A UK student’s death shows again: Too many tragedies surround too many fraternities.
There are still many questions that need answers in the death of Thomas “Lofton” Hazelwood of Henderson, just 18 years old and just beginning his college life at the University of Kentucky. Was the coroner’s ruling of “presumed alcohol toxicity” tied to a hazing incident at FarmHouse fraternity or that of an inexperienced drinker? Were other pledges involved?
But we all know one answer, even if we don’t like to talk about it: Too many tragedies on college campuses surround too many fraternities.
Here in Lexington, we had just closed the door on one of the worst in recent memory. The death of four-year-old Marco Shemwell two years ago destroyed two families, that of Marco’s mom and dad and little brother, and no doubt that of Jacob Heil, another UK freshman who drank at his fraternity before turning chauffeur for his fraternity brothers on a deadly ride. A jury acquitted Heil of reckless homicide, but his punishment is seeing Marco’s face wherever he goes for the rest of his life. His fraternity brothers should bear that guilt, too.
Once again, fraternities raise the question of whether they can be reformed or if they have outlived their usefulness in college life. On today’s modern campus, full of welcoming student centers and themed dorms, fraternities exist as anachronistic clubhouses that put more energy into exclusion and hazing than the service work for which they’d like to be known. Too often they are campus centers of racism, misogyny, sexual assault, and sometimes fatal under-age drinking. They create border walls of gender, race and class as they play silly games like wrapping each other in toilet paper and setting it on fire. Or forcing a pledge to drink soy sauce until he goes into a coma. Those scamps. In the cascading bully theory, they get hazed, then haze, as though brotherhood should be measured by how much one set of young men can humiliate the next.
Yes, they provide fellowship and a sense of belonging, and sometimes they provide community service. But the elephant in the pledge room is alcohol. That drinking is what most often leads to these fraternity deaths, estimated at at least one a year nationwide. Are they simply collateral damage?
As writer Caitlin Flanagan noted in a year-long investigation for The Atlantic: “The organizations raise millions of dollars for worthy causes, contribute millions of hours in community service, and seek to steer young men toward lives of service and honorable action. They also have a long, dark history of violence against their own members and visitors to their houses, which makes them in many respects at odds with the core mission of college itself.”
UK officials play a constant game of whack-a-mole, banning one after another from campus, only to watch them reinvent themselves, then get banned again. About six months ago, there was a fracas at an off-campus party thrown by Alpha Sigma Phi and some UK football players, in which “alcohol and racial slurs ‘played a significant role’ in the escalation of the altercation,” according to an investigation. One player was accused of having a gun, which was disproved, but the incident still kept the players off the team for weeks. A grand jury declined to indict them.
At other schools around the nation this fall, according to the New York Times, fraternities are in the crosshairs, threatened with extinction because of heightened attention to the very real problems of sexual assault that happen in fraternity houses with disturbing regularity.
UK can’t stop underage drinking and will almost certainly not ban the Greek system at UK. But without fraternities, UK and many other places would surely be more inclusive campuses, safer for men and women. Some day, their time will come, and all we can hope is that more young men don’t have to die before they do.
