Zeta Hazing at Dartmouth (Take Our Word For It)
Nooooooooo!
You know that bug-eye, rollercoaster-stomach thing that happens when you go to save your term paper, only the computer's frozen and you look and look everywhere but you just know the brilliant text is gone? Well, we just found out that "This video has been removed by the user" is the blogger's equivalent.
There was a video of Zeta Psi brothers at Dartmouth lightly hazing a pledge. We were going to share it, after getting a tip this weekend. Now, we have only the pathetic image above as proof we're not making this up. Sigh.
The background: Zeta Psi was expelled as an official Dartmouth fraternity in May 2001 after an incident involving an edition of "The Zetemouth" newsletter that promised "patented date rape techniques" in a later issue. Not the most sophisticated move, especially in the shaky months following the Dartmouth murders. But no matter, Zete is back on track to be re-recognized in 2009. Unless, you know, a clip explicitly tagged "hazing" shows up on YouTube. We're assuming a friend of the chapter prevailed on the people who uploaded it to take it down.
We're actually not sure where we come down on hazing like this -- that is, a pledge being forced to dig a hole for a very long time while older brothers drop what looks like flaming debris and firecrackers from a balcony. ("Oh, plus it's raining," adds one of the girls taping the scene from their house/dorm/whatever window across the way.) On the one hand: it's kinda funny to watch -- "DIG FASTER!" the frat guys yell, and the girls narrating say you can hear the entire campus laughing. And making the kid dig and climb three flights of stairs ad infinitum is just physical labor, nothing psychologically traumatic. (A friend of ours who went to UNC reports watching fraternal twins stripped to their underwear and saran-wrapped face-to-face, and then forced to drink water -- hyponatremia alert!! -- until one of them peed on the other.)
On the other hand: it's a bunch of Dartmouth frat guys screaming at a slightly younger wannabe Dartmouth frat guy to dig a hole in their front yard. This is, in 5 minutes 4 seconds of banished YouTube, exactly why we never joined a frat.
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February 12th, 2007 at 6:17 pm
Ummm, gotta admit, the fraternal twin thing is kinda hot.
February 12th, 2007 at 7:28 pm
the video was stupid
just a girl explaining something that the camera wasn’t even capturing, and this probably took place years ago
now THIS is a dartmouth video: http://youtube.com/watch?v=-LcQ0Tv9z00
February 12th, 2007 at 8:38 pm
btw – everyone calls it “zete” or the full “zeta psi”, not “zeta.”
also, the infamous “zetemouth” paper was an internal frat newsletter circulated among brothers, and the “date rape techniques” was a joke. It wasn’t even an article.
February 13th, 2007 at 11:02 am
http://www.thedartmouth.com/article.php?aid=2007021301020
February 15th, 2007 at 11:30 am
it’s beyond foolish to suggest that activities involving “just physical labor” are not psychologically traumatic when they occur in the setting of pledging/hazing activities, especially in this particular case. the whole goal is to fuck with the guy’s head, and though i didn’t get to see the video before it was taken down, from the descriptions i’ve read i think it’s pretty safe to say that this situation involved more than just physical hardship for the pledge involved.
February 15th, 2007 at 11:37 pm
Come on…it is not hazing? It’s kinda funny? Yeah, real funny until the guy drops dead of an undetected heart defect or one of the twins happens to choke or die of water intoxication. Then everyone gets sued, families are devistated, and brothers ruin their futures. People who haze never think they will kill anyone, it’s all in good fun until it is your son, daughter, brother or sister who winds up hurt or dead…
April 16th, 2007 at 3:33 pm
Trust someone who knows what he’s talking about, this whole deal is being blown WAY out of proportion. The pledge had to dig in the rain for maybe 5 minutes, and then climb the stairs maybe twice. And there were no fireworks being dropped, that’s BS. Frat hazing at Dartmouth is pretty benign on the whole, and this thing barely qualified.