Hazing the unfazed and the unaware

The story in the morning newspaper reported that a study conducted by two University of Maine professors had found that hazing remains common on college campuses – not just in the traditional venues of athletics and fraternities, but in more benign groups such as marching bands and honor societies, as well.

The article, written by BDN education writer Ruth-Ellen Cohen, was a straightforward account detailing results of an extensive survey of nearly 1,800 college students from four unidentified public and private northeastern colleges and universities.

If survey results did not come as any great surprise to most people – college kids being the free spirits that they are – its conclusions were likewise predictable in these sensitive times. Hazing, which one of the study’s authors said “is about the abuse of power and violation of human dignity,” purportedly can lead to emotional and psychological trauma, poor grades and lots of personal problems, and it must be eradicated from campus.

So much for sending the rookie first baseman on a mission to buy a can of striped paint as part of a team initiation rite. Or dispatching the rosy-cheeked fraternity pledge off to Aubuchon Hardware in search of a left-handed monkey wrench. No more screaming at the hapless ROTC cadet who botches the close-order drill routine. And that “slave-for-a-day” gig you had planned for the neophyte sorority sister is definitely out.

For old fogy skeptics who suspect that not all hazing is created equal – that one person’s abusive hazing can be simply another person’s harmless practical joke – a couple of paragraphs in the newspaper story fairly jumped off the page. The survey’s authors had learned, they said, that many students don’t even know when they are being hazed. “There needs to be more awareness of what constitutes hazing,” explained one.

The disclosure begs two obvious questions: If someone who is allegedly being hazed is unfazed by it all – if the attempt to harass by ridicule or disagreeable chore is to the laid-back “victim” just so much water off a duck’s back – can he or she be said to have been hazed? If, on the other hand, you have truly been hazed and are too numb to realize it, might the deal be considered a draw? No perceived harm, no foul.

There is, indeed, high school and college hazing that borders on the criminal and should be dealt with harshly. No rational person could argue that there is any redeeming social value in trying to stuff a freshman down a toilet – cracking his teeth and giving him a concussion in the process – as happened recently several states down the line. But giving an unsuspecting colleague a hot foot, or dousing the winning football coach with a bucket of ice-cold Gatorade seems hardly in the same ballpark. There is hazing, and there is hazing lite. (Including being forced to misspell “light” just to keep in synch with society.)

The campaign to eliminate all forms of hazing as a great American pastime seemingly has a politically correct tinge to it, vaguely reminiscent of the PC denunciation of the children’s games of dodge ball and tag as being mean-spirited and damaging to the psyche of young rug rats, and therefore not to be countenanced in polite society. Over-protection from cradle to grave is the new game, loss of independence is its elongated name.

And now my longtime BDN stablemate, Tom Weber, writes of nursery rhymes that have come a cropper in Great Britain for allegedly being too insensitive. Politically correct revisions have been made to the exploits of such venerable nursery rhyme characters as Humpty Dumpty and Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs. Not even fictitious nursery rhyme characters should be singled out because of their “race, gender or anything else,” proponents insist.

Nor, in this country at least, should they be unduly stared at. Take too long a gander at anyone nowadays and if you don’t wind up dead or maimed you could be charged with “lookism,” an offense invented some years ago by the campus PC crowd when things had turned slow during the summer doldrums.

The genre is epitomized by that great crybaby of major league baseball pitchers, Pedro Martinez – late of the Boston Red Sox and now of the New York Mets – whose tendency to drill opposing batters for daring to glance in his direction is legendary. “He stared at me,” has always been reason enough for The Temperamental One to uncork a 92 mph fastball aimed at the offender’s left ear.

Now, that’s hazing that even a numbhead could appreciate.

NEWS columnist Kent Ward lives in Winterport. His e-mail address is olddawg@bangordailynews.net.