Editor's note appended (Oct. 17, 2014)
Last night more than 50 students attended a presentation of a video and audiotape that documented the initiation rites of two Dartmouth fraternities.
English Professors Tom Luxon and Ivy Schweitzer led students through the 80-minute videotape of Alpha Chi Alpha fraternity's 1987 "Hell Night" and an audio recording of Alpha Delta's 1988 sex-room interrogations.
Students listened to and watched the recordings in the Hyphen Lounge of Butterfield and Russell Sage Halls.
"What we really want to do is get a discussion going. We're not here to implicate other houses," English Professor Ivy Schweitzer said. "At the end of the discussion, you can come to your own conclusions. That's what we're showing it for."
The Alpha Chi video includes graphic footage of excessive drinking and coerced vomiting.
Luxon edited the tape, which lasts an hour and a half, down to 13 minutes of footage - the first drinks shared by pledges, the pledges' interrogation and games the pledges played the following morning on the fraternity's lawn.
Both the video and the audiotape were recorded by brothers in the respective fraternities and sent to College administrators, Luxon said.
The audiotape of AD's "sex-room" recorded brothers questioning pledges about their sexual histories and past lovers' names.
At the end of the questioning, pledges were forced to simulate fellatio on an inanimate object.
Luxon and Schweitzer said the AD pledges were sitting on blocks of ice with their pants down during those interrogations.
Luxon played an excerpt of the audiotape and he and Schweitzer read additional parts of the tape from transcripts.
After the presentation, Luxon and Schweitzer led students in discussions about the significance of such rituals in the context of all-male social organizations.
"All I see is women portrayed as the other thing rather than the other person," Anne Soutter '96 said.
Scott Rupp '95, an AD brother, said the house discontinued the "sex-room" initiation rite years ago. He said there are currently no members in the AD house who have gone through the "sex-room" ordeal.
"During Hell Night, never once was I asked about some sexual experience or some woman that I had sex with," Rupp said.
Jordan Frank '94, a brother of Zeta Psi fraternity, defended all-male social organizations as places where men can find release from social taboo. "This is the one place where you can show it and express penisness."
Claudia Ginsberg '95, an undergraduate advisor in Russell Sage Hall , said she asked Luxon and Schweitzer to make the presentation after seeing the number of students who attended the last showing at Topliff Hall earlier this term.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction appended(Oct. 24, 2014):
Alpha Delta pledges were required to simulate oral sex on an inanimate object, not an ejaculating dildo, which the article initially reported. The house's advisor now says the object may have been a banana.
