Academic hazing, a permitted bullying

The trees once went out to anoint a king over themselves. So, they said to the olive tree, “Reign over us.” The olive tree answered them, “Shall I stop producing my rich oil by which gods and mortals are honoured, and go to sway over the trees?” Then the trees said to the fig tree, “You come and reign over us.” But the fig tree answered them, “Shall I stop producing my sweetness and my delicious fruit, and go to sway over the trees?”

Then the trees said to the vine, “You come and reign over us.” But the vine said to them, “Shall I stop producing my wine that cheers gods and mortals, and go to sway over the trees?” So, all the trees said to the bramble, “You come and reign over us.” And the bramble said to the trees, “If in good faith you are anointing me king over you, then come and take refuge in my shade; but if not, let fire come out of the bramble and devour the cedars of Lebanon.” Judges 9:8-15

The good side of hazing
Leaving secondary school and entering university is a milestone in the lives of today's young people. In a way, hazing is like a rite of passage from adolescence to youth and adulthood, from high school to university. It is also the celebration of a victory, the achievement of getting into college, and the culmination of many years of effort to achieve the required grade point average. Many try but not all succeed, so wearing the black outfit of a university has its own flair and is a badge of success.

Hazing helps integration, it creates an identification with the university, and with colleagues; it also creates bonds of friendship and creates a community. Hazing can transform the shapeless mass of a crowd of students at a university into the familiarity of an academic home that the students had become accustomed to in their secondary school.

Hazing consists of ridiculous and silly games or rituals that make you, the hazing committee and the large audience laugh following someone as if you were his or her shadow; fetching things with your mouth from a jar full of flour; making a declaration of love, kill an ant with a shout, cutting the grass with a nail clipper, etc...

This being the case, and if this were always the case, hazing would be positive because it would act as icebreakers, dynamics of knowledge, communication, affirmation, confidence, cooperation to intimidate the more timid to come out of their shells and integrate into the group. All this wrapped in an atmosphere of celebration, laughter, comedy and partying.

Institutionalization of bullying
For some years now, the practice of hazing, supposedly still complying with the tradition and reason for which it was created, has been going downhill. In many cases, it is no longer innocent fun, but a joke in bad taste, an attack on the dignity, decency, and moral and physical integrity of the young people who are made to undergo it. It is easy to resort to humiliation, insults, violence, alcohol and sex. Students have been traumatized, physically and psychologically, with lifelong problems and even some deaths have occurred, so we can no longer consider hazing anything but crimes.

One freshman recounted being insulted for hours, covered in excrement and forced to stay that way until the excrement dried up; another freshman was suspended by his feet upside down from the top of a bridge; others were forced to drink alcohol going from bar to bar until they fell over drunk.

Faced with the prospect of hazing that awaited her, a highly intelligent freshman with a very high-grade point average, had a panic attack the day before she entered university; her parents had to travel a very long distance to come and calm her down, and her boyfriend had to beg the hazing committee to be lenient with her.

A completely reckless, arbitrary, and unbalanced activity, which is not limited to a space or a time, nor regulated by certain rules, practiced by the worst university students on young people who are vulnerable because they are young and want to fit in, can only lead to problems.

There are several elements that have led to this deviation, and it would be good for the Ministry of Education, deans and teachers to take them into account so that hazing can return to what it once was and stop being what it has become: unlimited limit 

• They are rarely practiced on campus during the day, but often at night and off campus. Deans and professors may see this as an advantage, but the lack of any supervision can only lead to abuse.
• It is no longer just on the first day of classes, but goes on all week, for several weeks, every year and often every year of the course and has even happened after the course.
• The peer pressure, and the fear of being ostracized, is such that young freshmen are willing to submit to anything in order to fit in well; this puts them in a very vulnerable position, susceptible to being abused.
• The secrecy and silence surrounding these practices is mafia-like, and where there is mafia there is impunity.
• It is incomprehensible how a rite of passage into adulthood can consist of uncritical submission to an authority of weak moral character, the Dux (The leader of the committee that enforces hazing).
• If hazing is the welcome to university, it would be logical for the brightest student to oversee this activity, but the reality is that the opposite is true; the one who oversees hazing, the Dux, is the most idiotic, the one with the worst student.
• The one who has existentially settled at the university; the one who wants forever to be a student, as the fado says; a Peter Pan who does not want to grow up so he can continue to live parasitically off the sweat of his parents and the taxpayers. This is how failure, laziness and irresponsibility are rewarded. A former university Dux said in an interview with TVI that he was always invited to all the university’s public events, to all the parties and sprees, and was even better known and more popular than the Dean.
• The absence of any rules or standards makes these practices dependent on the discretion and arbitrariness of the Dux and other members of the hazing committee. The lack of character and psychological maturity can lead these gentlemen to project their resentment of their academic and existential failure onto hopeful freshmen in the form of revenge, by hardening the hazing. "If you want to know a villain, put a stick in his hand" The Dux, or Duce as the dictator Mussolini was called, is the least suitable person to do hazing.

 Conclusion - Hazing helps the integration and identification of the new students with the university; it can transform the shapeless mass of a crowd of students at a university into the familiarity of an academic home. It consists of ridiculous and silly games or rituals that make you, the hazing committee and the large audience laugh. The negative side of it is that it can become bullying if not supervised.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC

Life in three time frames

Today's man is strongly influenced by the spirituality of "presentism" coming from the Far East and by the philosophy of life of consumerism, which appeals more to our basic instincts and less to our reason, seeking to disconnect our actions in the present from their causes in the past, and their consequences in the future. The aim is to get people to live in the pseudo-eternal present of a consumerist nirvana.

When, in the last stage of our lives, we live in the true eternal present, Heaven, then the past and the future will no longer be important; but until then, and as long as we live limited by the coordinates of space and time, the past and the future are of the utmost importance.

Life is like a play in three times and three acts. Anyone who lives in the past is a dead living, because the past is no longer happening, it cannot be acted upon, it is closed, it is passed; "Water under the bridge does not move mills".

Anyone who lives in the present disintegrated and without reference to the past is a living-dead, because without the memory of the past, he is a reed shaken by the wind, and since he does not know where he comes from, he does not know who he is, he has no identity. Anyone who lives in the present disintegrated and without reference to the future, without a dream, without a project, does not know where he is going, and "for those who don't know where to go, there are no favourable winds".

Those who live only in the future miss out on many opportunities in the present and forget that for this future, in order to be possible, must have one foot in the present, that is, there are things in the present that must be done to prepare the project to be completed in the future; if the future is the roof of the house, the present is the foundations and the walls.  A future without a present is a utopia, a fantasy; it is living in limbo in an eternal "standby".

Human life is the result of a balanced and harmonious living of the three times between which it follows We live in the present and only in the present; but by looking to the past, we discover who we are and the meaning of our lives; and by projecting ourselves into the future, we find the motivation for our living. The present is just one piece of the puzzle that in its totality includes the past and the future.

• The past is the reason, the present our action, the future our motivation.
• The past is the tradition, the present the action, the future the innovation.
• The past is what we were, the present what we are, the future what we are going to be.
• The past has been, the present is existing, the future is transcending.
• The past is God the Father who created us out of love, the present is God the Son who saved and saves us by giving us health here and now; and the future is God the Holy Spirit who animates, inspires and give us strength in our journey.
• The past is faith, the present is charity, the future is hope.

Faith identifies us with a past
Humanity’s heritage is not just made up of historical monuments, but of everything the human race is and has done over the 5 million years of its existence on this planet. All of this is genetically incorporated into the DNA of every child that comes into this world, it is something like Jung’s collective unconscious, it is part of us and defines us as such. The past is made up of all this.

Libris ex libris fiunt, when I want to create something new, in any field of knowledge, I have to research what already has been done in that area, in order to add to the fruit of my work.  Only God has the ability to create out of nothing.

Faith in a personal God, creator of everything and everyone, who revealed himself through the prophets and then in his Son, who sent us the Holy Spirit, already has a history. My adherence to this faith leads me to be a part of this history and gives me identity and a sense of belonging to a people and a community.

The same is true on an individual level; I know what I am and what I am capable of when I look back and see how my talents and shortcomings have performed in various circumstances that life has thrown at me throughout my personal history. It is the approval of this past that gives me the sense of self-worth, I need to relate properly with myself, with God, with others and with my surroundings.

Even God, who lives in eternity, outside of space and the becoming of time, to present himself to mankind, made use of the fact that he had lived with them in the past, presenting himself to Moses as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob...

Hope projects us into the future
As the stubborn donkey didn't want to walk, the young man tied a carrot to the end of a string, which he hung on a stick, then mounted the donkey and put the carrot two feet in front of the donkey's snout. Hoping to bite the carrot, the donkey kept on walking, not realizing that the carrot was also moving.

Hope is faith with wheels; the dynamic faith that projects us into the future.  We all need a "carrot" to walk on. The dream is the engine of life; what inspires our present is not in the present.

Martin Luther King was one of those who, projecting into the future, mortgaged his life on the struggle for equality between blacks and whites; a dream that he knew would not come true in his lifetime. The day before he was assassinated, inspired by Moses who after 40 years of desert wandering, saw the Promised Land, which he did not enter, from the top of Mount Nebo, he said: I am grateful to God because he has allowed me to see the Promised Land, I may not enter it with you but I am certain that we, as a people, will enter it one day.

You can only live meaningfully in the present if it is impregnated with the future.  To live in the present without the presence of the future is to drift. And when the present is painful, it is hope for a better future that helps us endure it.

Charity fills our present
Unlike the past and the future, the present is in our hands, in it and only in it are we free to act. The present is the here and now of our lives, which should be full of actions, acts of charity and love. For us Christians to live is to love and to love is to serve, to place ourselves at the service of those who need it most.

Putting into proportion what Mother Teresa of Calcutta did, and how much there was to do in the face of so much poverty and misery, a journalist once said, "What Mother is doing is like a drop of water in the ocean"; to which she answered with much humility, "Yes, but if I didn’t do it, the ocean would have one less drop of water".

God does not ask us to revolutionize the world, or to make it better, he only asks us to do our best. In the parable of the talents, the one who achieved more is not praised more than the one who achieved less; in the parable of the labourers in the vineyard, those who worked all day did not receive more than those who worked for only one hour; in the parable of the sower, those who produced 100% are not exalted more than those who produced 60% or those who only produced 30%.

Much or little, all the Lord asks of us is that we bear fruit. That our lives be productive; that we leave here more than what we find here. That we be part of the solution and not part of the problem; in other words, that our living and acting be a contribution to solving the problems of this world and not a contribution to making them worse.

Three virtues, three popes
There are those who want to see an incarnation of the theological virtues in the lives of the last three popes of the Church.  John Paul II, the one who crossed the threshold of the third millennium, is the Pope of Hope; Benedict XVI, who wrote an encyclical on faith, proclaimed the Year of Faith and his whole life as a theologian focused on the reasonableness of faith, is therefore the Pope of Faith; Pope Francis, by the name he chose, for his words and gestures, is the Pope of Charity.

Fr. Jorge Amaro, IMC