialist majorities in the 1930s.

I used to study at a university that was founded in the 18th century, and that was dominated by corporations. In 1933, it had prided itself in saying it was the first German university that was "free" of Jews. Every student organisation was headed by somebody who was in a corporation. They were everywhere. And they had the black-white-red banner and said that Germany should "finally stop accusing itself of the stuff done from '33-'45." I quoted.

Now I study at a university founded in 1949. While there are student corporations, they are completely powerless and have nothing to say. I'm happy about that.


I have no good word to say about them.

 

[Genghis Khan]

In Canada, hazing and initiation rites usually start at the beginning of high school (grade 9).  A couple of days back, a local story broke out.  "Minors" as highschool freshmen are called were taken to nearby woods and paddled.  Similar things happened during my years.  I've no experience of hazing during my university years.  I could have cared less about typical things done as entertainment.  I've dug around and found this interesting article about hazing.  Here it is in case anyone is interested.  Check especially the second to last paragraph.  That's a poignant point.

Hazing the ultimate in grisly initiation rites

When dinner-party conversation used to turn to homosexual issues, one of our friends, Dave, would sometimes take it upon himself to be devilishly incorrect by adopting a British mariner's accent and lecherously asking:

By The Vancouver SunNovember 5, 2005



When dinner-party conversation used to turn to homosexual issues, one of our friends, Dave, would sometimes take it upon himself to be devilishly incorrect by adopting a British mariner's accent and lecherously asking:

"Have you ever been to sea, Billy?"

His har-de-harring made me recognize what should have been obvious: The all-male crews that once sailed the oceans blue comprised a closed society in which many young sailors were probably initiated into the sea-going life through secretive male-to-male sex.

The sailor link also came to mind recently in response to the recent furor about sexual hazing rituals involving rookie football players at McGill University and big-time hockey hopefuls at the Windsor Spitfires.

The Oxford Dictionary says the original meaning of hazing is nautical, referring to sailors who were "harassed with overwork." Since then the word has been defined in North America as "bullying."

Beyond being revolted by the humiliating nature of hazing's male-on-male bullying, I found myself wondering three things:

- Why is male hazing so focussed on homosexuality?

- Is hazing prevalent in all walks of life, including the military, boys' private schools and to broaden the definition, medical training programs?

- If initiation rites accomplish anything, like creating a feeling of belonging and promoting toughness, could those things be accomplished another way?

The football hazing practised at Montreal's McGill University came to light when a new player complained about veterans threatening, as is their custom, to shove a broom handle up his anus and make him and others perform fake fellatio.

Soon after, a player in the Ontario Hockey League's Windsor Spitfires fought back against the "hotbox" hazing ritual of being crammed naked into a bus washroom with three other stripped players. As ostracization, 16-year-old complainant Akim Aliu later had two teeth knocked out in practice by a goon teammate.

In the resulting furor, all sorts of North American sadistic hazing techniques have been trotted out -- including itching powder being applied to boys' genitals at an Ontario private school, male players being forced to consume poisonous amounts of alcohol, tied-up athletes being made to drink urine and rugby players demanding recruits eat goldfish and pass them mouth to mouth.

Worse physical and sexual humiliations occur in the military (not to mention in prison), during which some men have died.

The army and navy hazings are usually justified as unauthorized training -- to demand unquestioning obedience and prepare men for the pure hell of combat, where dignity is often forfeited to survive.

A Canadian journalist who used to be an athlete wrote recently that he and his former male sports pals took part willingly in over-drinking and homo-suggestive rituals to prove they were bona fide heterosexuals.

"You chugged the beer to show you were a man," the Ottawa business journalist wrote. "You stripped naked to exorcise the spectre of homosexuality so you could shower with 20 guys nearly every day and still feel like a man."

How depressing. No wonder many men are emotionally silent, bottled up and utterly confused about what society believes it means to be a 21st-century male.

If such attitudes are widespread, mommas, don't let your boys grow up to play football ... or hockey ... or rugby. Hazing's supposed to create male bonding, but it must actually foster suppressed fear and hatred.

I don't really get hazers' obsession over homosexuality. But a former Canadian rowing champion turned scholar, Laura Robinson, has a workable theory. She claims such sado-masochistic exploitation of newcomers is borne out of homophobia and homoeroticism.

"These are male-only subcultures where masculinity is defined through violence, intimidation, aggression and dominance," Robinson says.

"Because the subculture is male-only, a 'bitch' -- someone who doesn't have equal power and deserves a subservient position -- must be identified, so that masculinity has something to be tested against." She could be right.

The head of the Maurice Young Centre for Ethics at the University of British Columbia maintains that the crudest forms of hazing go hand in hand with the most brutal contact sports.

"You don't hear about this in badminton or chess clubs," Peter Danielson says.

By expanding the definition of hazing, Danielson suggests grisly initiation rites are almost everywhere.

Doctors in training are initiated by undergoing a vile, two-year stint as interns in which they are stretched to the breaking point with overwork and sleep deprivation.

Business executives are sent on Outward Bound bonding weekends, Danielson says, with some coming home complaining about being shamed in the name of team-building.

Even the workplace comic strip, Dilbert, and the TV cartoon show, Family Guy, have recently been satirizing how, in popular career paths such as broadcast journalism or veterinary medicine, interns can be mistreated to the point of abuse.

Although Danielson makes a distinction between hazing-like practices that are largely based on economics (like the exploitation of low-cost interns) and those that are done in the name of group cohesion (like sexual bullying in football), he believes the two are related.

The kind of disgusting athletic hazing that's recently made the news is on the extreme end of a continuum that at the other end sees university engineers or fraternity members engage in pranks or mischievous secret rites to build solidarity. Hazing produces a group cachet.

Taking part in a hazing rite of passage suggests it takes more than money or brains or skill to belong to a revered group, Danielson says. It takes sacrifice. It's as if the group has to lower the new recruit's individual self-esteem so it can be raised up again in the form of in-group-esteem.

Although it may seems unnecessary to have military-style hazing practices in hockey, football, rugby and the navy, people used to argue in the late 19th century that war was necessary because rugged preparation for it created virtuous people -- by building a sense of loyalty, courage, discipline, obedience and self-sacrifice.

In the late 19th century, American philosopher William James responded to such hawkish sentiments by writing a famous essay, titled The Moral Equivalent of War.

James argued young men, and presumably young women, could become morally stronger by joining an adventure-service organization -- perhaps the equivalent of what would now be the Peace Corps, Canada's Katimavik program, a habitat-protecting outdoors organization or a foreign-aid agency. Through such groups adherents would challenge themselves by working in teams on the front lines to make the world a better place.

Now someone may need someone to write The Moral Equivalent of Hazing. It would help outline how group loyalty, conscientiousness, inner courage and self-discipline can all be cultivated without ritualistic humiliation.

What a concept.

dtodd@png.canwest.com
© (c) CanWest MediaWorks Publications Inc.

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I have no good word to say about them.

Same here.  I could never understand the "need to belong" mentality where someone is willing to degrade themselves for such a need.  I'm glad about that.

 

[national acrobat]

The only initiation ceremonies at my university were for the rugby teams, who made new players do various disgusting and depraved stuff. Any other society, you just put your name and email address on a list - which I was fine with.

 

[Onhell]

I read an article about this in Razor Magazine 5 years ago or so. One lawyer defending his frat said that sure it was hell to be locked in a basement with nothing but bread and water, but the other Freshman he was with... well they became practically brothers and they were friendships he still kept in constant contact with. But in general the article said it was unnecessary brutality.

 

[Prisoner Of Maiden]

The only initiation ceremonies at my university were for the rugby teams, who made new players do various disgusting and depraved stuff. Any other society, you just put your name and email address on a list - which I was fine with.

My one good friend just made a hockey team and they throw a "rookie party" every year. This year it consists of the whole team getting wasted then the rookies have to eat a Viagra and strip down to there underwear and play games like twister, do karaoke and pose for the rookie picture. I had a good laugh when I heard that the poor bugger has to do that

 

[Onhell]

Aside from having an erection for over four hours, that's actually pretty amusing... I'd do it

 

[Ardius]

My uni isn't old enough to have initiations, the only initiations I have ever heard of are in films and TV, never heard of it done in reality, not even from friends who have gone to various other universities around the country.
I've only ever heard them mentioned as a joke.