Binge and Purge

Scolding students won't make them safer.

Matthew Herper from the November 1999 issue

Late on the night of October 31, 1997, MIT lost its third undergraduate in little more than a month. By then I was getting used to writing obituaries. It was my junior year, and I had started an alternative newspaper, hoping to write about the scientific breakthroughs flowering all over campus. Then students started dying, and I found myself covering a different beat.

This time, I was almost frightened at how the article came so automatically, in an easy stream of typing and phone calls. Two cars had hit and killed Michelle Micheletti as she crossed Memorial Drive, a dangerously busy street that separates MIT from the Charles River and Boston. My dormitory was on Memorial Drive, as are most of the others on campus. From the curbside, the speeding cars seemed eager to tear off pedestrians' limbs. There were neither traffic lights nor walkways. Even before the accident, some MIT students had been campaigning for a safer way to get across the street. Even after the accident, nothing was done to make the street safer, aside from repainting the crosswalks.

I posted my story on the paper's Web page. Finishing it left me drained, so I drifted around my dorm for a while, feeling numb. Seeing an old friend in an elevator, I sighed and muttered that we had "lost another one." She asked who it was, I told her the name, and she collapsed into my chest. "I knew her, I knew her," she sobbed. The elevator doors opened and she ran back to her room, wiping her eyes.

Her reaction left me in cold shock. At the end of September, two freshmen had died within a week of one another, but neither had been on campus long enough to be close to more than a small group of friends. I hadn't known Michelle, but it seemed as though every third person I talked to had. She had been active in student government, a sorority member, an excellent student. Everyone who talked to me about her mentioned her constant smile. This loss stung, striking not only at our fear of mortality but at the connections within our community.

But Michelle Micheletti's death had little impact outside of MIT: just a few articles in The Boston Globe. The first student to die--Umaer Basha, who had drowned in the shower--seemed to get no press coverage at all. But the second death had captured the nation's attention, seizing space on CNN, in newsmagazines, and on front pages.

Scott Krueger had passed out drunk during an initiation celebration at his fraternity. He choked on his vomit, fell into a coma, and, three days later, died. By then he was already national news. His death had become a flash point in a national debate about drinking on campuses, and the handsome face and dimpled smile of his high school yearbook photo had become a symbol of the dangers alcohol poses to youthful innocents just sent off to college. And once he was turned into a symbol, the details of his tragedy were glossed over, forgotten. The realities of student life were lost in a swarm of flashing cameras, screaming headlines, and political grandstanding.

Life at MIT became surreal. As some students tried to mourn at a candlelight memorial service, others lined up for the television cameras. All sense of context was lost, and with it went any chance of really learning from Krueger's death.

College is a nuclear reactor. Students bounce around wildly, colliding and combining and falling apart in the chaos between early adolescence and adulthood. Universities try to contain this energy, to direct it toward learning and growth. But there is inevitable tension: The hyperactive stupor of a wild party is at least as much a part of student life as the controlled intellectual exercise of the classroom. Sometimes the controls on student behavior snap, and something explodes.

Scott Krueger's death was an explosion, as violent an accident as the crash that killed Michelle Micheletti. And just as Micheletti might have been saved by a traffic light or an overpass walkway, Krueger might have lived if some aspects of college culture, particularly fraternity culture, had been different. But the conditions that killed Krueger were shaped by the complicated reactions of a campus' social life, something far more complex than a busy street. Automobiles have drivers. Fraternities don't.

Yet the perception that college drinking was out of control--and the fact that Krueger was so young--led many people to insist that someone must be responsible for his death. The police launched a homicide investigation. As a grand jury was convened, there was speculation that indictments might finger not only Krueger's fraternity brothers but MIT itself. The legal process dragged on for the better part of a year, while Scott's parents gave interviews to Newsweek and 20/20 attacking MIT for allowing their son to live in a fraternity that had encouraged his drinking and his death.

Those charges had merit. Indeed, there were times when I was ready to point a finger at the university myself. Krueger had died at a reckless, dangerous event that had occurred while MIT wasn't watching but should have been.

Krueger had passed out while drinking at an initiation party at the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity, or Fiji, where he lived. Allegedly, the frat had challenged Krueger and his pledge class to finish the alcohol left in a room with them while they watched the movie Animal House. According to court papers, Krueger was then taken to his basement room and placed on his stomach with a trash pail near his head. There was a delay before anyone called for help. Krueger's fraternity brothers called MIT's campus police. When an ambulance arrived, he had already turned purple.

Animal House Night was a Fiji tradition. A student who had pledged the fraternity the year before but left, Pedro Fuentes, remembered attending a similar event. "It was Animal House Night, I think," he told The Harvard Crimson. "They gave us 90 beers...and told us to finish it before the end of the movie." When I phoned him, Fuentes declined to elaborate further: He didn't want "to get the guys in Fiji in trouble." He insisted that all pledge activities were voluntary.

Such dangerous initiation rites were not limited to Fiji. A former member of Sigma Phi Epsilon, Ryan Maupin, told me that "Sig Ep" used drinking rituals to welcome new pledges. But "after Krueger it had to stop--it was too risky."

The university should have been more aware of what was going on. As Rosalind Williams, MIT's highest-ranking dean, admitted to me, "We just were not sufficiently aware of what was happening in fraternity houses." But it isn't fair to blame Krueger's death on MIT.

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