Fraternities Across U.S. Turn to Anti-Hazing Campaigns : Education: Sensitive about their image, some brothers lean toward eliminating the excesses during the pledge period.

An anti-hazing campaign aimed at countering the image of Greek rows as gin-soaked “Animal Houses” appears to be gaining this fall on campuses from the University of Southern California to Dartmouth.

Worried by their image, as well as the possibility of lawsuits, fraternities around the country are moving to eliminate hazing. Some want to eliminate pledging, the practice of having a period between the recruitment of a member and his formal initiation when hazing is most likely.

In August, two of the nation’s largest fraternities, Tau Kappa Epsilon and Zeta Beta Tau, decided that the most effective way to end hazing was to ban pledging altogether in their chapters.

Kappa Delta Rho also approved a long-range plan that includes a move to no pledging by 1995. Phi Sigma Kappa amended its constitution to allow for experimentation with non-pledge programs. Alpha Epsilon Pi introduced new membership education programs.

The National Interfraternity Council, which represents fraternities at 900 college campuses, weighed in with an anti-hazing campaign of its own in September, stressing that the image of fraternities everywhere was suffering from hazing incidents that harmed pledges physically or psychologically.

“It’s not a concern for decreasing membership,” said Jonathan J. Brant, executive director of the Indianapolis-based council. “We’re just really fed up with the perception that silly and dangerous things occur on the college campus, and fraternities are sometimes associated with those things.”

“What has empowered us in making our case to fraternities is that we are painfully aware that the stakes have been raised in legal liability,” Brant said.

Fraternity brothers on many campuses still resist the idea of ditching the time-honored practice of putting new members through physical or mental ordeals before their formal initiation, despite excesses that have led to 40 deaths and hundreds of injuries in the last decade nationwide.

“I really don’t think you can form any sort of loyalty to a house without pledging,” said Steve Colafella, a sophomore initiated last month into Alpha Sigma Phi at Penn State.

“The oneness that you show with the brotherhood, the thing you have in common, is the trials and tribulations that got you there.”

Some 400,000 undergraduate men and 250,000 undergraduate women belong to Greek organizations in the United States and Canada. After a slump in membership from 1965 through the 1970s, Greek organizations have grown steadily over the last decade.

Hazing has continued at some campuses this fall, including one notorious case at the University of Mississippi, where Beta Theta Pi pledges were abandoned bound and naked last month on the campus of Rust College, a predominantly black school, with “KKK” and a racist epithet painted on their chests.

But many fraternities are looking for better ways to initiate members.

At USC, for example, Theta Xi is dropping pledging this fall and will instead require candidates to complete educational programs to acquaint them with active members and the mores of the house.

Phi Sigma Kappa will scrap pledging and replace it with four weeks of informal rushing, said chapter president Darrin Aoyama. The house is recruiting prospective members by making friends and inviting them to the chapter. Those who decide to rush have to pass a test on the fraternity’s traditions, history and rules.

“I think it’s a lot more positive,” Aoyama said. “How can you expect the person to be your friend after you treat him like dirt?”

But Tau Kappa Epsilon member Terry Koh, whose fraternity will abolish pledging in two years, said: “The most disgusting thing in the world is to get rid of pledging. It no longer becomes a fraternity; it becomes a club. If you ask anybody, their pledge semester was the most fun.”

At the University of Alabama, where 28% of the 16,000 undergraduates belong to one of 46 Greek organizations, ZBT president Brian Katz said his group is following the anti-pledging program this fall as laid out in a 400-page manual issued by the national fraternity.

But some brothers don’t understand why they can’t do the same things that were done to them as pledges, he said. The chapter has about 100 members.

“It’s like if you’ve been swinging a golf club one way all your life and all of a sudden this guy comes up to you and he says you’re doing it wrong and you have to change,” Katz said. “You’re going to have trouble changing your swing.”

At Tulane University in New Orleans, where 32% of male and 40 percent of female undergraduates belong to Greek organizations, ZBT President Jon Randman said the no-pledge rule is “just about the only way a fraternity can go these days.” The tighter rules, he added, spare him from “looking over my shoulder and worrying as much as I might have been in the past when people had been able to run pretty much free.”

Randman said the pledge semester has been replaced with a four-week educational period during which older members work to make the freshmen part of the group and a cohesive class unto themselves.

“Since my freshman year it has changed a lot,” said Jeff Switek, a senior and president of Bones Gate Fraternity, one of the largest at Dartmouth, where 58 percent of undergraduates join fraternities or sororities. Now, school officials insist that such organizations give details of their rush plans.

“A lot of people thought what they had to go through was humiliating and didn’t want others to have to go through the same thing,” Switek said.