Folks – look at the list in #242. That’s just the list of schools which have had a hazing death. Figure that the list of schools where hazing goes on but where a death (luckily) has not occurred is 50 times longer. Then add in all the bad drunken rape events. There’s basically no colleges left for your snowflakes to attend. They all are populated by monsters. They all have to change their cultures.
Stanford - nope. Swimmer rapist.
Yale – nope. Basketball rapist.
Columbia – nope. Mattress girl.
UVA – nope. Swim team hazing, plus the lacrosse murder.
Penn State – nope.
Cornell – nope.
MIT – nope.
Texas – nope.
West Virginia – nope.
Clemson – nope.
Vanderbilt – nope.
CU Boulder – nope.
And on and on.
Maybe you’d be OK with sending your kid to BYU? Maybe not, since even they’ve had their problems with rape victims and drinking under their honor code.
Hunt #244 is totally right. Calling these frat boys inhuman monsters is just a pointless unhelpful cop out.
Also, drug de-regulation / de-criminalization is an infinitely more complicated issue involving the prison industrial complex, pharmaceutical companies, and the “special interest groups” that lobby for them, so don’t even get me started on that lol.
“Well, allow us to set the record straight about this board of trustees election – the man who received the most votes is an ex-football coach with exactly zero experience as an educator who likely won on name recognition alone. If Penn State truly wanted to set the Sandusky record straight, they’d cut all ties with the Paterno family forever and ensure that JoePa’s statue never sees the light of day again.”
What can adults do? If I were king, I’d have a long list. If I were a university president–with strong support from my board–I’d do the following:
All Greek houses must be on University property, and under University authority.
Hazing is prohibited, and doing it gets the students involved expelled and the death penalty for the chapter.
Ditto for underage drinking.
Unannounced spot-checks for both.
No pledging until sophomore year.
If it was a private university, I think I’d prohibit students from belonging to off-campus Greek organizations. This gives me pause, because of the freedom of association, but frankly, I’m out of patience on this issue. I don’t think a public university would be able to enforce this requirement, though.
It’s certainly true that there will still be drinking, and binge drinking. But again and again, serious incidents happen in connection with pledging and hazing. It should be possible to eliminate that, because there are plenty of other campus organizations (including, supposedly, some Greek organizations) that don’t do it.
@philbegas – I agree wholeheartedly with the comments on hazing…just trying to bring some focus to the fact that hazing is a part of the problem, not all of it. I have hosted several foreign exchange students from countries where the drinking age is lower. It is easy to make an argument without data that these kids are better able to handle alcohol, but the statistics say differently. Check out the stats at http://www.worldlifeexpectancy.com/cause-of-death/alcohol/by-country/. Germany, as one cited example, has almost double the rate of alcohol-related deaths as the U.S. And that’s without these countries having the kind of four-year, away from home, on campus collegiate experience that is typical in the U.S. There is no statistical correlation between a lower drinking age and safer alcohol consumption. There are ways to encourage responsible drinking, but despite what we want to idealize, the numbers don’t support an earlier drinking age as being one of them.
@doschicos Are there not fraternities that are based around academic excellence or social service?
@NashvilletoTexas I don’t think lower drinking age = safer alcohol consumption. But I do think that if kids are able to legally have a beer at a college bar when they’re 18 they’ll be much less likely to partake in dangerous unregulated activities instead.
When I was under 21 (under 18 even) I went to a lot of raves, concerts, etc. My friends and I would all have to pre-game really hard because we knew once we were in the venue we would have no access to alcohol. That often involved finishing a bottle of hard liquor between 3-5 people so we would be really drunk by the time we got through the line and would just gradually sober up throughout the length of the party. Ever since I became of legal drinking age (23 now), I only pre-game lightly, simply because it’s so much cheaper to do so. But then I wait and I get in and I have mixed drinks or cider, and I’m not trashed the whole time. And I know it’s the same for many people that I know.
@Philegas. There are Frats that are based on academic excellence and most Frats and Sororities have some kind of philanthropy that they support. The problem is that even those academic frats still engage in hazing. Im not sure why? Who the hell wants to drink their own vomit or do sit-ups in it. Better yet, who want to even drink till they vomit. Society has made Greek life more glamorous than it is. Maybe thats where some of the change needs to begin.
“Are there not fraternities that are based around academic excellence or social service?”
Plenty of campuses have organizations/groups that focus on social service and academic excellence without being greek organizations. I don’t buy that argument. Nor am I a fan of exclusivity.
@Dungareedoll To respond to your longer comment to me:
I understand where you’re coming from. Kids need to be taught to be careful and to say no just as much as they need to be taught good habits. But when you come into the thread and start off by saying people need to learn how to say no, it sort of misses the point and gives off the impression that you’re victim-blaming… Hindsight is 20/20 but this could have been your kid or anybody elses in the thread. I’ll bet that the deceased’s parents would have never thought he would end up in a scenario like this either.
For starters, more parents need to model responsible moderate drinking and to make their children aware of the dangers of excess drinking beyond what’s covered in health classes/PSAs.
In my case, it also helped that I grew up in a former working-class NYC neighborhood in the tail end of the high crime era in the '80s and early '90s where there was a widespread presence of disheveled alcoholics and drug addicts on the streets/nearby parks. A factor which caused most of the academically aspiring classmates including yours truly to regard alcohol/drugs with disgust due to that association.
It’s something my own parents did for me and most aunts/uncle for my cousins.
This was in great contrast to my aunts’/uncles’ neighbors in their upper/upper-middle class suburbs who clearly didn’t from what I’ve observed from visits and from accounts from the relatives living their and the neighbors themselves*.
I.e. HS/college kids home from college proudly bragging about holding alcohol laden parties with parental knowledge/approval. HS kids openly drinking in the woods behind one uncle/aunt's house as shown by their complaints to the local authorities and left-behind piles of littered beer/liquor cans/bottles.
It was a phenomenon alien to me being the city kid from what was a working-class neighborhood.
@philbegas I believe they are “all” culpable. No one ever deserves to die for their immature behavior but their behavior is part of the equation, as is the behavior of the other 18 boys in that Frat. Thats why I sadly think they are all victims of their own stupidity and immaturity. Does that bar them from being prosecuted? No! They now have to pay for their stupidity, as did Piazza, who paid the ultimate price.
Again, this breaks my heart because your right, it could be anyones child. My heart goes out to those parents.
I hope and pray that this will set enough of an example that change begins… at home, whereby parents instill a true understanding of individualism and at school, whereby the colleges do crack down on this behavior.
Hazing is a very significant part of the problem, and 82% of deaths from hazing involve alcohol. When you look at the expanded list of hazing deaths above, almost all of them involve college fraternities.
This is not just a Penn State problem, this reaches to a large number of different fraternities (and sometimes sororities) on a large number of different college campuses. It is caused by a systemic fraternity culture that not only tolerates underage drinking, but - either directly or indirectly - requires it. Why do it? Perhaps they feel invincible. Perhaps they think that if they can endure it through one semester of pledging that it will “go away” when they are initiated. I don’t know. But, it goes deeper than just saying no.
I’m not for banning the greek system. It does appear as though it’s one frat here, a different one there, so it would be difficult to say that the problem is with any specific national fraternity. But for the problem to be solved, there is going to have to be a top-down approach involving every fraternity chapter in the country and making sure the alumni support it with huge repercussions for those chapters that violate already existing hazing and alcohol laws.
Well sure, and I think that the boys in the frat who contributed to his death deserve to do some actual hard time in prison. And then some community service perhaps at a homeless shelter so they can see the very real effects of alcoholism. They need to reflect at length at the effect they had on this Piazza’s life, and his family. He lost the rest of what might have been an amazing life due to the awful actions of people he looked up to. It just breaks my freaking heart. Between the 18 of them they should do 80-something years of jail time because that’s how much time this kid might have had on this earth.
And in my opinion, a few of these kids might be monsters. Alcohol makes people do stupid stupid things but it takes some sort of predisposition or lack of empathy to do something this awful. Especially to CONTINUE not calling the police way after the party had ended.
By that logic, establishments and their owners/employees which end up being prosecuted/closed down/jailed alongside for serving excess amounts of alcohol to someone heavily inebriated which ends up resulting in serious injury/death of others are also victims rather than instigators/perpetrators of crimes. Sorry, I completely disagree…and more importantly…the law strongly disagrees in practice.
Instead, the fraternity leadership and the older brothers and like the bar establishment, owners, and employees responsible, share the lion’s share of the responsibility.
Diluting the blame/culpability beyond them in light of the evidence only serves to effectively perpetuate the muddle-headed mentality behind the "If everyone’s responsible, then no one’s responsible mentality.
“but a culture in which alcohol and peer pressure result in terrible behavior.”
Experience tells me that you don’t need peer pressure for excess alcohol to result in terrible behavior. But it definitely can make things worse. Ever try to control a bunch of drunk friends? Maybe you have a great chance to reign them in. If you know them.
" My point is simply to say that at the end of the day this could have all been avoided if Piazza knew his limits and just said “NO MORE”"
I don’t think so. That’s assuming that “I don’t want to do this” would be an acceptable answer in this case if you still wanted to join the group…
And most people DON’T know their “limits” until they’ve had that “horrible, never again will I do that” scenario. I bet a majority of us know what the “limit” is from some “I’m never doing THAT again!”
Peer pressure can be incredible. Even the kid who wanted to make the 911 call chickened out. And he was the one who said “no more”.
What he needed at that point was someone else to back him up and make the call.
The strength of an individual to buck a group and say “not for me” (especially a group you want to join and that’s the only reason you are even present?) has to be fairly remarkable. You’ve been trying to impress strangers to join the group and now you just say “no thanks” in an alcohol induced haze? Those individuals who can withstand peer pressure are not looking for validation from external sources (and may be those who think the Greek system needs to be abolished because they can’t see the value in it).
I understand the value of knowing one’s limits but in this case it was the current members who had control but were out of control.