To the Editor,
As a University alumnus, I read Adeline Garvie’s column, “Let clubs be about interests, not interviews” with concern. While her frustration with hyper-competitive student organizations is understandable, her suggestion that the University establish new standards for clubs’ recruiting process, including banning multi-stage interviews, risks confusing discomfort with danger — and selectivity with hazing.
In the wake of the Stop Campus Hazing Act, some universities have begun treating stress itself as suspect. Multi-round interviews, skills-based questions and selective recruitment processes are increasingly lumped together with coercive initiation rituals. That is a category error. Hazing is about abuse and humiliation. Interviews are about standards.
This distinction matters. When rigor is recast as harm, merit suffers, and students are poorly prepared for life beyond Grounds — where interviews, evaluations and rejection are routine. The University should be equipping students to meet high expectations, not lowering the bar in the name of comfort.
There are also serious due process concerns when not yet proven hazing allegations are tied to standard application processes. Transparency and reporting requirements tied to hazing enforcement can expose student organizations to public suspicion before any wrongdoing is established. Reputations are easily damaged and rarely repaired, especially when the alleged misconduct amounts to little more than being selective.
Worse still, over-policing benign practices risks driving genuinely harmful behavior underground. Dangerous practices do not disappear with new expansive rules, rather they adapt, become informal and move out of view. If administrators and students are distracted by policing harmless recruiting processes, they dilute attention and resources away from real hazing. When everything is labeled hazing, real abuse becomes harder — not easier — to identify and stop.
None of this is an argument against confronting dangerous hazing. It is an argument for precision and restraint in defining what causes real coercion and harm. The role of the University is to forge students capable of meeting high expectations. Treating interviews as suspect and standards as cruelty moves the University in the opposite direction of promoting excellence.
Clubs should indeed be about interests. But interests are often advanced through commitment, evaluation and seriousness of purpose. Confusing those qualities with hazing does students no favors — and does not honor the spirit of the law meant to protect them.
Scott Gleason is a Class of 1972 alumnus of the College of Arts and Sciences. He can be reached at opinion@cavalierdaily.com.
The opinions expressed in this guest letter are not necessarily those of The Cavalier Daily. The guest letter represents the views of the columnist alone.
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