April 10th, 2012Top StoryDartmouth Sorority Girl Goes Public With Her Hazing NightmareBy Cassie Murdoch
While the Rolling Stone article on Lohse covers the abuses of the Greek system as a whole—and it discusses that girls are often sexually assaulted as a result—little mention is made of hazing that goes on in sororities. That's mostly because the article centers on Lohse's claims and their veracity. While a lot of what he says seems to be accurate, he not a particularly reliable or even likeable narrator, and there's been an insane amount of pushback from the schools alumni who refuse to admit that there's a problem while simultaneously suggesting that these practices are a tradition and therefore are sacred. Now Ravital Segal, who graduated from Dartmouth in 2009, has added her voice to the mix, writing in the Huffington Post about her horrifying hazing experience as a sophomore rushing Kappa Kappa Gamma. Surprisingly, Segal still has a lot of good things to say about Dartmouth—even calling it "my beloved Alma Mater"—despite the fact that she very nearly died thanks to the reckless behavior that the Greek system fosters. Here's how she describes what happened to her one night during rush:
As frightening as that prospect sounds, it gets worse once you know the end result:
That right there signals a major problem for the sororities and the school—that they've got multiple kids ending up in the hospital from overdosing on alcohol in a single night—but, according to Segal, for her the drinking wasn't the only problem:
Jesus Christ. That's a far more grave tale than anything Andrew Lohse recounted experiencing at his frat. You won't be surprised to hear that this experience caused Segal to re-evaluate what she was doing. As she says, "I fell into an emotional tailspin." But for her it wasn't a clear-cut case of wrongdoing on the part of her sorority sisters. She describes a conversation she had with one of the other pledges from Kappa Kappa Gamma who'd overdosed:
However the girls chose to rationalize what had happened, you'd think the real responsibility for handling the matter would lie with the school and the sorority. And, indeed, Dartmouth held a hearing about the incident, where Segal says,
Well, that's maddening—and it's the kind of thing that's bound to give every parent of a Dartmouth sorority girl serious pause when writing that next tuition check. What's interesting is that despite the fact that Segal had what sounds like a tremendously traumatizing experience, she still goes to great lengths to defend the acts of her senior sorority sisters that landed her in the hospital that night. She now fully recognizes that she was hazed, and she later depledged the sorority. But she says, "those girls sitting in the front of the car who were hazing me into near death, they were victims too." She cites Milgram's classic 1963 study in which he had people "shock" other study participants and Philip Zimbardo's 1973 Stanford Prison Experiment, and she concludes that "otherwise thoughtful people can act in atrocious ways." That may be true, but it doesn't absolve them of any wrongdoing. And then she makes this statement:
Therein lies the problem: there are so many people to blame that it's easier to never even try to punish anyone. Add to that the fact that there are a number of entrenched interests that want to do everything they can to keep the Greek traditions from being destroyed. And that is almost inevitable if the school really wants to address this problem in any meaningful way. It's also true that individual students have reasons for sticking with the system even when they find it troubling. In the case of the other girl whom Segal overdosed with, she says the practice of Dartmouth alums helping future generations of graduates get jobs had a big impact:
The Rolling Stone piece says much the same thing of Lohse's experience. It's disgusting, but it's also easy to see how things ended up this way. Of course, now that they're facing the glare of the national spotlight, it continuing to sweep this under the rug isn't really an option for the school or the fraternities and sororities any more. Segal sees this as an opportunity to start a conversation about changing things for the better. Ideally, this conversation would be led by Dartmouth's president, Jim Yong Kim, whose handling of this situation so far has been mixed at best. But Kim was recently nominated by President Obama to take over the presidency of the World Bank; so he may end up passing the buck onto someone else. Segal, however, makes the valid point that it's also up to the alumni to start being honest about their own hazing experiences, and also to encourage reform for the benefit of current students. After all, just because they didn't die during rush doesn't mean the students of today should have to. Earlier: Dartmouth Frat Bro's Bro Memoir Will One Day Polarize Bros Everywhere Hazing Confessions of a Dartmouth Alum [HuffPo] |
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