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Question:
I need some advice on reforming minor hazing in my chapter that is really poisoning new members. As you said hazing destroys the chapter from the inside, and I fear by belittling our new members we are stunting their development into leaders and breading nothing but resentment and mistrust. I am having a hard time conveying this to all the brothers in the chapter though. Is there a tactic that worked for you or any advice you can offer to address my chapter to make them see this at my level? I believe I am one of the few with such a devotion to my fraternity and would like to find an argument to state the negative affects to the brothers so they can also see how hazing directly hurts their own fraternity experience. People need to have incentives to change habits and I am having difficulty connecting the incentive between fostering trust in new members and how this improves everyone’s time.
Answer:
This is a difficult spot to be in. There are always going to be that contingent of brothers who don’t understand what they are doing and the impact hazing has on the fraternity. And these guys are typically very bull-headed in their opinion.
Your best course of action is to take small steps in eliminating the problem. A lot of brothers will complain about a problem in the fraternity, but not many will offer an alternative solution.
Fortunately, coming up with an alternative solution probably won’t be that difficult. Chances are the events that are causing problems have low brotherhood turn-out which causes tension in the fraternity. If you can come up with a better event idea that solves that problem, you will probably get brotherhood buy-in to change. And you can eliminate the hazing in the process.
If you and the other brothers who share your opinion do this enough times, it won’t be long before your hazing problem is solved.
I hope that helps. If anyone has additional advice on this topic, please leave a comment below.