History of hazing
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Hazing expert Hank Nuwer shares the history of hazing back to the earliest recorded occurrences
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I think one of the things that’s interesting is that people do not know the history of hazing. People have an idea that it’s something that’s just been around for a few years. Well, Saint Augustine wrote about hazing in the 4th century in his book on confessions. Martin Luther was a huge advocate of hazing at Wittenberg, saying that if you were hazed at Wittenberg it would help you as an adult later.
The hazing in the European colleges and universities came to Harvard. A person named Joseph Webb was fined for hazing at Harvard almost the first year that it was founded. And it’s come up to the present day in many morphed changes, meaning that alcohol was suddenly added to the mixture at one point and we finally had a death from alcohol in the 1940s. Sexual abuse was added at some point.
And so hazing has been around for a long time – at least since the 4th century – but the nuances and the kinds of hazing change by the year.
Hazing expert Hank Nuwer shares the history of hazing back to the earliest recorded occurrences
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Hank NuwerHazing Expert
Hank Nuwer is a writer and social critic who writes on the topic of hazing as an international human rights abuse issue and USA high school and campus safety issue. The State University of New York's Buffalo State College awarded him a Distinguished Alumnus Award in 1999 and Honorary Doctor of Humane Letters in 2006 for his long career as a hazing historian and researcher. His first investigative story on hazing appeared in 1978 for Human Behavior Magazine, including his groundbreaking interview on hazing as a form of Groupthink conducted with Groupthink theorist Irving Janis.
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