My story may seem like ancient history, but if you’re up on recent headlines about fraternity hazing, it’s relevant.
For example, here’s a New York Times story about alleged hazing at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Police reportedly discovered a basement full of fraternity pledges, partially clothed, covered with food, condiments, and other liquids.
Condiments?
When I finished the story, I thought: No broken glass in cavernous fraternity shower stalls that looked like something out of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest? No cigar smoke blown into those stalls until breathing fresh air became nearly impossible? No radish races, butt-naked, drunk off our asses running in front of the older boys?
“Rookies,” I said to myself.
It was in the fall of 1979 at the Beta Theta Pi fraternity house at Ohio Wesleyan University, a naive numb-nut kid from New Hampshire transplanted into the cornfields of Delaware, Ohio.
Picture a scrawny college freshman, drunk after a failed keg race, standing butt naked and barefoot in shower stalls, suddenly discovering how an insecure young man’s high need for approval could put him directly in harm’s way.
To the best of my recollection, Beta had already been in trouble with the university before I arrived. With the fraternity back in operation, our soon-to-be Greek brothers “in Kai” got creative about putting us through the rush and, for those chosen, Hell Week.
I landed at Beta because several of my first dorm mates had older brothers who were revered members of the house.
I wanted to belong. Once again, my high need for approval put me in line for a very hellacious week.
I lived. So did my pledge brothers. That tells you something about being 18.
I wasn’t fearless. I was insecure. And for an insecure young man desperately trying to belong, alcohol and drugs can seem like remarkable elixirs.
So I became a varsity athlete of sorts, not only on the actual tennis and swim teams, but as one of the guys doing his best to be a good teammate at every keg race and party.
In case you missed that particular college sport, picture two small groups of boy idiots representing competing fraternities on the same Greek hill. Different Greek letters. Same afflictions.
A big-ass keg sat on ice, and the objective was simple: empty it at terminal velocity. Picture young men testing the limits of natural selection.
I don’t condone hazing or mayhem
I should probably make this crystal clear. Neither of our sons went Greek. I’m glad. Some of what we did was stupid. Some dangerous. Much of it crossed lines that, looking back more than four decades later, shock me.
Broken glass on a shower floor wasn’t character building. Neither was humiliating young men, making it difficult for them to breathe, or seeing how much alcohol an 18-year-old body could absorb before something terrible happened.
But that was the culture from ancient Greece. That doesn’t excuse it. It helps explain why so many of us accepted things then that I would never want my sons or grandchildren experiencing today.
And apparently, we still haven’t figured it out. The rituals may change. Condiments may replace cigar smoke. But underneath hazing is something very old: young people desperately wanting to belong and slightly older young people discovering how much power comes with deciding who gets in.
I understand that part much better now.
Then Beta really made news
Fast-forward to the Spring of my senior year, 1983. By then I had already moved out of the fraternity house and into a shared home on the other side of campus. My need for approval had diminished considerably, and I was madly in love with the woman who would eventually become my wife.
Living in a fraternity house wasn’t going to cut it anymore. It was March, and as Ohio started its early attempt to bloom following a frigid Winter, Ohio Wesleyan withdrew recognition from Beta Theta Pi until 1986. The administration cited repeated violations of university rules. The decision triggered a protest involving an estimated 200 to 300 students.
Things deteriorated rapidly. According to this newspaper clipping preserved by the Theta chapter of Beta Theta Pi, fraternity furniture ended up in bonfires. Police cruisers and fire trucks were reportedly pelted with bottles and billiard balls. Four students were arrested. By the following night, most of the roughly 53 men living in the Beta house had moved out.
The newspaper even compared it to National Lampoon’s Animal House. Beta members rejected the comparison. Fair enough.
From a distance, though, it looked pretty damn close. For my four years of college — including a year abroad — Beta maintained a campus-wide reputation for highly organized mayhem.
And there was beer. Lots of beer. We had the infamous 3.2 beer of that era, which college students mocked as barely deserving the name. Ohio Wesleyan alumni from the period still remember “3.2 beer” as part of campus life.
In retrospect, it was close enough to water to make a great chaser for grain alcohol. Sophomore year remains something of a blur.
Junior year, I went to France. The exchange rate eventually became wonderfully favorable to a broke American kid, and I figured out how to stay for an entire academic year at the University of Dijon. At the same time, my financially struggling parents sent whatever they could.
I learned to live cheaply. Very cheaply. When money got tight, I ate at the university cafeteria. When I had a few francs to spare, life became a loaf of bread, some ham and cheese, and whatever adventure came next.
Somewhere during all of this, I began growing up.
The fraternity house got smaller
A couple of years ago, my wife and I returned to Ohio Wesleyan for my 40th reunion. I walked over toward Greek Hill carrying a version of the place that had been stored in my brain for four decades.
What I found felt almost like a ghost town. The Beta house was still there, but it looked like a shanty compared with the enormous mansion preserved in my magnifying mind. Smaller. Darker. Tired.
It looked like tragedy ran over it.
Inside those walls, I had desperately wanted to belong. I drank too much, acted like an idiot, made friends, got humiliated, humiliated myself, laughed harder than I probably ever have, and participated in rituals that seem almost incomprehensible to me today.
At 18, that house represented something enormous. At my 40th reunion, it was just an old building. Maybe that is one of the strange gifts of aging.
The places that once seemed gigantic become smaller. The people who intimidated us become ordinary human beings. The things we believed we had to do to belong begin to look ridiculous.
And yet the memories remain enormous. That’s what shocked me most. The house had shrunk. The memory hadn’t.
Was college worth it?
Absolutely. Not because of my 2.3 GPA. Not because I earned varsity letters in tennis and swimming, or because of my Greek badges of honor—or shame.
College gave me time to grow up. It put me around people from different parts of the country and, eventually, the world. Rich kids from rich families. That wasn’t me.
I remember asking my father whether we could afford for me to go. I could work construction. I could join the military like some of my buddies. I could skip college altogether.
My father told me, in essence, “Clifford, we’ll find a way to make it work. You can join the military if that’s what you want, but it may not be the best fit for someone like you. If you graduate from college, you’ll have relationships for life, and you’ll have more choices if you discover you don’t like working construction.”
More choices
That was my father’s argument for college. Looking back, he was right. I made it through Ohio Wesleyan. I survived Hell Week. I survived Beta. I survived plenty of stupid decisions I made myself.
More importantly, I met the woman of my dreams. In retrospect, more than 42 years later, I won the lottery with Janice as my wife. We are madly in love. Blessed with the greatest gift of all: a true friend for this life.
It turns out I was the quintessential C student who eventually found his way through the much harder school of life. It all worked out.
And I’m grateful for that.