Anonymous posters on Greek Life forums have long swapped rumors about the horrific hazing at Young Harris College, a tiny private college up in Appalachia run by former Georgia Secretary of State and failed gubernatorial candidate Cathy Cox. Now, a potent new lawsuit alleges that YHC administrators turned a blind eye — and some even joined in the fun — as sorority members made rushees sit naked on washing machines while they marked the jiggling parts of their bodies, male pledges engaged in human centipede-style “elephant crawls” through freezing cold creeks, and students dropped out of classes due to the emotional and physical stress of participating in Greek Life.
We spoke with the plaintiffs — one former pledge and two former instructors who say they were fired for challenging the administration— who are suing Young Harris for “reckless indifference” to a “widespread and well-known culture of abusive and sexually charged hazing.”
1,035 undergraduates attend Young Harris College, a liberal arts college in the heart of the North Georgia Appalachian Mountains that was founded in 1886 but earned its four-year accreditation just five years ago. YHC advertises both its sustainability initiatives and religious life offerings on its website, but campus culture is dominated by Greek Life — even professors don lettered shirts — and has been for decades, as evidenced by a 1989 hazing-themed edition of Enotah Echoes, the student newspaper. “The actions of some of our campus organizations continue to fly in the face of all moral and legal sense,” a professor wrote to his colleagues at the time, urging them not to ignore hazing practices.
It’s easy to ignore hazing at YHC because most of the Greek houses are local; this year, only two out of the nine Greek houses are national chapters, and that’s an unprecedented number. Students and alumni gushed about the tight-knit community on a Facebook page called Young Harris Students/Alumni Against National Fraternities/Sororities, launched in 2009 when a small group of freshman started pressuring the administration to allow national sororities and fraternities to open on campus. “People, what is our paradise turning into?” one student wrote. “Looking back, nothing was more meaningful than the local greek organizations,” an alum recalled. “Together, they brought a sense of absolute unity to the entire college.”
But that “absolute unity” also fostered “a widespread and well-known culture of abusive and sexually charged hazing” among the local fraternities and sororities that lack even the bare-bones oversight given to national chapters, according to a recent lawsuit filed against the college by current sophomore Jo Hannah Burch, a former Gamma Psi pledge, and two faculty members who claim they were fired for trying to expose the administration’s failings.
Burch, 20, told Jezebel she rushed the local house as a freshman because it was one of the largest and most popular sororities on campus. Gamma Psi girls were known for their high GPAs, but they were also known for hazing hard — although the sisters tactfully called it “education period” instead. On five or six nights in February/March 2012, Burch and her fellow pledges were taken to the nearby woods where they were screamed at, spit upon, and forced to crawl through mud into a freezing creek, often at 2 A.M. on a weeknight. Once, Burch alleges, there was a lightning storm while the girls shivered in the water; the girls still weren’t allowed to get up. Burch told Jezebel that two current YHC admissions counselors and alums helped scream at Burch and the other pledges as they kneeled in the mud. (Only one is referenced in the complaint.)
Burch, bruised all over, finally reached a breaking point in mid-March. When she told Gamma Psi’s President and Vice President that she planned to de-pledge, they asked her if she was okay because they didn’t want to “wear orange” — as in, go to prison — if she tattled. “Orange isn’t my color,” Burch recalls one joking. A few days later, Burch reported her ordeal to Susan Rogers, YHC’s Vice President of Student Affairs, who eventually decided that Gamma Psi would be suspended for one year but that no individual student or staffer involved in the hazing would be punished, even though Burch could easily identify many of them. She told Burch not to bother filing a police report — if she did, the sorority members would probably sue her.
Burch developed severe depression and couldn’t stand to be around the students and staffers who hazed her, a challenge at such a small school. When her father called YHC President Cathy Cox around Easter 2012, she told him that “these things happen.” The case seemed closed whether she liked it or not.
But Burch had one more hope: plaintiff Theresa Crapanzano, then a YHC visiting instructor in Communication Studies and Burch’s advisor on the school paper. She opened up to Crapanzano the same day she quit rush, and, unlike Rogers and Cox, Crapanzano was disturbed.
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