Long before Scott Krueger drank himself to death at a Phi Gamma Delta initiation event last year, there were signs that social life in the Greek system at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was getting out of hand.
In 1996, three Boston College students were hospitalized on separate occasions for alcohol poisoning after partying at Phi Gamma Delta, an M.I.T. fraternity. A fed-up dean at the college asked the neighboring university to take some action. “These incidents could have been very serious, from both a medical and a legal perspective,” Robert A. Sherwood, the Boston College dean for student development, wrote in an e-mail message to M.I.T. administrators. “Anything you could do to address this issue would be appreciated.” M.I.T. won’t say how it responded, if at all, to the complaint -- one of several that have come to light since Mr. Krueger died. The death of the 18-year-old freshman has thrust M.I.T. to the center of a debate over whether a university can be held legally responsible for an alcohol-related tragedy involving its students. The institute has long ignored complaints about hazing and dangerous drinking in its Greek system, according to administrators from neighboring colleges, city officials in Boston, and M.I.T. students themselves. Yet, critics say, because of a housing shortage on its campus here, M.I.T. has continued to funnel its freshmen into unsupervised fraternities. The debate is likely to be played out in a courtroom next year. Mr. Krueger’s family says it will name M.I.T. as a defendant in a lawsuit. The Suffolk County District Attorney’s Office, which spent a year investigating the death, decided not to file charges against university administrators. But it did note a “troubling lack of supervision” over the fraternity. (The district attorney filed charges of manslaughter and hazing against Phi Gamma Delta in September, but the charges went nowhere; the chapter has disbanded, leaving no one to prosecute.) M.I.T. administrators say that the university’s housing system had nothing to do with Mr. Krueger’s death, and that the university cannot be held legally responsible for the actions of individual students in privately owned houses. “We can’t monitor a student’s behavior 24 hours a day,” says Rosalind H. Williams, dean of students and undergraduate education. Darlene and Robert Krueger didn’t understand M.I.T.'s housing policy and were unfamiliar with fraternity life when they dropped their son off here in August 1997. Housing brochures stipulated that freshmen were required to live “on campus,” in “institute housing.” But that definition included M.I.T. fraternity houses, many of which are located across the Charles River, in Boston -- about a mile away from the campus. Just before leaving their home in a Buffalo suburb to make the eight-hour drive to Boston, Mr. and Ms. Krueger learned that their son would spend a few days in a dormitory room while he participated in rush activities. He could then decide whether to live in a fraternity house or in a dormitory. The Fiske Guide to Colleges describes the entering student’s hunt for housing as a “seven-day ordeal that some claim is the most pressure-packed part of the whole M.I.T. experience.” Four days after his arrival, Scott Krueger pledged and moved into Phi Gamma Delta, known as “Fiji.” Ms. Krueger says that she wanted to see the house first, but that he told her, “If I don’t take the bed, someone else will.” Nonetheless, she wasn’t overly concerned. M.I.T. had a fine reputation, and her son was a “true adult” who had “never made a bad decision in his life,” she says. Scott Krueger wasn’t an experienced drinker, she says, although his older sister, Kelly, has said she once saw him after he had been drinking. That’s why his twin sister, Katie, was worried when he told her during a telephone call on September 26, 1997, that he and 11 other pledges would have to drink a specific amount of alcohol at an initiation event that evening. “The pledges were told that they were to gather together that night at 8:30 p.m. in a designated room of the fraternity, watch the movie Animal House, and collectively drink a certain prescribed amount of alcohol,” Pamela J. Wechsler, the assistant district attorney who led the investigation, wrote in a report released when indictments against Phi Gamma Delta were announced in September. The chapter’s “pledge trainer” gave the initiates beer and a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, which they consumed before each pledge met his “big brother,” or mentor. Scott Krueger’s big brother gave him a bottle of Bacardi spiced rum. Throughout the evening, Mr. Krueger complained of nausea, and he eventually lay down on a couch. When he began to lose consciousness, two students carried him to his bedroom, placed him on his stomach, and put a trash can next to his bed. Ten minutes later, Mr. Krueger was unconscious and covered in vomit. A fraternity member discovered him and dialed campus police. Paramedics rushed him to Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, in Boston, where he lingered in a coma for 40 hours, until he was pronounced dead on September 29. An autopsy determined that he died of alcohol poisoning and from suffocating on his vomit. William A. Martin, executive director of Phi Gamma Delta’s national fraternity, based in Lexington, Ky., has declined to comment on the events leading to Mr. Krueger’s death. M.I.T. and the national fraternity immediately suspended the chapter, and the Boston Licensing Board, which issues housing, restaurant, and alcohol licenses, revoked Fiji’s “dormitory license,” criticizing the university for not doing enough to prevent Mr. Krueger’s death. Daniel F. Pokaski, a board commissioner, says M.I.T. bears some responsibility for Mr. Krueger’s death, because it allowed him to join a fraternity for which he was not prepared. “It was a total abrogation of what a university should be doing, which is to guide people on their own for the first time,” he says. At a November 1997 hearing, Mr. Pokaski told M.I.T. administrators that they should have brought the fraternity “under control” earlier, by banning alcohol and placing an adult supervisor in the house. The licensing board had issued two previous warnings to Phi Gamma Delta, in response to two large parties there, in February 1996 and February 1997. The Interfraternity Council dealt with the first incident by banning the use of alcohol at the chapter’s parties for nine months. “Believe me, looking back you see things differently,” Ms. Williams, the dean of students, told the board. “I think at the time, we took what we considered appropriate and very serious action in suspending alcohol for nine months.” Darlene Krueger says M.I.T. is hardly blameless in her son’s death. “Did he drink the booze? Yes. We have personal responsibility, too, because we should have checked on the college better. We didn’t think we had to at a place like M.I.T. But if you want somebody to blame, how about the school that put him in that situation? How about the fraternity that had the party? How about the person who told him not to come out of the room until the booze was gone?” “I’ve raised my kid for 18 years and never had a problem. I send him off to a prestigious institution, and they kill him in five weeks.” Jim Borghesani, a spokesman for the district attorney, says M.I.T.'s “behavior did not rise to any level of criminality. It had no hand in orchestrating, planning, or executing the events of that night.” Investigators say police and paramedics were called to Phi Gamma Delta 15 times in the five years before Mr. Krueger’s death. Boston University, which has academic buildings and dormitories near many of M.I.T.'s fraternities, including Phi Gamma Delta, has complained for years about loud parties and heavy drinking at several of the fraternities. “They haven’t quite seen the gravity of the problem, and I’m not sure why they haven’t seen it,” says David Lampe, B.U.'s associate vice-president for university relations. M.I.T. has had a “laissez faire” attitude toward its Greek system, he says. “We would’ve liked M.I.T. to have taken a greater responsibility for the actions of the people in their living groups.” This past summer, a Boston University police officer ruptured a disk in his neck while dodging beer bottles thrown by students at a party at M.I.T.'s Beta Theta Pi fraternity. M.I.T. responded by banning alcohol at the chapter for three years. The officer has filed notice that he plans to sue M.I.T., which puts the university at risk of facing three fraternity-related lawsuits at once. (A woman who said she was raped at a Delta Upsilon party last year named M.I.T. in a lawsuit filed in Superior Court in August.) University officials say they have taken steps in recent years to make the fraternities safer -- emphasizing alcohol training, revising party-registration procedures, and hiring a full-time alcohol-education coordinator. Other institutions allow freshmen to live in fraternities, but the president of one such university says extra precautions are taken because of the policy. “It places a greater ‘duty to care’ on us,” says Edward H. Hammond, president of Fort Hays State University, in Kansas. There, administrators randomly visit off-campus fraternity houses, which are owned by alumni corporations. Some fraternities also have “house mothers,” university employees who live in the fraternity, he says. This fall, M.I.T. began requiring fraternities either to ban alcohol or to hire a live-in resident adviser. Until the change, it had left supervisory responsibilities up to the student leaders of each chapter, the fraternities’ national offices, and the alumni corporations that own the houses. “Students understand that when they join a fraternity or sorority, they are joining a system that requires a high amount of self-governance,” Ms. Williams says. Several M.I.T. housing committees have recommended in the past 10 years that freshmen be required to live in dormitories, and that rush be deferred until the spring. In 1989, one committee noted that the existing system presented an obstacle to freshmen who learned too late that fraternities weren’t for them. Very few students dropped out of the Greek system in the middle of the year, the panel said, because they either felt inhibited by social pressures or feared that they would get the worst dormitory rooms left over from the fall. M.I.T. finally went along with such thinking this past summer -- in the midst of the investigation into Mr. Krueger’s death. It announced that freshmen would be required to live in dormitories starting in 2001, when a new residence hall is to be completed. Ms. Williams says the university had rejected previous calls to change its policy because students prize the freedom to choose their housing, and because fraternities offer a supportive environment for new students who might have a difficult time making the transition to college life. Nearly a third of the 1,000 freshmen at M.I.T. live in fraternities, but freshmen have always been guaranteed a dormitory room if they want one, she notes. M.I.T.'s about-face is not an admission that its housing system contributed to Mr. Krueger’s death, she argues. “We know there’s a percentage of students who indulge in dangerous drinking, but it can happen in a dormitory as well,” she says. In fact, an underage student from Simmons College was treated for alcohol poisoning in September after attending a party in an M.I.T. dormitory. Courts generally have ruled that colleges cannot be held accountable when students’ drinking takes a fatal turn. “It’s impractical to impose the obligation to supervise the conduct of students,” says Eugene D. Gulland, a Washington lawyer who advises colleges on how to develop legally sound alcohol policies. Mr. Gulland, who has represented colleges in cases involving alcohol liability, says courts have ruled that “part of the college experience is for students to behave and act as adults and learn to take responsibility for their own conduct.” But in a paper he wrote for college administrators in 1994, he said a university may be held liable if it did not “stop a continuing pattern of dangerous conduct.” M.I.T. failed to do just that, according to Scott Velasquez and Robert Plotkin, two former students. They say they warned administrators about reckless hazing practices after being forced out of the university’s Pi Lambda Phi chapter in 1989 for refusing to participate in drinking rituals. A booklet that they wrote in 1992 about fraternity hazing at M.I.T. didn’t grab the attention of administrators, Mr. Velasquez says. M.I.T. officials, for their part, say the students’ concerns “were given serious consideration” and helped lead to increased alcohol training in the fraternities. But Mr. Velasquez and Mr. Plotkin, who later graduated from M.I.T., fired off an angry letter to Charles M. Vest, the institute’s president, in July 1993. “When a student is killed or dies at an M.I.T. fraternity,” they asked, “how will M.I.T. explain its full knowledge of dangerous and illegal practices persisting unchecked over a period of years?” http://chronicle.com |
We're sorry. Something went wrong.
We are unable to fully display the content of this page.
The most likely cause of this is a content blocker on your computer or network.
Please allow access to our site, and then refresh this page. You may then be asked to log in, create an account if you don't already have one, or subscribe.
If you continue to experience issues, please contact us at 202-466-1032 or help@chronicle.com