Sigma Nu began with three men who decided something had to stop.
They were cadets, and what they saw around them was not unusual. Older men held callous and capricious power over younger ones and used it because they had it. Everyone called the arrangement tradition. Any one of the three could have kept his head down and graduated into the same authority he resented. Instead they agreed with one another, and then they built something.
They named it the Legion of Honor. The name was not decoration. It was a description of the most important thing they were trying to save from corruption.
So, we are not a fraternity that came to oppose hazing reluctantly, after lawsuits, headlines, and public pressure. We are a fraternity that exists because three men refused to hand cruelty forward.
I want to say plainly what I believe hazing is, and why no amount of custom can make it otherwise.
Some things are wrong before anyone writes them down. We know this. A man who is beaten in an alley is wronged whether there is a statute against it or not. The test for a practice is not how old it is or how many men consent to it, but what it does to the person inside it. A custom that raises a man up is worth keeping. A custom that puts him beneath other men and requires him to stay there is not made right by repetition. A wrong does not become a rite by surviving twenty years.
Consider what hazing has to do before it can work at all. It has to take a man and make him less than a brother. It has to treat him like a sub-human or an incapable toddler, standards that do not inspire profound personal growth. It has to turn a person into something handled, sorted, and processed, with his personhood held in trust and returned to him at the end as a reward for having surrendered it like a trained animal being rewarded. That is servitude. We should be willing to call it what it is. And the promise it makes is a lie on its face, because dignity is not ours to confiscate and give back. It was not issued to him by the chapter. It is not ours to hold. That authority is held solely by a higher power.
I do not doubt that men who suffered together feel bound to one another. Suffering does that. But you cannot manufacture a brother by beginning with the premise that he is not one yet. Whatever is built that way rests on a debt, collected from a man who did not feel free to say no.
Here is what I have learned over my years. I am not most afraid of the brother who enjoys it. There are not many of those, and the chapter usually knows who they are.
I am afraid of the good one. The brother who is uneasy and says nothing. Who tells himself it is not as bad as what happens elsewhere, that the young men will be fine, that this is not the year to make an issue of it. He wants order, and he mistakes it for peace. A chapter can be perfectly quiet and still be doing wrong, and a quiet that depends on a young man’s humiliation is not worth keeping.
If you are an undergraduate and something has been sitting wrong with you, you already know what it is. You do not need more information. You need to say one sentence in a room full of men who will not thank you for it. You are not being asked to be the only one. You are being asked to be the first, because three men agreeing has to start with one man speaking.
If you are an alumnus who has wondered about your chapter and told yourself it is not your place, it is precisely your place. Ask the man you would least like to ask, and do not accept a comfortable answer.
Our founders were handed something unworthy of the Creed, and they refused it. What we were handed, they built. What we hand on is ours to answer for.
Love. Honor. Truth. Nothing less.