Tuesday, December 27, 2011

On Hazing, FAMU, and Hypocrisy

By Lee Bessette, College Ready Writing, INSIDE HIGHER ED

Like the situation at Penn State, what’s been going on at FAMU is another topic I’ve been trying to avoid writing about. One of the reasons is because of my own brief history as a faculty member there; I was on the tenure track there for a year but left to keep our family together when my husband got a better tenure-track job. Another reason is that hazing is a clearly sensitive topic, particularly in higher education but seemingly also in society at large. The extent that our society both implicitly tolerates and explicitly encourages hazing is maddening and unsurprising.

I was bullied as a child, not just at school, but also at swimming. I was locked in lockers, mentally tormented, and often physically assaulted in the pool, where it can easily be made to look like it was an “accident.” These weren’t initiation rituals, as enduring them in no way made me a part of the team, but they closely resembled the physical and mental anguish friends of mine suffered in “legitimate” initiations to sports teams.

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