Death of a Fraternity Pledge

Tall, thin Thomas Fitzgerald, 19, a junior at Queens College, stood in the crisp night air on Indian Island, a 50-acre patch of scrub just 50 feet off Long Island's South Shore. From his neck, in front of his chest, hung a strip of 2-by-4 wood, 20 inches long. On it was scrawled "P.O.W." Fitzgerald, a member of the St. John's University Reserve Officers Training Corps program (Queens College has no ROTC unit) was trying to get into the corps' Pershing Rifles fraternity. According to police, he and nine other pledges were taken to the island as part of the fraternity's initiation rites and told to play the part of war prisoners withholding military secrets. Playing Fitzgerald's interrogator was James Savino, 21, a cadet officer in the ROTC unit. Savino emphasized his questions by jabbing a knife into the narrow plaque.Somehow one jab missed the target. The knife plunged through the main artery of Fitzgerald's heart, killing him.

In the wake of the tragedy, Savino was charged with second-degree murder; ROTC headquarters assigned an inspector-general to investigate the incident; St. John's suspended the fraternity pending the outcome of a university inquiry. Even before their full-scale investigations began, both the ROTC and St. John's disputed the police version that the fatal stabbing stemmed from hazing. One ROTC officer suggested that the Pershing Rifles were simply conducting unauthorized training maneuvers. That theory raised the question of why only the pledges played the roles of P.O.W.s. As for St. John's, its spokesman noted that hazing was forbidden by the university and New York state law.

Straight Alcohol. In fact, hazing that inflicts physical or mental abuse is banned by most universities and colleges and several states. But it still goes on to some degree. There have been other deaths. Last year at the University of Nevada at Reno John Davies died after being forced to drink straight alcohol, whisky, vodka and gin, for more than 24 hours by a fraternity called the Sundowners. In New Jersey in 1974 William Flowers, a pledge to the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity at Monmouth College, suffocated in a "grave" he had been forced to dig for himself on a rainswept beach.

Most hazing does not result in death, of course, but if the practice is not always dangerous, it is often demeaning. At Michigan State University hazing was banned by 1950, but it remains an integral part of initiation rites at several fraternities. Senior Steve Ryckman lost interest in joining the Delta Sigma Phi house last year after he developed a burn on his nose from being forced to rub it along a carpet. "They wanted to see how much they could humiliate you," he recalls. "It was degrading." On the Champaign-Urbana campus of the University of Illinois, nearly two-thirds of the 54 fraternity chapters still haze. The more extreme initiation rites range from paddling and "chugalug" contests to sticking fingers up rectums or inserting penises in light sockets.

What is the rationale for such sadistic nonsense? Says Psychologist Gary Margolis, director of counseling at Vermont's Middlebury College: "It's a tragic vestige of ancient tribal customs in which painful initiation rites were extremely important. To prove one's masculinity you had to experience pain. The more pain, the closer the male bond became." Adds Willard Broom, Illinois' associate dean of campus services and programs: "It's all a physical dependence process. I guess it's sort of the way the Army does basic training."

To a growing number of today's students, however, there seems to be no excuse for hazing, except perhaps to provide a trip for a junior Marquis de Sade. Hazing is clearly much less prevalent than it was during the college days of the current undergraduates' parents. One reason: whether it is outlawed or not, most students will not accept it. Says Senior Steve Taylor, president of the Zeta Psi house at the University of California at Berkeley (a position his father held 25 years ago after being branded on the arm as a pledge): "All that stuff, tubbing, paddling, branding is looked down upon today." Gary Ausman, assistant director of student services at the University of Washington, agrees: "The decline in hazing is coming from the kids themselves. No amount of pressure by the school, the law or parents would stop it, but they don't want it so it's not there." That is little comfort, of course, to the family of Thomas Fitzgerald.

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