Half of all college students and 73% of social fraternity members experience hazing. As it turns out, hazing has a long and deadly history in the United States and we know about this history in large part because of the hard work of one man, Hank Nuwer. For a transcript of this episode: https://bit.ly/campusfiles-transcripts To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What is hazing and its prevalence in Greek life?
Greek life is a cornerstone of the American college experience. Each year, nearly 750,000 students pledge fraternities and sororities. And whether or not you've joined one yourself, you've probably heard about hazing. It's become deeply embedded in campus culture, depicted in countless films and TV shows as a rite of passage.
According to the most comprehensive study to date, 73% of students in Greek life experience some form of hazing. So where did it all begin? The roots of hazing go much deeper than you might think, stretching all the way back to colonial America. And much of what we know about that history comes from one man, Hank Neuer. I'm Margo Gray.
This week on Campus Files, Hank Neuer and the weed in the Garden of Academe.
Chapter 2: Who is Hank Nuwer and what sparked his interest in hazing?
I had gotten classic comic books about Frank Buck. He was a bring them back alive explorer and adventurer who stocked the zoos with what he had.
That's Hank Neuer. As a kid, Hank was captivated by the Frank Buck comic series, which chronicled the real-life adventures of an animal collector. Buck was famous for bringing exotic animals, everything from snakes to elephants, back to the United States. Hank became an avid reader of the series and was fascinated by the natural world.
So one day, on a visit to the local library looking for more Frank Buck-type books, he came across a title that caught his eye, The Jungle.
So I went to Frank Buck, I said, oh, The Jungle, great. I check it out.
Upton Sinclair's The Jungle is a harrowing expose of life inside Chicago's meatpacking industry, an unflinching look at poverty and the dangerous conditions faced by immigrant workers. Not exactly reading material for a 13-year-old. But Hank was hooked.
I started reading and I couldn't stop reading. I still remember the page with the workman falling into the lard and his body being processed.
Hank is describing a scene where a factory worker accidentally falls into a rendering vat and is ground alive into animal product. As you might imagine, scenes like that grabbed the public's attention. Ultimately, Sinclair's vivid writing helped spark much needed reforms in the meatpacking industry. But for Hank, it revealed something even bigger, the power of journalism to drive real change.
That realization sent him on a path, not to cover working conditions, but something else entirely. Years later, while writing for the student paper at the University of Nevada, Reno, Hank had a chance encounter that changed everything. It happened at a bar near campus called The Little Waldorf.
It was kind of a hangout for a group called the Sundowners, which didn't use the term fraternity, but they were. They had a horrific initiation.
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Chapter 3: What shocking incident influenced Hank's view on hazing?
There was support of hazing in a large way. It builds character. It prepares people for life later. It teaches arrogant freshmen, as they would say, to be in their place.
Hazing was widely accepted as a rite of passage, viewed through the lens of tradition and camaraderie. But as Hank dug into his research, a more disturbing picture came into focus.
These were not accidental deaths. Because the activities were planned in advance, it needed to be looked at as possible homicides that law enforcement was lacking in some of the cases.
Hank was uncovering a reality that we understand all too well today, that hazing can be deadly. After a year of painstaking research, he compiled a chilling list of students who had lost their lives during hazing rituals. He published that list in a groundbreaking article titled The Dead Souls of Hell Week.
They included a young man who'd been buried alive, William Flowers, a young man named Richard Fuse, who died with a terrible amount of alcohol in New Jersey. And then Mortimer Leggett, the first fraternity pledged to die in 1873.
When the Dead Souls of Hell Week was first published, the response was lukewarm. Many academics brushed it off, arguing that while hazing existed, it wasn't serious enough to justify deeper investigation. But the list of deaths just kept growing.
In 1978, Hank released the first independent edition of what would become his hazing database, a meticulous record of confirmed hazing-related fatalities. That work eventually reached Eileen Stevens, a mother from New York who had just begun her own battle against hazing. Her son, Chuck Stenzel, had recently died during a brutal fraternity initiation.
I met Eileen early in 1979. She wrote me in October 78 after my database came out, and she said that she had done a New York Times list and could add a few to mine. And so that became this running total.
At that point, Hank had been researching Heizeng for about three years.
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Chapter 4: What did Hank discover about the dangers of hazing?
They spoke about Eileen's son, Chuck. She was convinced there was more to his death than what she'd been told. The conversation stayed with Hank. He kept in touch with Eileen and eventually decided to take a closer look at what really happened to Chuck at Alfred University.
I spent an extensive amount of time, might have been 10 days at the library going through things, and a second trip back to do interviews. I was on the phone and doing interviews with a lot of the young people.
What Hank uncovered through his interviews and research was so revealing that it became the foundation for his book, Broken Pledges. In the preface, he includes a quote from Chuck's memorial service, a passage from John 8, 7. Let him who is without sin cast the first stone. Hank goes on to write, I am not without sin. I pledged Sigma Tau Rho and was initiated in 1965. I was hazed as a pledge.
I hazed as a member. But the problem of hazing is too demeaning, dangerous, and widespread for even sinners like myself to ignore. It shatters the lives of perpetrators as well as those of victims and their families. I concluded finally that a former sinner might be the best qualified to expose hazing abuses. I hereby cast the first stone.
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Chapter 5: How did Chuck Stenzel's story impact the understanding of hazing?
He was to be put to sleep. Unfortunately, Rocky, after giving him a shower, went to take a shower himself.
Rocky got out of the shower around 11.30 p.m. to find Chuck barely breathing. The skin under his fingernails had turned blue.
And in that amount of time, Chuck passed, and they could not resuscitate him.
None of the brothers knew CPR, and few were sober enough to take much action. They called 911, and Chuck was treated by EMTs until he was pronounced dead at 1.45 a.m.,
The members could not believe that alcohol alone could kill. And they were looking to see if he had taken any barbiturates or anything else. And that was the first information they gave to the rescuers. They didn't know if they had a drug death, an alcohol death. There was confusion.
And it turns out that there was nearly another death that night. When authorities tried to account for all members and pledges, there was one pledge nobody could find. Finally, after forcing open a locked closet door, the pledge was found unconscious with a faint heartbeat. Chuck's mother, Eileen Stevens, received a phone call from the university in the middle of the night.
She rushed to campus and arrived early the next morning. When Chuck's body was examined, the autopsy revealed a blood alcohol content of 0.46. Anything above 0.40 is considered lethal without immediate medical attention.
The pathologist said to her that he considered it a homicide or murder
More specifically, the coroner told Eileen that the cause of death was diffuse pulmonary edema caused by acute alcohol poisoning. In layman's terms, his organs had drowned in alcohol. Eileen insisted that she be allowed to see her son one last time. The coroner, hospital staff, nurses, and others tried to dissuade her. But ultimately, she was led to the morgue.
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Chapter 6: What is the significance of Hank's book, Broken Pledges?
At Cornell, a student named Mortimer Leggett fell into a gorge while blindfolded during a pledge ritual. He'd been rushing the Kappa Alpha Society, an organization that's still active today and often credited as the birthplace of American fraternity life. Two decades and four hazing deaths later, in 1899, another Cornell student, also a Kappa Alpha pledge, drowned during a hazing event.
That, Hank says, was the point of no return.
The death would have been about 1899, was almost the same circumstances as the 1873 death. Kappa Alpha Society, same group, same school. And in both cases, they were found not guilty. All the history of hazing could have changed if in those two cases, somebody went to jail immediately. It would have put some fear into the universities and into fraternity members at that time.
And you have to understand that fraternities then, right into the 1928s, were covered on the front pages of the New York Times. These were political groups then.
From that point on, hazing deaths began to accelerate, three in 1900 and 23 by 1910. In a late 19th century speech at Harvard, hazing was famously called a weed in the garden of academe, a practice that had existed since the days of Plato in ancient Greece, and one the speaker claimed could never truly be eradicated.
And in the decades that followed, that weed just kept growing, especially in the 1970s, when states began raising the legal drinking age to 21.
Look at the period when alcohol, the age of consumption, went from 18 to 21. When you look at my database, you'll see those numbers shooting up. After the drinking age, it became attractive. It became a symbol of rebellion.
As drinking moved behind closed doors, it became even more dangerous. It was under these conditions that John Davies died with the Sundowners and Chuck Stenzel with Clan Alpine. While the number of hazing deaths varied year to year, the U.S. recorded at least one hazing-related fatality every single year from 1959 through 2021. That deadly streak lasted 62 years and claimed 214 lives.
It took a global pandemic and the closure of campuses nationwide to finally break the pattern. But once COVID lockdowns lifted, hazing came roaring back. In 2023 alone, four students died, three in an alcohol-fueled car crash, and one by suicide linked to hazing. As to why hazing persists despite these tragedies, Hank has a few theories.
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Chapter 7: What are the long-term effects of hazing on victims and organizations?
And that's why it's such a psychological problem when students are blackballed or drop out right before they get into the group. You'll see a correlation of actually dropping out of school.
As of today, Hank Neuer has documented 303 hazing-related deaths at colleges across the United States. His decades-long research has fundamentally reshaped our understanding of hazing, its origins, its persistence, and its tragic consequences.
Hank's writings have been cited nearly a thousand times in academic studies on hazing, an area of scholarship that barely existed before his groundbreaking article appeared in Human Behavior. His tireless work has also supported Eileen Stevens and countless other families as they've pushed for legislative action against hazing.
At the time of Chuck's death, only five states had laws addressing hazing. Today, that number has risen to 44. And in December 2024, the Biden administration signed into law the first-ever federal anti-hazing legislation.
This is a social organization. The fun time is important, particularly when you're at a school where you can be lost. But no one should die for a good time, number one. And number two, the old line about you are your brother's keeper is important. You can't be desensitized. You just can't be. Like, for example, I told you about the death at Nevada Reno. If I could go back, I would have called 911.
Yes, maybe they would have been punished. Yes, I would have lost acquaintances that I called friends back then. But maybe John Davies would be alive.
Campus Files is an Odyssey original podcast. This episode was written and reported by Ian Mont. Campus Files is produced by Ian Mont, Elliot Adler, and me, Margot Gray. Our executive producers and story editors are Maddie Sprungkaiser and Lloyd Lockridge. Campus Files is edited, mixed, and mastered by Chris Basil and Andy Jaskiewicz. Special thanks to Jenna Weiss-Berman, J.D.
Crowley, Leah Reese-Dennis, Maura Curran, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, Hillary Shuff, Sean Cherry, Laura Berman, and Hilary Van Ornum. Original theme music by James Waterman and Davey Sumner. If you have tips or story ideas, write to us at campusfilespod at gmail.com.
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