You may have heard of a new Global Ambassador Award created by the Advance Foundation to recognize Australians with exceptional leadership qualities who are doing great work outside of Australia to benefit people globally. The Prime Minister of Australia is the Patron of the award and the Advance Foundation is funded by the Australian Government and Australian industry to support Australian expats through a global alumni network.
Well, guess what?
I won an award for my work with women and girls! In accepting this award, each awardee is asked to mentor a young person studying the field in which we work. For me, this translated to financial services due to my work with Women’s World Banking in providing microfinance to women in developing countries.
Going through the applications from these university students, I was struck by the fact that there were no applications from women. When I asked the award administrators about this, they told me that no women had applied. I read the applications from young men who were so confident and focused and aware of the benefits of global networking and global mentoring in relation to great job prospects.
When I read applications from young women in the social innovation category there was more of a spectrum that ranged from those who were confident and assured to those who were anxious and concerned about how to gain the confidence and the ability to make their mark in the world. In the end I chose a young man to mentor in the financial services category and a young woman in the category of social innovation.
I was thinking about this as I re-read an article that has stayed with me for weeks. It’s an article on hazing that appeared in the April 12th edition of Rolling Stone magazine. I would describe hazing as ritualized degradation as a precursor to entry to an elite club within a college system. In this article, journalist Janet Reitman documents the hazing practices at Dartmouth College’s elite ivy college. This is a college that has seen its graduates occupy a sizeable number of the 1% positions including CEOs of GE, eBay, Freddie Mac as well as two US Treasury Secretaries, advisers to Morgan Stanley and billionaire oilmen.
Reitman’s article centers on a student named Andrew Lohse and his journey from joining Dartmouth, becoming a member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE) fraternity and a writer for Dartmouth Review to a kind of anti-hero when he fell from grace and later blew the whistle on hazing practices within the college.
In this article, a Dartmouth Professor, Michael Bronski, frames the culture in which Andrew Lohse found himself. “The fraternities have a tremendous sense of entitlement…their members are secure that they have bright futures and they just don’t care. I actually see the culture as being predicated on hazing. There is a level of violence at the heart of it that would be completely unacceptable anywhere else but here it’s just the way things are.”
While hazing is illegal in 44 US states, including in New Hampshire where Dartmouth College is located, it’s still a practice that is alive and well in a college in which long standing traditions are fought hard – it was the last college to admit women and, even then, only after extreme pressure. This culture of hazing continues despite the fact that, according to Reitman, 105 college professors at Dartmouth signed a petition condemning hazing as ‘moral thuggery’ and called for an overhaul of this system, the third attempt by college professors to see the practice outlawed.
According to Janet Reitman, around 25% of Dartmouth graduates find jobs in Wall Street and the finance and business sectors. In her article, David Rothkopf, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and author of Power Inc, says “one of the few dependable ways into the 1% is via these elite feeder systems, like Dartmouth. These schools are about their role as networked conduits to the top as much as they are about education.”
One of the frat brothers sums it up to Reitman. ‘Having a 3.7 and being the President of a hard-guy frat is far more valuable than having a 4.0 and being independent when it comes to going to a place like Goldman Sachs. And that corporate milieu mirrors the fraternity culture.’
Reitman details the induction new students have to Dartmouth culture through a five day wilderness orientation called ‘Trips”. Here, students kayak, hike, mountain bike their way over and around White Mountains ending up at a Dartmouth-owned ravine lodge where they enjoy communal dinners and games, and ghost stories read to them at night. At one point they are served Green Eggs and Ham and are read excerpts from Dr Seuss (the writer, Theodore Geisel also went to Dartmouth). And so the students revert to a kind of Boys’ Own/Girls’ Own childhood and, in the process, they are recast as a privileged member of the Dartmouth Tribe.
In Reitman’s article we follow the course of Andrew Lohse’s experience where he teaches himself quickly how to drink alcohol in order to be a regular Dartmouth guy where male Dartmouth frat students take pride in being able to drink six glasses of beer in less than 30 seconds (captured on YouTube). Binge drinking becomes binge vomiting and this becomes normalized at Dartmouth.
In order to be inducted to SAE, Lohse had to compete with other students to drink as much Mad Dog (13% alcohol) while blindfolded in a wood at night to the light of tiki torches held by his perpetrators. Better than some other applicants (‘pledges) who were subject to beatings and other students throwing up on them – or much worse. Binge drinking and vomiting then became part of ‘brotherly life’. In fact, according to Reitman, by the end of his pledge term, ‘Andrew Lohse had vomited so much that the enamel on his teeth had mostly burned away.’
In this culture it’s perhaps not surprising that Dartmouth College has the highest number of sexual assaults (15 per year) of any college in the US, and an estimated 109 incidents on campus per year. Nearly every female Dartmouth student who spoke to Reitman complained of the predatory nature of the fraternities at Dartmouth and the use of date rape drugs. One male student, Stewart Towle, told Reitman that he de-pledged in 2011 due to the number of practices he observed as dehumanizing. He told Reitman “There are always a few guys in every house who are known to use date rape drugs.” He tells of fraternities removing female students from their house before calling security so as to not be culpable. One female student found herself in hospital with an IV in her arm and bruises on her chest that looked like bites, having been invited to a fraternity for a drink. “To be very honest with you, I don’t really want to know what happened,” she said to Reitman.
So, what is the Dartmouth leadership doing about a situation that would be designated an emergency crisis in many other organizations?
Dartmouth’s College President is Jim Yong Kim and he’s just been successfully nominated by President Obama to head the World Bank. Kim was awarded this role over Ngozi Okanjo-Iweala, Nigeria’s Finance Minister who has done so much to fight corruption in her country and who was highly qualified for the role.
Kim, an anthropologist, medical doctor and co-founder of the international NGO, Health Partners, recently committed to an intercollegiate collaborative called the College Health Improvement Project to study high-risk drinking, with a report due next year. “We don’t expect to have solutions,” Justin Anderson, a Dartmouth spokesperson, told Reitman, “but we will have tons of data and ways to measure the results.”
This research on high-risk drinking does not address the heart of the problem, which is the fraternity culture itself and the inherent support the fraternity system has from its highest leadership. According to Reitman, Kim is a strong supporter of the system and has suggested that fraternity membership may have health benefits due to people with strong standing friendships being found to suffer fewer heart attacks.
In a recent interview in The Dartmouth Kim denied his own power to change the situation. “I barely have any power, I’m a convenor.” Reitman claims that Kim met with Dartmouth alums and reassured them that he had no intention of overhauling the fraternities. “One of the things you learn as an anthropologist,” he apparently said, “you don’t come in and change the culture.”
In truth, Kim is one of the few people who is in a position to do just that. As the President of Dartmouth College, he is the one person to whom the fraternities are accountable, together with the rest of the Board.
As for Andrew Lohse, he was suspended from the college for a year on a cocaine charge although the student busted with him wasn’t suspended and went on to graduate. Stewing over the perceived injustice during his year of suspension, Lohse amassed evidence about hazing at the college and took it to the college administrators, effectively becoming a whistleblower on SAE and the college system. In response, the college informed Lohse that, based on the information he’d provided to the college, they were pressing charges against Lohse and 27 other members of the SAE that he named, all of whom have categorically denied the charges. And so, as Reitman points out, Lohse, who provided this information voluntarily, may end up being the only student who is punished for hazing.
Apparently Dartmouth does not have a policy where whistleblowers are given immunity if they alert the college to illegal acts practiced by students. While Lohse was compromised due to his own drug taking, anger and possible opportunism, the situation does still raise the question of whether Lohse’s allegations should be less credible due to his complex character.
Lohse is now writing a book and, who knows, this may force the hand of the college. Reitman interviewed Bill Sjogren, a 1967 graduate of Dartmouth. Sjogren became an alcoholic after learning to drink at Dartmouth and he now volunteers his time to counsel students with substance abuse issues. Speaking about the culture at Dartmouth, Sjogren told Reitman, “No one has physically died at Dartmouth, yet, but the system destroys the souls of hundreds of students each year. It’s just beaten out of you. For a Dartmouth kid to do what (Lohse) did, he had to have been broken and hit bottom before he could break the code of silence.”
It seems obvious from this article that institutionalized forms of power are not going to be changed from within. Whether the reason is an anthropologist’s lens or a plea of leadership impotency, those who benefit from such power, prestige and fortunes are not going to give it up easily.
From all that has happened in other countries, most recently and over the course of history, it’s clear that real change is going to occur through citizen action and agitating. Except in this case it’s not just citizens on the street fighting for democracy in their country, it’s not even just citizens globally aligning for a new world order where the power base swerves from the 1% to the 99%. It’s the need to advocate for a world where women are valued for themselves and their own talents and abilities. Not just as conduits (‘where a woman benefits, her family benefits and her community benefits’) but as human beings with all the gifts and potentiality inherent within themselves to recognize their value in their own right. A world where men value their own humanity enough not to seek to diminish others and, in so doing, diminish themselves. Where the men who have spoken out in this article, like Sjogren, Towle or Rothkopf, are held up as a model to other men, and women, of a life informed by ethics.
Without a values base and ethical lens to decision-making, it seems that corporate commitments become a free-for-all. Whether it’s News of the World adopting widespread phone-tapping practices or Walmart executives in Mexico normalizing bribery practices into the company’s corporate culture, without this values base and ethical framework, monetary reward becomes the only measure by which decisions are made.
As I type this, I note an invitation I’ve received from the Global Peace Initiative of Women to a day-long event in Wall Street next month called Re-envisioning Prosperity that will focus on the kind of changes in Wall Street culture that will lead to positive, systemic shifts that benefit our economic, environmental and social systems with a focus on equality and equity. This intentionality is certainly a start – so too is being a mentor to young men and women who constitute the next generation of decision-makers. While the changes that are needed call for a revolution, I’m reminded of the quote from Helen Keller that Stella Cornelius used to share with me:
I long to accomplish great and noble tasks, but it is my chief duty to accomplish humble tasks as though they were great and noble. The world is moved along, not only by the mighty shoves of its heroes, but also by the aggregate of the tiny pushes of each honest worker.
Jane Sloane