Ohio University’s Effort to Eliminate Hazing Ignores the Rights of its Students

Tim Burke, Manley Burke LPA, tburke@manleyburke.com

“…THE GROUP IS NOT TO MEET IN ANY CAPACITY, officially or unofficially. This includes organizational meetings, meetings of the executive board, organizational programming, social events, philanthropic events, and any trip or travel. This also includes communication with and among the group via any social media platform or application. To reiterate, I expect there to be no other communication with your members, unless preapproved by me.”

So dictated the Assistant Dean of Students and Director of Ohio University’s Office of Community Standards and Responsibility.

In other communications, the Ohio University (OU) Assistant Dean indicated a desire to “uphold the values of our institution.” Apparently, those values do not include recognizing the constitutional rights of the University’s students and the members of the numerous groups that recently received Cease and Desist orders from OU. The Assistant Dean may have significant power and responsibility, but that does not include the prior restraint on freedom of speech.

Last fall at OU, Collin Wiant, a Sigma Pi pledge, died. A lawsuit alleging his death resulted from hazing is pending. So it is understandable that OU would be especially concerned about addressing hazing issues. But does that justify a broad deprivation of the rights of students to freely assemble, speak and communicate freely, and to appropriate due process? Of course not.

Yet those rights are precisely what OU failed to recognize last month. The University received several reports of hazing by IFC member groups. Rather than concentrating on those groups, a Cease and Desist order was issued to all IFC member groups, as well as to the band and the rugby team. Later, three NPC member groups were added solely as a result of two very short anonymous emails that appeared to be from a single source who claimed to have been a student at OU more than five years ago.

Those Cease and Desist orders—nowhere provided for in any University public policy or regulation—were claimed to not be “a University sanction…{however} you and your organization are expected to comply with the terms of this directive. It is important to note that failure to comply with the conditions of a lawful directive of a university official would be considered a violation of the Ohio University Student Code of Conduct.”

It is difficult to comprehend how a state university can view a prior restraint on the freedom of speech and the establishment of an Assistant Dean as the censor of communication among its students as being a lawful directive.

Ohio University’s Office of Sorority and Fraternity Life piled on, issuing a five-page, single-spaced, “Frequently Asked Questions” document. Among the answers provided were the following:

Can members, even those not living at the house, still hang out at the house? Groups under a Cease and Desist directive from the Office of Community Standards and Student Responsibility and groups under a University-Directed suspension may not congregate at their house.

Can we talk to each other? …You may continue to communicate with your friends on a 1:1 basis but should reduce conversations to personal topics as opposed to sorority/fraternity operations and updates.

Can we play intramurals? Individuals are still able to play intramurals? Individuals are still able to participate in intramurals, but you are not able to participate as an organization or as a group of people that could be associated with your organization.

Can the House Director have a groupme chat with students living in the house? The house director can continue to communicate with those members living in the house? The house director can continue to communicate with those members living in the chapter facility for matters pertaining only to the house.

Are we (advisory board members) permitted to contact our new members with any update or statement of support? As advisors you can contact your members regarding University or organizations updates. However, please note that you should not be communicating with chapter members regarding details of the investigation.

For weeks, the University withheld information it claimed justified these cease and desist orders, arguing in the Q&A that, “to protect the integrity of the administrative process, the University needs to withhold the reports of hazing until the administrative investigation is complete.”

Pushed by public records demands from many sources, the University finally was forced to comply with Ohio’s public records law and released the allegations against each group to each group, and all of the allegations were also released to the media. But, at least as of this writing, they have not released the source of the allegations. Indeed, instead of releasing the original emailed allegations regarding the three women’s groups, the University released official university Incident Reporting Forms, on which the emails, without their source, were restated but with redactions.

Withholding information regarding the source deprived many of the accused groups of the ability to attempt to prove that the allegations against them are bogus. In the anonymous emails, one of the women’s groups was accused of “forcing girls to do drugs,” and another was accused of requiring girls to “sit on dryers nearly naked” while circling their “fat in sharpie markers.” The anonymous report was the sole basis for the Cease and desist orders to the three groups and the justification for the plan to require every member of each organization to individually attend a 45-minute interrogation session.

Finally, common sense and better judgment prevailed, and on October 30, 2019, the three women’s groups were notified that the investigations of their chapters “will not be continuing at this time.” Unfortunately, significant damage had already been done to the three women’s groups and their members. Recall the aftermath of the bogus Rolling Stone article reporting false allegations of sexual misconduct at the University of Virginia.

National and International Fraternities and Sororities share the concerns of colleges and universities regarding hazing. Virtually all of them make clear in their own rules that hazing is banned. They support holding accountable any student who engages in hazing. They have and continue to support legislation that defines criminal hazing and the criminal prosecution of those who violate such laws. And they attempt to work with the institutions where they have chapters to address hazing issues. But it does not help when a university is not following any process defined anywhere in its published Code of Conduct or other publicly available policies.

In the end, especially at a state university, there must be respect for the rights of the individuals impacted by university actions; that includes members, the chapter, the house corporation, and the national fraternity. That did not happen at Ohio University.