I went to a mixed-sex college at Melbourne University in the 1990s and our hazing rituals were quaint, involving mostly a play on words. We were forced to do silly things that punned on our surnames. So my friend Emma Callaghan was “Call-again Callaghan” and she had to ring all the freshers at 6am and get them out of bed. Another, Tom Dobson, had to dob on people doing naughty things at the pub. Otherwise in one stunt someone ate a sausage from a bin. A lot of people got drunk. We learned the words to various chants and drank beer from an old boot.
But no one got hurt in O Week and the stupid games meant that about 100 people, most of whom didn’t know each other, had something to talk about at breakfast in those first weeks. After all, how do you give a kid from Malaysia, a private school kid from Mandeville Hall and a kid from a country town of 200 in the wheatbelt, some common ground? You give them an intense week and minor humiliations – the experience of being initiated together. This was as good as any. It felt like the ultimate icebreaker.
Years later I regarded my experiences at college with real fondness. The friendships I found with my fellow freshers, started during that O’Week, have been some of the most enduring of my life.
I feel lucky. The Red Zone report released this week about initiations at Sydney uni colleges shows a culture of cruelty, misogyny and extreme degradation. Students forced to drink toxic chemicals, male students masturbating into women’s shampoo bottles, students crammed into a small room being pelted with fish, and a student killing himself soon after arriving at college.
What’s different? Perhaps it’s a generational thing, perhaps it’s the place, maybe a bit of both. In my mid-20s, I moved back to college as a tutor. I was in Sydney this time, and lived briefly in one of the Sydney uni colleges that features prominently in the Red Zone report.
I arrived mid-year and didn’t see any hazing. But the atmosphere was off. I did six weeks there and then that was that. There were good kids there, but the place had a crazy, dark vibe. Female students had just been admitted to the college. There was no more than a dozen of them – you’d see them in pairs around the dining room. They were not a relaxed group. Some of them told stories about boys trying to break into the rooms at night. Others left for the all-women’s college or share housing. They had an air of besiegement about them.
You had to be on your guard. Students would tell me stories of kids getting drunk and falling off the roof, or tearing across Missenden Road and being hit by a car.
One night some boys in a ute drove at great speed at a female member of the senior common room who was walking up the college driveway. They braked at her feet, giving her a good ol’ scare.
I was also working as a journalist at time, as a cadet at the Sydney Morning Herald. I was no longer a good fit for college life. Sometimes I’d be late for formal dinner (that I was required to attend three times a week) and would rush from the newsroom to the dining hall, academic gown flapping behind me to the sound that I began to dread. It was 200 boys (and possibly those dozen girls) hissing – as I made my way to high table. By the time I got to my seat it was like a plague of locusts had been let loose.
Physically it was a beautiful place, full of shady spots to sit and read, cool sandstone and cloisters. But all beauty would fade when in the morning I’d open the door to find the outside streaked with vomit (not mine) or that undeniable smell of piss on the carpet. I’d get invited to student parties, including a toga party, where I was told not to wear anything underneath.
For a story I later did on college culture, much of what I was told by former and current students was unpublishable for legal reasons. Their experiences were barbaric, cruel and criminal, and many of the students were scared. If they went on the record they may not get jobs, they told me. And they might be further ostracised or bullied if their names were attached to any article.
With some of the material I gathered, I wrote a novel for Harper Collins called Wild Things about a violent hazing at an Australian university college. Very bad things happened in my book, yet somehow the worst of what I imagined doesn’t beat the degradation that we impose on each other in real life.
The Red Zone report shows that levels of violence seem to be rising rather than falling. And some of the examples of hazing in the Sydney uni report involve clearly criminal acts.
You’d think the colleges would have their houses in order by now.
US colleges and fraternities are being sued by parents for the hazing deaths of their children. In one case filed this week in Florida, the parents of a Florida State University student who died while pledging a fraternity last fall sued Pi Kappa Phi and several individuals claiming they negligently allowed the young man to consume “overwhelming amounts of alcohol to the point of extreme intoxication.”
Secondly, corporations – such as the big banks, law firms or accounting firms – are desirable places to work for many of these middle class college kids. Three years of thinking it’s heroic to drink until you vomit, or throw fish on a room full of freshers, or make someone drink shampoo is not really good preparation for the real world – unless you are going for a job at Abu Ghraib. The big end of town has (at least in theory) strict standards about behaviour and are heavily invested in their reputation. Colleges with their hazing rituals are doing the students a disservice by instilling in them values and behaviour that are likely to get them fired or arrested once they enter the “real world”.
Thirdly, more students will die. And if students keep dying at college – are parents going to want to fork out $34,000 to send their children there?
When old boys groups stack the college council, it can be hard to change the culture. But the colleges should make a start. Changing the college culture needs the current batch of nasties to finish up or be thrown out. It happened in a small way at my time in Melbourne: my first year was full of hearty types, but by the time I left a lot more of the freshers were oboe-players and drama kids. Give places to the bright kids who can help change the atmosphere, not those who will maintain it with some misguided, puerile notion of tradition.
- Brigid Delaney is a Guardian Australia columnist
