2 BROKEN PLEDGES

“Whose Conduct Proceeds from Good Will”

Following orders, Justin Stuart handed over his phone and wallet. He walked down the stairs to a dark basement, its windows covered with blankets and old clothes. Suddenly, earsplitting music assaulted him. From speakers perched on a washing machine, he heard German lyrics, guttural, threatening, and incomprehensible.

“DU, DU HAST. DU HAST MICH!… DU, DU HAST. DU HAST MICH!”

Stuart, a nineteen-year-old college freshman, didn’t recognize the song. He had not yet entered kindergarten when the German metal group Rammstein released it. If he had understood the lyrics, he wouldn’t have been reassured. It was a sinister soundtrack, playing on the words “have” and “hate,” by a band whose concerts featured eerie white masks and flamethrowers.

“DU, DU HAST. DU HAST MICH!… DU, DU HAST. DU HAST MICH!”

Stuart had come to this basement, which smelled of mold and stale beer, to begin his initiation into the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity at Salisbury University in Maryland. In a brown wood-shingled home about a mile from campus, a de facto fraternity house, a Salisbury senior named William Espinoza stood in front of Stuart and eight other pledges on that Thursday evening in February 2012 and gave them a hint of what might come next. Stuart and Espinoza had graduated from the same Maryland high school in a Washington, DC, suburb, but now Espinoza held all the power. He was the SAE “pledge educator.” Like a US Marines drill sergeant, he controlled the lives and futures of the new provisional members, the pledges. The pledge term of instruction, designed to teach them about the fraternity and test their commitment, had just begun. It would last eight weeks. “Get ready,” Espinoza told the recruits. “This will be your favorite song by the end of the night.”

Stuart had descended into the basement about 4:00 p.m., when fingers of winter light still reached in through cracks in the window coverings. The aural pounding lasted hour after hour, an endless loop punctuated by a few seconds of silence. As the sun fell and the rest of the light faded away, the pledges withstood the noise, the uncertainty, and many hours later, the hunger. Like prisoners, they wore a uniform—jeans and white shirts. They leaned against the walls, their shoes sticking to the cement floor, which was coated with what seemed like the tacky residue of rancid beer.

“DU, DU HAST. DU HAST MICH!… DU, DU HAST. DU HAST MICH!”

At 9:00 p.m., the older brothers, loud, drunk, and menacing, ran down the stairs.

“Backs against the wall!”

“Heads down!”

Stuart and the other pledges complied, their eyes downcast. What followed seemed like a demented version of a pop quiz. The older members asked detailed questions about the history of SAE and the lyrics of a fraternity song. If a pledge answered incorrectly, things got ugly. First came insults, screamed in ears at close range, old-school basic-training style.

“You’re a worthless piece of shit!”

“I’ll make you suck a dick!”

“You’re a good-for-nothing faggot!”

Then, some of the older members got physical. They shattered liquor bottles against the wall and ripped the shirt off one of the students. One spat in a pledge’s face. Afterward, when that test was over, the music continued, the repetition incessant, broken by the few blessed seconds of silence.

“DU, DU HAST. DU HAST MICH. DU, DU HAST. DU HAST MICH.”

Stuart thought of the American war on terror, the prisoners subjected to the worst the psychologists had to offer, the military torturers playing Eminem and Metallica to weaken defenses and prevent sleep. After eight or nine hours in the basement, as Thursday night turned into early Friday morning, members led pledges, who were blindfolded with old shirts, upstairs to continue their education.

One by one, they arrived on the second floor, where their blindfolds were removed. They were told to kneel before a table draped with a purple-and-gold fraternity flag. Six candles flickered on the table. Behind them sat Espinoza and the chapter president, a burly six-foot-two physical-education major, Sam Kaubin. The pledges had passed the first hurdle. As a reward, they were taught the secret SAE handshake of interlocking pinkies. Like potential new employees, they also received a sheaf of documents, including a nondisclosure agreement. “Shut up and sign,” someone said.

The brothers bestowed each pledge with a nickname: Pootie, Slappy, Meat, Semen, and Landfill. Stuart was referred to as “Drop,” suggesting he was likely to quit. Afterward, each initiate was ordered to chug a pitcher of beer. Stuart and his fellow recruits were then taken to another house, where, urged on by SAE members, Stuart downed seven or eight drinks and a mystery punch, a fraternity favorite called “jungle juice,” often Kool-Aid and vodka or grain alcohol. Stuart, who hadn’t eaten for ten hours, had never been that drunk before. He returned to his dorm at 3:00 a.m. and slept through history class.

Stuart hadn’t signed up for this kind of treatment. In fact, Salisbury University only a few days before had led him to believe his initiation would be entirely different. When he was first invited to join SAE, he had visited the student affairs office, where he had been asked to sign a document. It noted that hazing violated school policy and is, under Maryland law, a misdemeanor punishable by as much as six months in prison and a $500 fine. “Consent of a student is not a defense,” the document said.

SAE’s national office took a hard line, too. Minerva’s Shield, the same safety rules ignored at the Cornell chapter, couldn’t be clearer: “Hazing in any form is not acceptable. Chapters are to be hazing-free at all times. If you have to ask if an activity is hazing, then it probably is.” The fraternity’s headquarters sought to undermine the common rationale for the practice. “You may have heard the expression ‘Break them down to build them up,’” the manual said. “The concept may work for the military, but it has no place in an organization like Sigma Alpha Epsilon that promotes ideals such as friendship and scholarship.” It also noted that hazing violated the spirit of its True Gentleman creed.

During pledgeship, members didn’t quiz Stuart on that section of Minerva’s Shield. But he was required to display a flawless recall of the words of the True Gentleman creed. The brothers ordered Stuart to recite them on a chilly March night in the backyard of the same house where he had been held captive in the basement.

“The True Gentleman,” Stuart said, shivering, “is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies.”

It wasn’t easy to get the words out. As he said them, fraternity members sprayed him with a hose and poured buckets of water over his head. It was no wonder he was shivering: Naked except for his underwear, he stood in a trashcan filled waist-deep with ice.

HAZING FLOURISHED LONG before fraternities; it was a venerable tradition with roots in medieval Europe and even ancient Greece. In England, the finest boarding schools featured “fagging,” the forced servitude of underclassmen by their elders. In the American colonies, Harvard and its successors gleefully imported the practice. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century America, colleges enforced “freshman laws,” which required first-year students to run errands for, and tip their hats to, upperclassmen. When the Civil War ended, returning soldiers brought military-style hazing to college campuses, especially Greek-letter organizations. Fraternities then made their own enduring contribution to hazing. They institutionalized it within a defining tradition of the college fraternity and called it “pledging.” In the word itself, and in the official literature, the practice has the ring of promise, of fealty to a sacred tradition of honor and brotherhood. A teenager earns his way into the group by learning its history and traditions, as well as respect for his elders. After the Civil War, when pledging took hold at fraternities, its duration could be as short as a day. The pledge period soon grew to weeks or months, devolving into the orgy of abuse so familiar today.

Early hazers doled out beatings, force-fed vile substances, and staged kidnappings. In 1873, a Cornell student named Mortimer Leggett was blindfolded, taken into the countryside at night, and left to find his way home in the darkness. He was pledging the Kappa Alpha Society, the first “social” fraternity. Leggett, son of the US commissioner for internal revenue, lost his way, fell off a cliff, and died, thereby becoming one of the first high-profile fraternity hazing deaths. Like medieval torturers, fraternities’ hazing pioneers sought to terrify with the primal elements of water and fire. At early twentieth-century Stanford, fraternities favored “tubbing.” This practice entailed stripping a pledge naked, then submerging him in cold water until he “strangled,” or nearly drowned. In the 1920s at Dartmouth, Delta Kappa Epsilon branded its Greek letters onto the forearms of the pledges. Hazing would reach its apotheosis at the end of the pledge term, a terrifying time often dubbed “hell week.”

In his essential history of college fraternities, Nicholas Syrett documents how hazing sought to enforce a vision of “manliness” that fraternities prized. “Manly” men were winners asserting their dominance over the weak. They were sturdy, able to hold their liquor, unintimidated by their peers or societal rules. As universities became co-ed, all-male organizations inevitably raised suspicions about members’ sexual orientation, so demonstrations of toughness became especially valued. Because manliness afforded social status—success with careers and attractive women—initiates were willing to put up with abuse to join the club. Fraternities “believed that their membership should be composed only of men who were able to withstand particular tests of manhood,” wrote Syrett, a professor at the University of Northern Colorado.

Early American educators and specialists in child development endorsed fraternity hazing as a natural, even beneficial, part of a boy’s growing up and a way of establishing his independence from his mother. In 1904, the American psychologist G. Stanley Hall, author of an influential book on adolescence, said Greek organizations were helping men prepare for battle, both in the military and, presumably, in business and politics. “The practical joke is war, cruelty, torture reduced to the level of intensity of play,” he wrote. “A good course of rough and roistering treatment” helped free a man of what he called the “petticoat control” of women. Reflecting this view, Thomas Arkle Clark, dean of men at the University of Illinois and a founder of its Alpha Tau Omega chapter, described fraternity hazing as a kind of “horseplay” or “rough house” that “determines what a man possesses, whether he has a streak of ‘yellow’ or whether he has stamina.”

By the 1930s and 1940s, however, the alumni running national fraternity organizations tried to rein in hazing. Many, including SAE, banned “hell week,” to little effect. More than a generation later, SAE’s national leaders again took aim at hazing. In 1978, it dominated an entire issue of the Record, SAE’s official magazine. An unsigned essay explained why the abuse continued: “The popular American macho image, the incredible terror of being thought a pansy, or worse, a faggot, impels many men to support hazing activities as consistent with masculinity.” The author seemed sympathetic to the impulse behind hazing: “There is something of a bully in all of us. It is momentarily ego-satisfying to mistreat and humiliate another person, even if he’s helpless to respond. This is not to suggest that all hazers are sadomasochistic monsters. They aren’t. But the few who do derive great pleasure from the enterprise give the rest of us a bad name.” This view walked a fine line. Hazing was understandable, natural, a male birthright; it just shouldn’t be too brutal and you shouldn’t enjoy it too much. You could imagine a reckless teenager, or a closet sadist, seizing on that muddled message as he shoved a freshman’s head into a toilet.

Tony Becker, a member of the Stanford chapter, considered that suggestion ludicrous. In his view, hazing reflected a grim view of humanity straight out of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

“Do you like to drink liquor until you throw up and eat your vomit?” Becker asked. “I don’t either, and I don’t think any self-respecting human would.”

Robert Arnot, an undergraduate with the University of Texas SAE chapter, said hazing was an absolute necessity.

“On our campus, most of the major, strong fraternities have a traditional physical pledgeship,” he said.

Arnot was asked why.

“Because it works, and it has worked for decades. Our chapter is powerful on its campus and always has been. Some fraternities in Texas have abandoned hazing only to find that chapter unity deteriorates.”

Later, Arnot added: “It builds character, without a doubt. It takes a kid from the country club who’s never had to tie his shoes and humiliates him. It takes a green ol’ country boy and exposes him to things he’s never seen before.”

This view, expressed by a generation of fathers whose sons are now in fraternities, has no doubt been passed down, like the lines of wooden paddles hanging on the wall of a chapter house. I saw this legacy celebrated on another wall, as well, at the Levere Memorial Temple, SAE’s national headquarters near Chicago. It was that mural in the basement—the one painted by the German artist that depicts students as bearded gnomes. In one scene, a blindfolded gnome is bending over, clutching his huge, green-booted feet, while one of his compatriots rears up to whack the unfortunate creature on his behind with a paddle. On the first floor, in the Levere Temple’s extensive library, I also flipped through editions of the Phoenix, the manual given to all new members that passes down SAE’s history and tradition. The pledge manual often seemed to endorse hazing. “The life of the pledge is not easy,” the Phoenix read in 1968. “He is often placed in situations which may cause him embarrassment, sometimes even resentment.” In 1972: “Your physical endurance and willingness to endure some humiliation might be called into question.” In the 1980 and 1988 editions: “Your pledgeship will test ‘your enthusiasm and perseverance’ and ‘your ability to bear up under stress.’” Finally, in 1995, the Phoenix condemned hazing, as it does in the current edition. “No organization is worth sacrificing your human dignity just for you to belong,” the pledge manual now said.

As the SAE manual affirms, fraternities have shifted from condemning the excesses of hazing at “hell week” to advocating its abolition. But the ban proved challenging to enforce in part because of the fluid definition of hazing. If a fraternity brother asks a pledge to strip and submerges him in ice, is that hazing? Sure. What about drinking games? Can members ask pledges to clean the house? Or wear a costume? Like con men and hustlers who woo their marks with good-natured requests, hazers often start small to win trust, then slowly raise the stakes. The fraternities’ “zero-tolerance” approach hasn’t worked. That failure has led a handful of fraternities, including SAE, as well as colleges such as Dartmouth, to try a once-unthinkable solution: ban pledging. Even though pledging has long been one of the defining features of the fraternity experience, advocates of a ban say any program for new members, no matter how benign, can function as a cover for hazing because initiates find themselves so powerless.

Fraternity traditionalists are horrified, in part because they downplay the prevalence and seriousness of hazing. As with drinking, contrary to all evidence, fraternities and their campus supporters suggest they are being unfairly blamed for a common behavior. College Greek-life offices often feature the following statement, which is taken from the Hofstra University website: “Myth #1: Hazing is a problem for fraternities and sororities primarily. Fact: Hazing is a societal problem.” Such statements are misleading. Hazing is everywhere, the argument goes, so it’s alarmist to worry about it at fraternities: by implication, this line of reasoning suggests that a freshman is just as likely to get paddled on the debate team, the literary magazine, or the student-government spirit committee.

When boosters downplay hazing at fraternities, they are citing the results of a 2008 University of Maine survey of more than 11,000 undergraduates at fifty-three colleges. The research, which received funding from Greek groups, found that hazing was widespread at student organizations other than fraternities. Half or more of the members of performing-arts groups, as well as clubs and intramural sports teams, reported being subject to abuse that met the definition of hazing. But the study also found that hazing was far more common at fraternities and sororities. Three-fourths of members of Greek organizations reported that they had been hazed. Among members of other campus groups, only varsity athletes reported a similar level of abuse. In other words, this research shouldn’t reassure freshmen wondering about whether to pledge: fraternity members—and varsity athletes—are more likely to be hazed than anyone else on campus.

In the Greek world, hazing has spread beyond the historically white fraternities that pioneered it. Kappa Alpha Psi, a historically black fraternity, has a decades-long history of hazing that has sent pledges to the hospital and, on occasion, the morgue. In his 2014 memoir, Charles Blow, the New York Times columnist, wrote about his brutal beatings at the fraternity’s Grambling State University chapter in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Blow, who is African American and became president of his chapter, described assaults with two-by-fours and paddling bearing no resemblance to a childhood spanking: “In response to the paddling, we each developed ‘pledge ass’—inch-thick, saucer-sized pads of damaged tissue and damaged nerves that formed just beneath the skin of each butt cheek.” An Asian American fraternity developed an equally dangerous form of physical torment. In December 2013, Chun Hsien Deng, a freshman pledge at Baruch College in New York, was blindfolded and forced to wear a backpack weighed down with more than twenty pounds of sand. As he ran a gauntlet, called “the glass ceiling,” which symbolized limited opportunities for Asian Americans, brothers of Pi Delta Psi repeatedly tackled him on a frozen yard in the Pocono Mountains. He later died from head injuries after members delayed taking him to the hospital.

Hank Nuwer, a prominent anti-hazing activist who has kept a running total of its casualties, counts at least one death a year at fraternities in the United States from 1969 through 2016. By far, the most common—and most dangerous—hazing involves forced drinking. More than half of fraternity and sorority members in the University of Maine survey reported hazing related to drinking games. One-fourth of them said they had been forced to drink alcohol until they got sick or passed out. Almost all of the more than sixty fraternity-related deaths from 2005 through 2013 resulted from alcohol, hazing, or a combination of the two. (Sorority women do report hazing, but deaths are rare.)

SAE has a particularly brutal history of hazing. At its University of Texas chapter, a sleep-deprived eighteen-year-old freshman pledge named Tyler Cross fell from a fifth-floor dormitory balcony in 2006 after pledges had been given half-gallon liquor bottles to drink. Earlier, “pledge trainers” had touched a hot clothes iron to pledges’ faces, shocked them with a cattle prod, and forced them to eat Crisco and cat food. At the University of Kansas, Jason Wren, a nineteen-year-old freshman died from alcohol poisoning during a “Man Challenge” ritual that included drinking margaritas, beer, vodka, and Jack Daniels. The drinking at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo illustrated the danger. In December 2008, SAE members summoned sixteen pledges to an off-campus house for what they called “Brown Bag Night.” Tarps covered couches to protect them from vomit. Pledges sat in a circle, with a trash can at the center. At 10:30 p.m., each pledge was given a brown bag filled with cans and bottles of alcohol. “Drink up,” an upperclassman told them. “Finish by midnight.”

Carson Starkey, an eighteen-year-old from Austin, Texas, was one of those pledges. He had a bag with two twenty-four-ounce cans of Steel Reserve beer, a sixteen-ounce can of Sparks alcoholic energy drink, and a fifth of rum he would split with another pledge. The initiates also shared a bottle of 151-proof Everclear, which is 75.5 percent alcohol. As members chanted “puke and rally,” Starkey emptied his bag in twenty minutes. After he passed out, fraternity brothers debated whether to drive him to a hospital less than a mile away. They placed Starkey in a car and removed his Sigma Alpha Epsilon pin so that doctors wouldn’t know he was at a fraternity event. Then they changed their minds. Rather than go to the hospital, they brought him back in the house and left him on a dirty mattress. He never woke up. Four fraternity brothers pleaded no contest to misdemeanor charges related to hazing. They were sentenced to jail terms ranging from thirty to 120 days. Starkey’s family sued Sigma Alpha Epsilon and several members for negligence, and settled for at least $2.45 million. As part of that 2011 settlement, SAE must now disclose disciplinary actions on its website. From 2011 through 2013, SAE chapters received twenty sanctions related to hazing, about one-fourth of all violations. It was the second most commonly specified offense, after illegal or dangerous drinking.

Colleges find hazing allegations difficult to prove. Absent a death or serious injury, police rarely file charges. In most states, as in California, hazing offenses are misdemeanors. After the University of Texas SAE death, two “pledge trainers” were sentenced to four days in jail. Six states—Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, New Mexico, South Dakota, and Wyoming—have no laws against hazing. When young men come forward to detail the abuse, their experiences are often categorically denied. In 2010, John Burford, a former SAE pledge at Princeton, recounted a litany of hazing: chugging a twenty-ounce bottle of tobacco spit, getting whipped and bitten at a strip club, swimming naked in a frozen pond, and drinking dangerous amounts of alcohol. SAE’s national organization denied the allegations, though they helped prompt a review of Greek life that led Princeton to prohibit fraternities from recruiting freshmen.

Another brother-turned-whistle-blower drew national attention to hazing at Dartmouth’s SAE chapter, the model for the preppy frat in Animal House. In 2012, a former pledge, Andrew Lohse, wrote a column for the student newspaper about what he called a “systematic culture of abuse.” He said pledges were forced to swim in a kiddie pool full of vomit, urine, feces, semen, and rotted food; chug vinegar; and “drink beers poured down fellow pledges’ ass cracks.” Rolling Stone magazine later ran a story based on his account, and Lohse wrote a book. Dartmouth placed the chapter on three terms of social probation for hazing, disorderly conduct, and serving alcohol to minors. The college accused twenty-seven individual members of hazing but later dropped the charges, citing contradictory evidence. Many at Dartmouth then disputed Lohse’s account.

Lohse later won a measure of vindication. In February 2016, responding to reports of hazing, SAE’s national office suspended the chapter for at least five years, saying such behavior “absolutely will not be tolerated.” SAE headquarters reported the hazing to the university, which withdrew the chapter’s recognition. Lohse said a Dartmouth administrator let him know that the hazing resembled what he had described years earlier. “It was textbook, just as I had described,” Lohse told me. I spoke with an SAE pledge who had been interviewed by investigators. Clark Brown, SAE’s general counsel, confirmed much of his account. The pledge told me Lohse’s book, Confessions of an Ivy League Frat Boy, had inspired the older brothers. Instead of a cautionary tale, it had become an unauthorized pledge manual. “It was kind of a running joke,” the former member said. The pledges met on a golf course at night, bringing a strange assortment of items such as women’s underwear, condoms, and vegetables, he told me. They were each baptized in a kiddie pool, though he didn’t think it held the kinds of noxious materials that Lohse described. They were forced to drink until they vomited and to repeat a mantra recounted in Lohse’s book: “What happens in the house stays in the house.”

BEFORE HE FOUND himself submerged in ice, Justin Stuart knew nothing about SAE’s hazing traditions. He had arrived at Salisbury University, a public institution of 8,600 on the Maryland shore, hoping to network, make friends, and build on his success in high school. Stuart grew up in Potomac, Maryland, a suburb of Washington, DC, and attended Montgomery County’s highly rated public schools. In high school, Stuart worked as a lifeguard at a community pool and built houses for Habitat for Humanity. The lanky six-foot-two teenager played varsity lacrosse and golf. “He was the ultimate team player,” said Colin Thomson, head lacrosse coach at Thomas S. Wootton High School in nearby Rockville. “Justin has a good head on his shoulders.”

Like many drawn to SAE, Stuart was ambitious and saw himself working in finance. The success of former SAE members impressed him. He had his first interview at the Scarborough Student Leadership Center, a Greek hub on campus named after the SAE chapter’s founder. Stuart stood before ten fraternity brothers seated at a table as if they were corporate executives in a boardroom. They asked about his major, his grade-point average, and why he wanted to join. They even videotaped the encounter. His pledge invitation, delivered by members in suits and ties, arrived soon after. Like a college acceptance letter, it was inscribed with an SAE seal. “They made it seem like it was super exclusive and that only the brightest are invited,” Stuart told me. He wasn’t naïve about fraternities; he anticipated some unpleasantness in pledging such as cleaning up after older brothers, but nothing like what he experienced when his “education” began.

After the first night in the basement with the German music, the SAE pledge program continued on Tuesdays in a science hall. Brothers covered a window with white paper, and, as pledges tried to learn SAE history, they were barraged with insults, including anti-gay slurs. Stuart considered quitting. Members assured him that they had all gone through the same crucible, and the worst was over. He weighed the benefits of SAE membership: entrée to parties, where freshmen could meet sorority women, and access to its alumni network of Wall Street and Fortune 500 companies. Perhaps just as important, he worried that if he left, he would end up shunned and alone.

So Stuart accepted the tasks of the fraternity pledge—the “personal servitude” that had been a tradition for generations. On weekends, just as at Cornell, the pledges were on call to “sober drive” drunken brothers deep into the early morning hours. The recruits’ social lives and grades suffered, as did their moods. Like a symphony, the pledge term often builds to a crescendo of pain and humiliation. The anticipation can be as frightening as the abuse itself. As spring break approached, pledges texted each other, dreading what would come next.

“They want to get us drunk to fuck us up,” one of the pledges texted in March.

A day after that text, the recruits found themselves again confined in a basement, this time for a ritual known as “family night.” Members divided pledges into “families” with names such as Thunderbird and Red Lady. As before, the German song blared in their ears. Stuart was then led upstairs, where he was blindfolded and tossed into a car without a seatbelt. Tires screeching, the driver sped around curves and made quick stops. Stuart thought he was going to die. Back at the house, a brother asked him to bend over. Still blindfolded, he heard clapping, thumping, and chanting—the animalistic rhythm of ritual. A member took a running start and hit him in the buttocks—once, twice, three times. Paddling might sound innocuous, but it can be a cruel assault, a punishment remembered for its mix of lasting pain and embarrassment. Each blow sounded like a punch to Stuart, as if his skin were cracking. He held back a scream, while his back seized up, leaving him briefly unable to walk. (For a day or so, it would hurt to sit down.) Members then told pledges to dress in women’s clothing and makeup, or diapers. Stuart wore a skirt, a leotard top, and a platinum-blonde wig. Then he had to chug four or five shots of a “secret drink,” made up of various liquors, before being driven to an off-campus party, so his humiliation could be more public. There, members handed pledges yet more alcohol. “If you don’t drink this, you’re out,” they said. Stuart figured he had ten drinks, fewer than some others. He saw one pledge dry-heaving for hours; another was vomiting blood. After the party, the recruits commiserated in text messages.

“They fed me a pint of Jack and Jose,” one pledge wrote. “Not to mention sake is the grossest drink I’ve ever drank but I’m going to try to get used to it.” He said he “got carried out and woke up with a burn on my forehead.”

Another pledge added: “I woke up in throw up and with a black eye and my knuckles were all bruised and I was limping.”

In a text, William Espinoza, the pledge educator, berated the younger students: “You raged at my house and some of you thought it was cool to punch holes in my wall, and you will be patching those fuckers up.”

After that night, Stuart decided to quit SAE and alert the authorities. He sent an anonymous e-mail detailing what had happened to the campus police’s “silent-witness” website. By then, the late nights at the fraternity had been exacting a toll. Stuart’s grades fell from As to Cs. He often couldn’t sleep because he worried about his safety. He had heard dark rumors about what was to come: a nighttime obstacle course, milk chugging, eating cat food, or worse, human waste.

Other pledges were also anxious and exchanged frantic texts later that month:

“We will be in the basement tonight. Just prepare mentally.”

“Damn… Let’s go guys at least they can’t kill us.”

“Or rape us.”

FOR STUART, LEAVING the brotherhood wasn’t easy. When he missed events, members called, texted, and visited his room. Stuart felt intimidated. His father, Henry “Hal” Stuart, a real estate developer, grew angry and protective. A six-foot-one, 260-pound former high school football player, he drove to the school.

“If they don’t leave you alone, things are going to get real,” he told his son.

Stuart found news accounts about Georges Desdunes’s death at Cornell and decided he had to do more to alert the administration. In May, he sent another report to the “silent-witness” website.

“I was hazed by the SAE (Sigma Alpha Epsilon) fraternity this past semester,” he wrote. “It was completely disgusting and you schools should step up your regulation of this.”

Although his e-mail was supposed to be anonymous, the campus police tracked him down. At home for summer vacation, Stuart told his story by phone. Lieutenant Brian Waller of the Salisbury University Police called his account “credible and truthful” and referred the matter to the city police department, which has jurisdiction off-campus. Waller also knew SAE had been in trouble before. In 2005, the university cited the SAE chapter for hanging “an obscene banner” outside a house where several sorority sisters lived. In November 2010, two women complained that date rape drugs were slipped into their drinks at an SAE party. The university ultimately found insufficient evidence but cited the chapter for alcohol violations.

“There have been a number of allegations involving this fraternity over the past few years, from hazing to date-rape drugging to harassing a neighbor because of his sexual orientation,” Waller wrote in an e-mail, urging the city police to take action. “I fear that sooner or later there is going to be a major incident, and our past efforts will be under the magnifying glass.”

The police investigation was brief. Two pledges denied that hazing took place. Stuart’s mother, fearing retaliation by fraternity members, told police she wanted her son to drop the case. Stuart decided it would be futile to move forward.

That fall, Salisbury University pressed forward with its own investigation and summoned Stuart before its disciplinary board, which includes faculty and student representatives. A pledge who had dropped out corroborated much of Stuart’s account. In all, Salisbury held thirteen hours of hearings over three days.

Stuart had been promised confidentiality, but his name leaked out. On September 28, 2012, Hal Stuart wrote to Salisbury University president Janet Dudley-Eshbach, lamenting the toll the investigation was taking on his son. “He essentially has been blackballed from any social life, eats his meals alone and is miserable,” Hal Stuart said. “I commend his courage for even coming back this semester.”

The next month, the board determined that the evidence supported Stuart’s allegations that SAE fraternity members had submerged pledges in ice, confined them in a basement, verbally abused them, and forced them to drink excessively. “The actions of the members of Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity put the members of the pledge class in harm’s way both physically and emotionally,” the board found. One board member told fraternity leaders at the hearing that their protests of innocence rang hollow. “What you said sounds like Disney Channel, when what I’m thinking [is] more like Quentin Tarantino,” the member said.

Another board member observed: “Not all of your members are True Gentlemen.”

The chapter appealed the findings on the grounds that members weren’t allowed to have lawyers at the hearing. Citing the Tarantino and “True Gentlemen” comments, the chapter contended that board members were biased. In November 2012, the university denied an appeal from the fraternity and suspended SAE through the spring of 2014. The university revoked SAE’s recognition as a student organization and barred it from campus. A handful of students were also disciplined. Justin Stuart and his father were far from satisfied. They wanted Salisbury to disclose its findings publicly.

Jen Palancia Shipp, then Salisbury’s general counsel, told Stuart she wanted to hear his concerns. He declined, saying he was preparing to transfer to the University of Maryland and needed to put the investigation behind him.

“I just want to not deal with this anymore,” Stuart told Shipp in an e-mail. “It’s done, ended, the fraternity members can continue to lock people in a basement. It doesn’t matter to me. I am just going to move on and work on my degree at UMD.”

Shipp said she understood.

“I certainly do not want any other student to endure the same thing as you,” she replied.

THE MEMBERS OF the Salisbury chapter never publicly acknowledged what happened. Daryl Spencer, an SAE member and former wide receiver on the Salisbury football team, brushed off questions about hazing. “Are you asking me if that’s what happened?” he responded to my colleague, David Glovin. “Maybe you should join a fraternity and find out. My memory is foggy.” Espinoza, the pledge educator, referred questions to the fraternity’s chapter adviser. “When I was there, none of this came up,” he said.

The adviser was Dwight Marshall, who was president of the chapter in the 1980s when he was a Salisbury student. Now in his forties, with a neatly trimmed gray beard, Marshall, known as “Duke,” ran a local insurance agency, belonged to the Rotary Club, and during the holidays, wore a Santa Claus tie when he rang the bell at the mall for the local Salvation Army. “It did not happen,” Marshall said of Stuart’s account. “The quality of guys that are in there—they are outstanding young men.” Marshall maintained the college had found the chapter responsible for underage drinking at a non-fraternity event and for what he considered innocent behavior such as requiring pledges to learn the True Gentleman creed, attend study hall, and wear pins, khaki pants, and white shirts. “I could not belong to an organization that promoted hazing or bullying or whatever you want to call it,” Marshall said.

Salisbury University said the chapter adviser’s description of what happened was inaccurate. Marshall also had to confront questions about his own behavior. Several months after the fraternity was disciplined, he was arrested for drunk driving. He pleaded guilty to driving while impaired and received probation. Marshall said he had been out having several drinks with friends and then used his arrest as a teachable moment for the fraternity, stressing the “importance of not drinking and driving.” The university, however, continued tangling with Marshall. Salisbury extended the chapter’s suspension for another year after Marshall distributed pledge manuals for recruiting meetings, which had been banned.

As the university cracked down, it antagonized its most fervent supporters. Marshall was a former president of the Salisbury University Alumni Association’s board of directors, as well as a donor who had a conference room named after his parents. The sanctions angered an even bigger Salisbury booster and philanthropist: Michael Scarborough, who founded the SAE chapter in the 1970s. As a student, Scarborough had been a leader: secretary of the student government, a resident assistant, and a wide receiver on the football team. Norman Crawford Jr., then president of Salisbury, enlisted Scarborough to help bring fraternity life to the university, which had primarily been a commuter school. Scarborough chose SAE and saw the chapter change lives, particularly for teenagers looking for structure and purpose in college. “The True Gentleman rang true to me, as it did for a lot of people,” Scarborough told me.

After college, Scarborough made his fortune as the founder of a Maryland investment firm, Scarborough Capital Management, which rode the boom in 401(k) retirement accounts. He also rose through the ranks of SAE as a volunteer, serving as SAE’s national president, or “Eminent Supreme Archon.” Scarborough came up with the idea of holding the national leadership school on a cruise ship, more than doubling its attendance. He also started the Inner Circle, an annual gathering that introduced about twenty-five promising undergraduate SAE members to prominent fraternity alumni, such as General Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in President George W. Bush’s administration. The Inner Circle met at Scarborough’s three-hundred-acre Maryland estate, where he managed a vineyard. At Salisbury University, Scarborough joined the university’s foundation board and donated $830,000 for the fraternity and sorority center, which opened in 2001 and bore his name. His generosity ended when the chapter was disciplined. He had pledged $2 million for a football stadium, but he canceled the gift. “If they decide that’s the hill they want to die on, then let them,” Scarborough said.

After Scarborough withdrew the pledge, he decided to invest the money elsewhere—in beer. “Here it is,” he said of the $2 million, when I visited him at his new Calvert Brewing Company in Upper Marlboro, Maryland, east of Washington, DC. Scarborough pointed to the giant vats of hops inside the 25,000-square-foot beer factory, as we settled into a booth in the tap room. Still fit in his early sixties, with close-cropped gray hair and intense blue eyes, Scarborough wore a hooded sweatshirt and still looked like the college athlete he once was. Hints of Greek life were everywhere. As I toured the brewery, I noticed that his company’s insignia featured a lion and a fleur de lis, two of the most important SAE symbols. Even the motto of the brewery sounded like a fraternity slogan. Delta Sigma Chi, an SAE rival, is committed to “Building Better Men.” Scarborough’s company is “Building a better beer.”

Scarborough was still smarting from what happened at Salisbury. He took no position on whether hazing had occurred, saying he wasn’t there so he had no way to know the truth. He said he canceled the $2 million pledge because of a longstanding complaint he has about universities: students are treated unfairly in disciplinary hearings; lawyers can’t represent them, and anything they say can be held against them later in criminal court.

“What kind of Communist country are we running here?” he said. “That’s crazy. That’s a real bone I have to pick with Salisbury. I’ve told the kids candidly, if it was me, and I’d done something wrong and I was called before a judicial board, I wouldn’t go. You’re not going to get me to testify against myself.”

Scarborough, a fraternity traditionalist who rails against the spoiled children of helicopter parents, would like to see the police, not colleges, punish hazers. “If I found a kid who I could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt was hazing, I would do everything I can to put him in jail,” he said. At the same time, Scarborough said colleges and fraternities have started to define hazing too broadly—for example, calling meal runs to McDonald’s acts of “personal servitude.” Like the SAE undergraduates of his generation who participated in the 1978 roundtable discussion, covered at length in the SAE magazine, he considered some sort of hazing inevitable. “Most of these chapters, whether anybody wants to admit it or not, there’s some—quote—hazing, whether it’s benign or its pretty darn serious,” he said. “That’s why part of me says you can’t outlaw some of this stuff.”

IN THE FALL of 2013, when I first met Justin Stuart, he had already transferred to the University of Maryland, where its fraternity chapters had been doing some hazing of their own. Lambda Phi Epsilon had ordered a pledge to punch a wooden board sixty-four times until his knuckles bled and he fractured the bones in his hand, leaving him unable to drive or type his class assignments. The year before, a pledge at Omega Psi Phi arrived at an emergency room with his buttock muscles so damaged after paddling that a doctor described them as having the consistency of “black leather,” resembling third-degree burns. Stuart wouldn’t have known about these cases, part of a litany of fraternity hazing at the state’s public universities that was later uncovered by the Baltimore Sun. He was now a junior and no longer part of that world. He steered clear of fraternity row when he walked across the College Park campus, near Washington, DC, to the student union, which was also home to the university’s Department of Fraternity and Sorority Life. There, in the noisy food court, he recounted his hazing publicly for the first time.

“It honestly reminded me of Guantánamo Bay,” he said. “It was almost like torture.”

Like a police officer testifying on the stand, Stuart, who wore a golf cap from a trip to the Georgia Masters, had a quiet, flat, matter-of-fact way of speaking. His memory was detailed and consistent, both in our initial conversation, and throughout more than five hours of interviews then and later by phone. Stuart could corroborate his account with text messages and provided names of witnesses. It was clear to me why the campus police described him as “credible and truthful” in its report. Stuart’s account helped explain a mystery to outsiders: why pledges put up with hazing. Once it started, he said, he didn’t want to have suffered for nothing. It was the same reason that investors stick with losing stocks. In pledging, you’ve already sacrificed some of your dignity. You’ve already thrown up. You’ve been beaten. Do you want to give up now? Do you want to admit it was all a waste? “You feel like you have so much to lose—it’s worth staying,” Stuart said. “I thought it would pay off in the end.”

Ultimately, Stuart left in part because he had no interest in abusing pledges when he became a full member. “I didn’t want to be known as the ultimate hazer,” he said. “It didn’t entice me. I didn’t want to do it after what happened to me.”

The hazing at Salisbury changed the tenor of Stuart’s college experience. At the University of Maryland, he lived at home, commuted to the campus, and didn’t go out much on weekends. Still hoping for a financial career, he joined the investment club. Sometimes, though, he had trouble trusting other students and had flashbacks to his experience as an SAE pledge. “I have dreams of the basement sometimes,” he said. “I hear the yelling. It sounds like they’re about to attack me. Then I wake up from my nightmare.”