Harvard’s Hazy Line on Hazing

Harvard’s latest hazing crackdown is heavy-handed and hardly helpful.

Amid a slew of updates to the Harvard College Handbook came a new undergraduate hazing policy, a first for the College. The policy sits atop previous University guidelines as well as state and federal regulations. But despite the bureaucratic ambition, we worry this latest policy will fail to make Harvard a safer or more inclusive place.

Undeniably, dangerous or life-threatening hazing is, undeniably, dangerous. It is also already a crime in Massachusetts, and Harvard should deal seriously with organizations that endanger their members. But Harvard is hardly the epicenter of America’s college hazing epidemic, and a policy expansive enough to capture almost any unpleasant initiation ritual conflates obnoxiousness with abuse.

More importantly, rules like these do not fall evenly across campus.

The organizations that hold sufficient power and social sway to carry out the crudest hazing will continue to do so, the handbook notwithstanding. In practice, Harvard’s hazing rules bear most heavily on clubs that would try to comply with them. Clubs will sacrifice harmless traditions and genuine community-building for fear that even the slightest bit of organized fun could attract a hazing investigation.

Just ask the orchestra.

Part of the problem is the broad standards the University uses to determine hazing. Initiation rituals, done right, can help students bond with a new group by enacting unusual traditions together.

The line should be drawn at coercing students into truly psychologically damaging acts, not at making them carry items “that serve no constructive purpose.”

And in any case, students should retain some agency to decide what indignities they’re willing to tolerate in exchange for a community they value. Part of becoming an adult is learning what’s worth it and when to walk away. Harvard can’t teach that judgment by making it for us.

We’re also worried that overly strict hazing policies will only push dangerous forms of hazing further behind closed doors. This, in turn, harms students and student culture at Harvard. First, we may never know how serious hazing gets sub rosa: Students will be less inclined to jeopardize the organization’s status by reporting their experiences when doing so could trigger such severe sanctions.

More importantly, though, hazing itself offers a window into a greater social divide on campus. The existing regime of social regulation — with its singular focus on risk minimization — has metastasized.

One Harvard attends Dean of Students Office-sponsored tailgates, registers its club-affiliated parties, and ensures they’re stocked with a preapproved ratio of alcohol to snacks. The other goes to the unsanctioned tailgate behind the stadium, skips the game, and heads straight to the Fox. With every addition to the student handbook, the DSO binds the former while pushing the latter off campus.

That dynamic creates greater inequality and social tension among students. If inclusivity is the College’s goal, it would need to confront exclusive social organizations directly (a project the College had tried and failed). A broader hazing definition is no substitute.

The University may need to socially engineer the College experience. But these new hazing policies are a step in the wrong direction.

This staff editorial solely represents the majority view of The Crimson Editorial Board. It is the product of discussions at regular Editorial Board meetings. In order to ensure the impartiality of our journalism, Crimson editors who choose to opine and vote at these meetings are not involved in the reporting of articles on similar topics.

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