Rites and Wrongs

The year is 1899. At Trinity College, situated in its former Queen Street location, the bell tolling at one in the morning signals the arrival of “The Holy Inquisition.”

By candlelight, Upper Years condemn First Years of “crimes.” Their verdicts, read by Upper Year judges, included consuming strong medicine, being beat through a barrel, among other physically and mentally damaging tasks.

It did not take long for this practice to be banned at the College, only to be replaced by another – the "Second Year Supper" which involved hazing first years in the Trinity basement before presenting them before the older members of college. Traditions were as hard to shake at the turn of the twentieth century as they are now.

When I was at boarding school, my headmaster would say at the beginning of each year that while "initiations create community, hazing excludes people from that very community." As someone who has spent the past five years living under the same roof as 400 other students, I can say with some authority that the shared experiences and traditions of initiations lends itself to creating a wider sense of community. However, it is not always clear where the line between hazing and initiations should be drawn.

Hazing is defined as "the practice of rituals and other activities involving harassment, abuse or humiliation used as a way of initiating a person into a group." The key part of that definition is the implication that by taking abuse, a member will be able to join that particular community. Initiations, on the other hand, are defined more generally as "a rite of passage marking entrance or acceptance into a group or society." This broader delimitation may encompass more the violent rituals that constitute hazing, but also include harmless traditional, religious and institutional rites.

Regardless of public and administrative discussions on some of Trinity's own rites of passage this year and their place in the future of the college, such as Deports and the Midnight Run, this article seeks to simply examine Trinity's history of initiations and hazing rituals from an objective perspective, which hopefully will allow us to understand our current practices within a larger context.

Hazing and higher education have gone hand in hand for more than 2000 years. The first instances of hazing recorded was in Plato's academy in 387 BCE. Plato himself likened the acts to those of "wild animals." In the Middle Ages, hazing – or pennalism as it was then called – became more frequently documented in early European universities.

In the early years of Oxford and Cambridge, hazing was known as "fagging" — the practice of an upperclassman subjecting a younger student to do as he pleased. The English system encouraged this through all levels of education. To receive teaching degrees, scholars would have to go through indignities to prove that they were worthy of future employment. This process was to prevent "charlatans from passing themselves off as scholars." Throughout history, hazing was ironically used as a method of "civilising" younger students. Those who endured abuses could become part of the community's established elite.

Trinity borrowed heavily from these English schools, so it is no surprise that in its early years hazing and initiations were important to Trinity's social fabric. Though hazing was officially forbidden, there was little the college could do to prevent rituals like the "Holy Inquisition" or the "Second Year Supper." Preceding these rituals was the even more brutal ceremony known as the “Rout.” First years were woken in the middle of the night by having their mattress pulled under them. Then, they were taken to a basement room, forced to drink an unknown substance, and then subjected to further abuses.

An unnamed incident, which left a student so damaged that he could not return to the College, caused Provost Whitaker to ban the "Rout". An oral account from that student's family claims their relative was tied to train tracks. The blindfolded student could hear the train approaching, and though the train passed on the adjacent set of tracks leaving the student unharmed, he was so affected by the incident he could not continue his studies.

In the first decade of the 20th century, the induction ritual of choice was the "Bog Lecture." The First years would be dumped from their beds by second year men dressed in black, wearing devil horns and pointed tails. The first years were taken to sit on a block of ice before a "red-clad, fiery judge" who read their charges. Their crimes? One first year looked "proud and contumacious", while another stood in front of a notice board with seniors present. Another had entered the dining hall before the older members of college. Their punishments included being buttered and rolled in flour, or having their hair dressed in a cocktail of axle grease, shoe polish, and gum.

First years in the early days of the college did not always readily take the upper years’ abuses. In the 1870s, many first years were resentful of Episkopon, which at that time was both public and a large part of college life, annually providing what they claimed was "the shaft of sarcasm, the blaze of wit, thunderbolt of censure." They further complained that they had, "no privileges, no representation in the Literary Society, in fact no rights at all."

In revolt, member of college John Farncomb created an alternative to Episkopon called "Kritikos" - the "mockbuster" version of the original. Kritikos lasted for three years until Farncomb relented, becoming the original organisation's scribe in 1877.

The reason why hazing is a self-perpetuating phenomenon is best explained by Robert Ciandini. Essentially, since going through an ordeal and pain to achieve something cause an individual to value it more, they are likely to impose the same ordeal and pain on new members seeking to join a group. This might explain why even though the name has changed, and the practices are certainly milder, one hundred years later Frosh are still woken up at midnight to complete tasks while judged by their older peers.

Other traditions, like getting poured out or the annual Cake Fight, are rituals that we still practice today in the belief that they are effective at building a community and allowing generations of Trinity students to share common practices. One of the key differences between these and more egregious practices is the emphasis that the acts are voluntary, as stipulated in the Trinity College Rules for Pourings Out, 1987.

Initiations are optional, while hazing gives no consideration to whether the participants are willing. When the First Years won the annual Cake Fight in 1953 for the second time in Trinity history, they were celebrated in a Varsity article. While hazing rituals are meant to degrade, imitations rituals can be an effective, and harmless way to bring new members closer to the older members of college by creating shared experiences.

Yet even the relatively innocuous Cake Fights and pourings out have been accused of being a façade for hazing over the years. After a first year fell on his face while bound during a pouring out in the 1980s, the Provost temporarily banned both pourings out and Deports. The Cake Fight, which in its 1950s heydays involved bombarding first years with dead skunks, duck eggs, and stink bombs from Henderson Tower as they scrambled towards the gates, was falsely accused of dyeing a first year orange by the Toronto Star, who strangely found a change in skin tone more offensive than the flinging of dead animals from high elevations.

A nineteenth century alumni fondly remembered, "the speech of a Freshman at the Lit was an occasion to be remembered. He was required to make a speech, or sing a song, or generally make of himself an object of mirth and good natured raillery." Like our former members of college, we can share the amusement of older onlookers at the discomfort of a first year debating at the Lit for the first time. If anything can be gleaned by Trinity's rich past of rites and rituals which signify admittance into our slightly eccentric community, is that we should value the ceremonies which make us different from other institutions without crossing the critical line between what’s fun and what’s going too far.

#episkopon #hazing #traditions