Since the sixties, the hazing practices of student fraternities have made the national newspapers on a regular basis. Let me dig up a few items out of a deep cesspit:
- Amsterdam 1962, “Playing Dachau”. Novices of the Amsterdam Student are forced to stay up all night, closely packed together in an ill-ventilated attic, besmeared, shaven-headed and partly undressed. A piglet is let loose amongst them who pees and poops all over the place. It looks like a concentration camp scene. And sure enough, “Now we are going to play Dachau”, one of the older frat-members exclaims, “All Jews step forward!”
- Utrecht 1965, “The Soothood Affair”. Members of the Utrecht fraternity TRES, popular among aristocratic families, have to put their heads into a hood filled with soot, before they are taken for a ride. One student chokes to death, another one barely escapes this fate.
- Leiden 1966, “The chariot accident”. The pledge classes of Minerva perform a wooden chariot race on the beach, starting from opposite directions, meaning that collisions are inevitable. A novice dies in a clash.
I’m skipping a few years to move closer to our day and time:
- Novice Reinier Pfeiffer needs to prove that he is worthy of a room in a student house of Vindicat by downing a litre of jenever (a Dutch gin-like liquor). Pfeiffer slips into a coma, suffers a severe epileptic seizure and dies.
- The novices are camping out. The name of the game is excessive alcohol intake and sleep-deprivation. An exhausted student passes out on the road. A camp-leader accidentally drives his car over him in the dark. The novice dies.
- Leuven 2018: Sanda Dia, son of Belgian-Senegalese parents, is tortured to death by an elaborate arsenal of torments inflicted on him by the fraternity Reuzegom: coerced alcohol-intake, water-deprivation, sleep-deprivation, lengthy exposure to the cold while standing in a water well half-naked, topped off with a banquet of mice from the blender, living goldfishes and eels, urine and litres of salty fish oil. Reuzegom carries the price away where hazing stunts are concerned. Apparently, lording it over a person of colour was extra inspirational.
Hazing rituals would be incomplete without a firm dose of racism and sexism. The first is already touched upon in the above. A striking example of the second was recently provided by the Amsterdam Student Fraternity during the celebration of its jubilee in July 2022. Female and male members are dining in separate halls. The dinner speeches of the men brand the female frats in the adjacent hall as ‘whores’, just as the sisters, mothers and girlfriends of the men present; women are sperm-buckets etc. According to the latest reports, Tragos also likes to indulge in racism and sexism.
All throughout this period, sanctions were imposed, protocols were developed, agreements were made, and culture changes were called for, demonstrably without lasting results. The malpractices that made the news are only the tip of the iceberg according to an anonymous Tragos alumnus, for secrecy is a core value of fraternities. The derailments damage the imago of the university in the eyes of the taxpayers who have to finance this institution.
Sixty years of documented humiliations and cruelty should suffice for exposing the systemic nature of the derailments. Fraternities exist to reproduce the socio-economic elite. Their supposed superiority needs to confirmed continually through behaviours that most citizens deem unacceptable, but that fraternity members permit themselves. Of course you besmirch the toilet walls with shit when you visit a restaurant in the company of your mates: you want to demonstrate to each other that you don’t give a damn about the cleaning personnel. By degrading others you raise your own social status. Classism, racism and sexism are indispensable ingredients of this contrivance.
The withdrawal of 30.000 euro’s subsidy is peanuts for frat alumni networks who feel that the young should have their bit of fun. There is only one solution: to permanently debar fraternities from access to new students. UM can start with Tragos.
Lies Wesseling, professor Cultural memory, gender, and diversity, faculteit Arts & Social Sciences