Cornell University has withdrawn recognition from one of its fraternities after excessive hazing at an initiation event sent two pledges to the hospital this fall. The Ithaca university says that at a Tau Epsilon Phi event in October, pledges were stripped naked by the brothers, violating Cornell's no-hazing policy.
"Their initiation consisted of being told to take off their clothes, down to their underwear, then the existing members apparently stripped the underwear off of them," Claudia Wheatley, a spokeswoman for the university, told the Times. "As far as the university was concerned, the humiliation of being told to strip and then having someone pull your underwear off was plenty to qualify as hazing, which is not tolerated at Cornell."
And Travis Apgar, associate dean of students for fraternity and sorority affairs, told the Cornell Daily Sun that the initiation event featured “really humiliating, sexually humiliating kinds of activities." “Things that are physically or mentally harmful, especially so egregious as this, we cannot and will not tolerate on our campus," he said. The university also says two students were served enough alcohol that they had to be treated for excessive intoxication at a local hospital.
Cornell is taking this seriously, likely in light of a sophomore's death at a fraternity house after a hazing event two years ago. That fraternity was kicked off campus. And hazing has been a problem at local universities all over: fraternities at Binghamton University upstate were recently accused of waterboarding pledges at initiation events, and in 2010 sorority sisters at Rutgers were arrested for excessive hazing that included brutally beating a girl with a wooden paddle.
