Last week we ranked the laziest of the Ivy League: those schools at which hazing is non-existent (or, possibly, so underground as to avoid detection). Yes, you may have been wondering, but who are the haziest Ivy Leaguers? So here they are, beginning with the laziest of the haziest: Princeton.

One thing to remember about these rankings—and, to a degree, about all of the Ivy League—is that hazing (both the phenomena and the perpetual scandal) is more or less the outcome of combining two very different populations: the world’s future overlords and the anxious, striving individuals who will form tomorrow’s press corps.

It makes a ton of sense, anyway, why the Ivy League is almost always awash in one hazing scandal or another. What else would you expect? The Ivy League attracts students who willfully submit themselves to the judgment of schools which constantly market, and profit from, their exclusive reputation. They bring together people who, for whatever reason, need to constantly distinguish themselves in as many ways as possible, no matter how illogical or arbitrary or pointless those ways are. Add to that a well-funded press corps with a taste for scandal, and voilà! Hazing controversy!

To get rid of hazing in the Ivy League, you’d have to stop admitting the very people who applied to any of its schools. You’d have to start admitting people who don’t care about reputation, or status, or prestige; about feeling (and, yes, being) better than others. But then the Ivy League wouldn’t be the Ivy League, would it?

Anyway! Here are the haziest members of the Ivy League: Read the rest of this entry »

So it looks like Hell Week is going to bleed into next week—there’s just too much hazing for only five business days! We’ll have the haziest Ivies (and the haziest Ivy, of course), plus the finale to DartmouthGate, which seems fixing to become exactly what we’d said it would: a shitstorm.

Speaking of which: we’ve got a super-shifty blind item—with a pictorial hint!

Read the rest of this entry »

According to Andrew Lohse ’12, the amateur polemicist of hazing scandal fame, Dartmouth’s administrators are lying through their teeth about Dartmouth’s hazing problem. Also according to Lohse, Dartmouth’s Chief of Staff colluded with Sigma Alpha Epsilon, Lohse’s former fraternity, in order to hide hazing from the Hanover Police Department. Also according to Lohse, the same Chief of Staff—David Spalding—and April Thompson are lying about the images Lohse showed them as evidence of the hazing he reported to them. Also according to Lohse, Dartmouth’s president Jim Yong Kim routinely ignores Dartmouth’s hazing problem.

So much lying, and collusion, and conscious ignorance has drawn others to Lohse’s story—especially Joseph Asch ‘79,  who accuses basically everyone at Dartmouth of lying, character assassination, and so forth, claiming that the Chairman of Dartmouth’s Board of Trustees seeks “to cast doubt on the hazing allegations by pointing to both Lohse’s troubled background.” (E.g., Lohse’s arrests for cocaine possession, witness tampering, and disorderly conduct.)

Lohse’s tale has also summoned a contributing editor to Rolling Stone, who (we imagine) can’t be having too much luck getting fraternity brothers to speak. And it looks like the publishing industry is next: on the same day he published his hazing column, Lohse admitted to Business Insider that he was already seeking a book deal.

In fewer words, Lohse is selling (quite literally) an elaborate ploy perpetuated by powerful yet dishonest individuals. This isn’t the first time the English major has attempted to do so, though. Before he began spinning (and spinning) his hazing experience at SAE into a shadowy plot of intrigue, Lohse was touting another conspiracy—the one about George W. Bush ordering the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11.

Yeah, we’re serious: Read the rest of this entry »

In higher education, anything can be ranked—even more so in the Ivy League. With so many hazing scandals erupting everywhere—at Cornell, at Penn, at Dartmouth, and on and on—the necessary question is: Yes, but which Ivies haze the most? Or the least? Let’s find out!

First, the Ivy League’s least hazy—a.k.a. laziest—members:

1. Columbia

LOL. Columbians don’t “haze.” Hazing is for commoners. Rather, Columbians take unpaid internships at underfunded literary magazines, at which they are subjected to nearly the same amount of humiliation.

Anyway: it looks like the last time any hazing-related event shook Morningside Heights to its core was way back in ’05—i.e., 1905—when Columbia student Kingdon Gould, which was apparently the name of a real person, defended himself against some sort of fraternity-affiliated kidnapping by firing a gun in the air. Oh, Columbia: how you’ve changed.

After the jump, Brown, Harvard, and Yale: Read the rest of this entry »

Shortly after Andrew Lohse ’12 published his now-famous hazing column on the pledging practices of Dartmouth’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, IvyGate began investigating the events of Lohse’s actual pledging period—something which Lohse’s biggest advocate, Joseph Asch ‘79, has more or less shied away from. For example: In a recent blog post, Asch casts blame on the Chairman of the College’s Board of Trustees; Dartmouth’s President; the Dean of the College; the school’s Office of Public Affairs; and, um, The Dartmouth—an independent newspaper—but not, for whatever reason, anyone actually associated with Sigma Alpha Epsilon, the fraternity whose members allegedly hazed Lohse.

Asch’s reluctance (or inability) is somewhat understandable. SAE runs a tight ship. During IvyGate’s investigation, nearly every individual familiar with SAE declined to provide specifics about the sort of hazing that happened at the fraternity, particularly the activities of Lohse’s pledging term. Brothers had numerous reasons: fears of being outed or ostracized; anxieties of being misrepresented; and, as it was in most cases, a simple desire not to say anything. The majority of brothers IvyGate attempted to contact did not respond to our inquiries.

A tipster, who asked not to be identified, provided a believable explanation for SAE’s organized silence: in 2010, in the course of its very public cocaine scandal, the Hanover Police subpoenaed the chapter’s emails. Thenceforth, SAE has been reluctant to discuss internal matters electronically. Meanwhile, the chapter’s “eminent archon”,  J. Brendan Mahoney ‘12, has objected to Lohse’s claims without really saying anything else. For good reason, perhaps: the reaction to Lohse’s column has been hysterical. It’s bad business to talk about hazing in terms other than outrage, denial, or silence. IvyGate, of all publications, knows this well.

This article is different, however. Over the past three weeks, on the condition of anonymity, we spoke with several extremely reliable sources who were willing to discuss the dirty details of Andrew Lohse’s pledging term.

Here’s what happened, what didn’t happen, and how it all began in the first place:

Read the rest of this entry »

This interactive hazing death map is the work of Hank Nuwer, a Franklin College professor who has diligently recorded every hazing-related death in the United States since the middle of the 19th century. This is IvyGate, however, so you’re probably most concerned with the Ivy League. That’s where it gets interesting.

Only four Ivies—Brown, Cornell, Penn, and Yale—have recorded instances of students dying from hazing. (Nuwer’s list is imperfect, to be sure—we’ve excluded both a bystander’s death at Cornell and an auto accident involving Yale students; Brown’s sole death is also iffy.) Per Nuwer’s list, the Ivy League has experienced six hazing-related deaths in total. Half of them occurred at Cornell.

In fact, Cornell was the among the first schools in America to witness a hazing-related death, in 1873, in which a student fell into one of Cornell’s gorges, allegedly while blindfolded. Cornell is also among the most recent schools (Ivy or otherwise) to witness another hazing death, in 2011, of George Desdunes. According to ABC News, Desdunes was allegedly blindfolded, too.

Cornell shares some uncomfortable company: it is one of six schools in the United States to have three or more hazing-related deaths in its history. The others are MIT and the Universities of Maryland, Missouri, Virginia, and Texas—at the last of which, in 1928, a fraternity pledge “died from the electric shock when he had to crawl through mattresses charged with electric current.”

After the jump, we’ve collected a list of every Ivy League hazing-related death since 1873:

Read the rest of this entry »

Is Andrew Lohse ‘12 telling the truth about hazing at Dartmouth? He says so—and apparently has pictures to prove it. Nobody, except Lohse and the College’s administration, has seen these pictures. (You would know if we had!) Furthermore, they do not depict everything he wrote about—just a lot of beer and someone vomiting. Where are these pictures? Lohse hasn’t provided a single one.

So it comes down to Lohse’s credibility. In other words, it’s important whether Lohse keeps his word, whether he is honest, whether he is principled—if, indeed, he has principles at all, besides those which relate to his own fame.

So Lohse’s record matters. And that record should give one pause.

Here’s what we know from Lohse’s alcohol-fueled bender in October 2011:

Andrew Lohse hurled a folding chair at Jessica Gilbert, a female Dartmouth Safety and Security officer:

[Gilbert] instructed the four to leave and one (later identified as [Andrew Lohse]) engaged her in argument resulting in [Lohse] throwing a chair at [Gilbert].

Relevant quote:

“I, my fellow pledges and all pledges since, have been implicitly encouraged to treat Dartmouth women with about the same respect with which we treated each other in our social spaces: none.” —Andrew Lohse

Lohse willingly lied to the Hanover Police about throwing a chair at the female DSS Officer:

[Lohse] denied any knowledge of an incident on the Green and denied there was a confrontation with a DSS Officer.

Relevant quote:

“Despite Lohse’s various problems, Dartblog continues to stand by his assertions about fraternity hazing, which have been corroborated for us by numerous reliable sources.” —Joseph Asch

Lohse was sufficiently coherent to express that he “wanted to make sure his rights were protected”:

Sgt [Redacted] told me that [Lohse] was refusing to stay in bed and stay in the facility, then stated he was complying with everyone’s orders, he just wanted to make sure his rights were protected.

Relevant quote:

“Lohse, who was arrested on May 19 for cocaine possession and witness tampering, entered a plea of no contest to the Class A misdemeanor charge of witness tampering.” —The Dartmouth

(We’ve decided to commence IvyGate’s Hell Week a little early.)

In the morning hours of January 24, Joseph Asch—Dartmouth’s official blogger—posted an unedited draft of an upcoming Dartmouth column in which Andrew Lohse ‘12 alleges that his former fraternity, Sigma Alpha Epsilon, “forced” him to wade through human excrement, chug vinegar, and vomit upon his classmates. A few days later, The Dartmouth extinguished much of Lohse’s argument by changing every instance of “forced” to “asked.” Yet The Dartmouth maintained Lohse’s assertion that he was “implicitly encouraged to treat Dartmouth women with about the same respect with which we treated each other in our social spaces: none.”

Shocked as we were by Lohse’s story, nothing could prepare IvyGate for what we were soon told. Within hours of Asch’s post, IvyGate received a tip that Lohse had been arrested for throwing a chair at a female security guard sometime during Dartmouth’s annual Homecoming bonfire. IvyGate’s initial reaction was, of course, disbelief: Lohse is Dartmouth’s moral authority, and routinely demonstrates the integrity of his character.

Juicy though the tip was, our consciences overruled our instincts. We didn’t publish it. Still, we wondered: did Lohse actually lob a chair at a female security guard? And then later condemn, yet claim to be above, his fraternity’s maltreatment of women? The hypocrisy was almost too difficult for IvyGate to imagine.

Nevertheless, we dutifully filed a records request with the Hanover Police Department. To our total surprise and horror, the tip turned out to be true! A day after IvyGate HQ received Lohse’s protective custody report, Lohse pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct—a step sideways from Lohse’s earlier occasions of cocaine possession and witness tampering—for the incident in question. Our scoop was ruined—or so we thought, until we read the baffling, hilarious account of Lohse’s alcohol-fueled bender at Dartmouth’s Homecoming bonfire. It is bonkers.

Not to worry, though: on Friday, Lohse informed The Daily that, contrary to logic, the fact that he was arrested for and pleaded guilty to cocaine possession and witness tampering (and now disorderly conduct) was “totally irrelevant” to his credibility. Whew! 

The full text of the police report, after the jump :

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s Hell Week! Starting on Monday, IvyGate will be devoting its bloggy energies and quasi-journalistic faculties to the Ivy League’s not-so-secret culture of hazing. It’s going to be (as they say) a haze fest.

So get excited for that. In the meantime, we’re especially hungry for hot tips—from you!—on hazing (of course), Greek malfeasance (for example), and any other dirt you might have on the most ambitious young people in the world treating their peers terribly.

Do you have any incriminating emails, pictures, or videos (or some hell-forsaken artifacts we’re not aware of)? Send them to us! There’s two ways to get in touch with IvyGate:

1) Email us. Easy. Anonymity guaranteed, but you knew that already.

2) Or call us! In honor of Gawker circa 2008, IvyGate now has a tip-line. Check it: (917) 830-7IVY — i.e., (917) 830-7489. It’s a Google Voice number that’ll go straight to voicemail. Dial *67 before calling to obscure your phone number.

This should be fun.