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Panel must not oversimplify hazing problem
By Roosevelt Wilson
As Florida A&M University’s board of trustees puts together a panel to look into hazing there must be a couple of things that should be part of the ground rules as the panel prepares to do its work.
First, the panel must be prepared to study the history of hazing and all of its aspects. Second, one of the first things the panel should do after it prepares itself to conduct this investigation, is to teach or to hold a hazing workshop for the board of trustees and perhaps even for Florida’s Board of Governors and others who will be looking further into the hazing issue that lead to the death of a FAMU drum major on Nov. 19.
(It should be noted here that subsequent reports that Champion was gay further complicate this issue and adds the hate-crime element.)
Until that is done no one will really know how to handle the issue or know how to deal with the information they get either from the anti-hazing panel, the Board of Governors, law enforcement or the governor’s office.
One of the sad things about this issue is that it has generated a lot of emotion and a lot of ideas from people who have their own concepts of how it should be handled. Some people even believe that the president of a university, not just FAMU but the president of any university, can stop hazing.
It’s not that simple. Hazing has been happening for years, but the nature of hazing is that we don’t hear about it until it results in something tragic. And if it were that easy to stop by simply telling someone to stop, it would have been stopped a long time ago.
It’s a very complex and involved matter. It’s going to take months, perhaps, for the panel to be able to interview enough students, not just at FAMU, because one of the biggest mistakes any of us can make is to view this as a FAMU problem. It is a national problem. Frankly, it happens in other countries as well.
Hazing or initiation, as some call it, is a process that some people use to validate membership in certain organizations and many of them want to be part of that process so their participation usually is voluntary. Because of that it is a very secret process and not easily discovered. But the big question is: “What is the difference between initiation and hazing?”
So once the panel delves into this and comes up with some information that it can share with those charged with dealing with the hazing problem, then perhaps, they may be able to also suggest some solutions. And the last people we need making those suggestions are those who believe hazing is a simple problem to solve, or that one person, or that a group of people can solve the hazing problem at FAMU or anywhere else.
National sororities and fraternities have been dealing with this for a long time, and they have gone to the extent of decertifying chapters when they are caught hazing pledges, but they still haven’t stopped it. But they continue to work on it. That doesn’t make it any more tolerable, but I think it is important that we understand the nature of it before we can attempt to address it.
So we encourage that panel to begin to work immediately, with due diligence and with all deliberate speed, to see if it can learn enough about hazing and the possible ways to address it so that FAMU could be the national launching pad for addressing hazing and not be viewed as the national launching pad for hazing itself.
So with that in mind, I encourage the FAMU board of trustees to be patient. Wait until it gets enough information in; wait until it gets the information from the experts, from the panel before it decides on a course of action. Most of all, I encourage the trustees to not jump to conclusions or not oversimplify this grave matter because jumping to conclusions invariably means jumping to the wrong conclusions.
Let us look forward to the day when perhaps FAMU can release some information, or release a study or release the results of its panel’s findings and share it with the rest of the world, particularly in this country, and perhaps put us on the road to ridding ourselves of this horrible ritual.
Thus we must remember that whether it is binge drinking, whether it is battery, beating up on a friend or pledge, or being required to steal something, it can still be called hazing. It is a form of initiation and at some point we have to, as educational institutions, figure out how to teach our young men and women that they don’t have to do those kinds of things to be accepted. That they are belittling themselves by encouraging others to belittle them by hazing them.
It won’t be easy to stop that but we have to make a commitment to keep trying.