Idiots, Follies and Misadventures by Mikey Robins

Author:Mikey Robins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster Australia
Published: 2023-07-05T00:00:00+00:00

NO THANK YOU SIR, I WILL NOT HAVE ANOTHER

The practice of hazing is a long-running stain on the history of Western education. It has caused mental anguish, physical injury and on more than one occasion its share of brutal and needless mortalities. What makes it even more insidious is that it is mostly carried out by young men (and let’s be honest on the whole it’s young male students) that not only should know better, but also carry out these vile acts whilst they are at the very institutions that are dedicated to higher learning.

Plus, and this will come as no surprise, it’s been going on forever, as far back as 387 BCE. Plato was bemoaning this behaviour amongst students he was instructing. He complained of ‘practical jokes played by unruly young men that injured the hazed and citizens who got in the way’. He likened the perpetrators to wild animals. It would seem that the brightest and wealthiest would not only inflict pain or humiliation on junior students but would also attack any poor citizen who felt compelled to step in and try and stop the bullying.

Years later Saint Augustine, who was never shy on having an opinion on just about anything, had something to say about hazing which he had witnessed at the University of Carthage back when it was called ‘wrecking’. He wrote, ‘I would take no part in the wild doings of the “wreckers”, a cruel and devilish name, which was looked upon as the stamp of the best set. I went about with them, and some of them I made friends with, yet I always disliked their ways of going on their wreckings, their wanton attacks upon the shyness of freshmen and the unprovoked affronts with which they carried on their malignant amusements. Nothing could be more like the conduct of devils, and what name could be fitter for them than “wreckers”’.

This passage from St Augustine’s Confessions was written around 400 CE, a good six centuries after Plato, but it shows that privileged young men would, and (I’ll put this in philosophical terms) quite often did, still behave like a bunch of useless, spoilt dickheads.

So much so that by 530 CE, the Byzantine emperor Justinian cracked down on the practice when he was codifying his set of Roman laws.

As the so-called Dark Ages in Europe receded and universities began to flourish, sadly so did the bastard practice of hazing. By 1340, the University of Paris had declared hazing an offence punishable by immediate expulsion.

It was also recorded that over a century later, the students at the University of Avignon formed their own anti-hazing Fraternity of St Sebastian so concerned they were about the pernicious effect hazing was having on their wellbeing.

You also have to spare a thought for the poor students at Uppsala University in Sweden. Any first year student between the 15th and 16th century had to endure something known as the ‘Deposition’. This would start almost on their day of arrival. I say

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