In late may, shortly after the grand jurys harrowing presentment was released to the public, Jud Horras appeared on CBS This Morning. In a conversation with Gayle King, Charlie Rose, and Norah ODonnell, he was measured, calm, and so ungraspablealways separating the thugs of one rogue chapter from the larger entity of the fraternity industrythat midway through the interview, ODonnell lost her patience and interrupted him.
There have been 60 deaths over eight years involving fraternity activities, she said angrily. There should be zero tolerance. There should be immediate action on this. It is unacceptable. This is murder.
Her sentiment was one shared by many people when they learned about what had happened to Tim Piazza, but it revealed a common misunderstanding: Fraternities do have a zero-tolerance policy regarding hazing. And thats probably one of the reasons Tim Piazza is dead.
For most of their long history, fraternities pretty much did as they pleased. But in the 1980s, parents of injured and dead children began to fight back: They sued the organizations and began to recover huge sums in damages. Insurance companies dropped fraternities en masse. Because of this crisis, the modern fraternity industry was born, one that is essentially self-insured, with fraternities pooling their money to create a fund from which damages are paid.
The executives realized that even if they couldnt change members behavior, they had to indemnify themselves against it, which they did by creating an incredibly strict set of rules, named for a term of art in the insurance industry: risk-management policies. These policies forbid not just the egregious behaviors of hazing and sexual assault, but also a vast range of activities that comprise normal fraternity life in the majority of chapters. You cant play beer pong in a fraternity house. You cant have a sip of alcohol if youre under the age of 21, or allow anyone else whos underage to have a sip of alcohol. During a party, alcohol consumption must be tightly regulated. Either the chapter can hire a third-party vendor to sell drinksand to assume all liability for what happens after guests consume themor members and guests may each bring a small amount of alcohol for personal use and hand it over to a monitor who labels it, and then metes it back to the owner in a slow trickle.
In an emergency, when the police and an ambulance show up, the national organization will easily be able to prove that the members were in violation of its policies, and will therefore be able to cut them loose and deny them any of the benefitsincluding the payment of attorneys fees and damagesthat come with the fraternity insurance the members themselves have paid for.
Fraternity members live under the shadow of giant sanctions and lawsuits that can result even from what seem like minor incidents. The strict policies promote a culture of secrecy, and when something really does go terribly wrong, the young men usually start scrambling to protect themselves. Doug Fierberg, a Washington, D.C., lawyer whose practice is built on representing plaintiffs in fraternity lawsuits, told me that in virtually every hazing death, there is a critical three or four hours after the injury when the brothers try to figure out what to do. It is during those hours that many victims pass the point of no return.
