As the historically unproductive 118th session of Congress comes to a close and members fight over the basic tasks of governing, lawmakers quietly passed a law to fight campus hazing without much controversy.
The bill, which passed both chambers unanimously and is set to be signed by President Joe Biden this week, was the result of a six-year collaboration between national fraternities and the parents of hazing victims at colleges and universities around the country.
If that seems like an unlikely pairing, it is one. When students die from hazing incidents, parents typically take the fraternities responsible to court. But in the effort to get state and federal laws to take a harsher stance on hazing, the two sides became allies. Jim Piazza, whose son, Timothy, died from injuries sustained while being hazed at Penn State in 2017, was one of the first parents to reach out to national fraternity representatives to talk.
“You know, it’d be easy to be at odds, and certainly I would understand if parents didn’t want to work with national fraternities,” said Jud Horras, the president and CEO of the North American Interfraternity Conference (NIC). “In the end, Jim and I have a common enemy. It’s college hazing. It’s hazing in general.”
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It’s not just the coalition of advocates behind the bill who are strange bedfellows: The legislation has bicameral and bipartisan support across the board. Sens. Bill Cassidy and Amy Klobuchar led the bill in the Senate, with a slew of co-sponsors from both parties.
Democratic Rep. Lucy McBath, one of the sponsors of the House bill, told NOTUS she was grateful to have been able to lead the bill after the hard work of the advocates. Students shouldn’t have to worry about getting hazed, she said.
“They should be going to study and to learn, and I think it’s our responsibility to keep them safe, so I’m really excited and really grateful that we were able to get that across the aisle,” McBath said.
The new law will require colleges and universities to disclose hazing incidents annually and publicly distribute a policy on hazing prevention. Some states have already enacted similar laws, but this will make the policy national.
Republican Rep. Jeff Duncan, the other House sponsor, told NOTUS he feels it’s important for parents and students to know what an organization might have in its past before deciding to join.
“It’s just the right thing to do,” Duncan said. “No parent should lose a child when they send them off to college.”
The bill went through both chambers of Congress with unanimous approval and didn’t encounter much, if any, resistance along the way.
“I don’t think anybody really said to us, ‘This is a problem. This doesn’t make sense,’” Piazza said. “I mean, sure there was some clarification that some folks needed, but it was pretty much an easy, bipartisan, I would say, no-brainer.”
Implementing the law in colleges and universities across the country will require some help from the Department of Education, which President-elect Donald Trump has threatened to abolish. But the bill’s many supporters aren’t worried about getting it implemented: Once it’s law, it’s law.
“These universities will still be required to report this, whether the Department of Education is involved or not,” Duncan said. He told NOTUS he hasn’t had any conversations with the incoming administration about hazing. When asked if she was concerned about implementation, McBath shook her head no.
“The parents are going to make sure it is a priority,” Horras said. “We feel comfortable, regardless of administration, and over time, we’re going to be dealing with hazing for many, many more years through many, many different cycles of who’s president of the United States.”
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Helen Huiskes is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
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