By MATT CHITTUM
ROANOKE TIMES

The law essentially makes a "judge" of a person "with a vested interest in the school not losing face," the author of a hazing study said.

When George Wade Jr. was struck on his buttocks with leather belts and wire coat hangers by four upperclassmen at the Virginia Military Institute in the fall, it wasn't considered hazing under Virginia law.

But if Wade had taken his licks about 40 miles to the west, in West Virginia, he would be considered a hazing victim, experts on the topic say. The same would be true in a good many of the other 39 states that have anti-hazing laws.

It wouldn't make any difference that a doctor did not find any welts left by the blows, and it wouldn't make any difference if - as some of the other five VMI freshmen struck with Wade have claimed - Wade agreed to the whippings and it was all just "horseplay."

In fact, a fair amount of the sanctioned activity of the brutal "ratline" at VMI would be considered hazing in some other states, the experts say.

The comparison illustrates that Virginia's anti-hazing law - while one of the oldest in the United States and born of concern over hazing practices at VMI - is practically useless when it comes to prosecuting someone for mistreating another during an initiation.

"The penalties are there, but are they? A statute such as this isn't worth the paper it's written on," said Eileen Stevens, president of the 20-year-old Committee to Halt Useless College Killings. Hank Nuwer, a former University of Richmond professor and author of "Broken Pledges," a book-length study of hazing, agreed.

The law seems merely "symbolic," said Kent Willis, director of the Virginia chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Part of the problem is that it does not really define hazing but sets a high standard - mistreatment resulting in "bodily injury" - for what constitutes it. It doesn't acknowledge the mental effects of hazing.

The West Virginia law demands only "endangerment" of the victim's physical or mental health. In South Carolina, hazing is an act with the "foreseeable potential for causing physical harm."

Also peculiar to Virginia's law, and perhaps unconstitutional in Willis' view, is that it seems to usurp the commonwealth's attorney's power and give prosecuting authority to college officials because any charge of hazing must be initiated by the college.

Nuwer said Virginia's anti-hazing law is typical in its weakness among states where the military or military schools have a strong presence.

But when the Virginia law was born - 70 years ago this month - it was in the hostile atmosphere of a General Assembly disturbed by a rash of brutal hazings at the college during the fall term and debating VMI's overall worth to the state.

Young Frank Dinges of Edinburg survived a mere 21 days in the 1927 version of VMI's famed "ratline" training regimen.

At the end of his third week at school, he returned home to have his appendix removed, which his doctor said was damaged by repeated punches to his belly.

Dinges' father told the school and, on Oct. 18, one of the greater uproars in VMI history began.

Superintendent William H. Cocke had vowed to crack down on hazing at VMI. So, when he learned it was a senior named William Francis Roelofson Griffith Jr. of Norfolk who had allegedly struck the blows, he immediately dismissed him, according to press reports of the time.

Before Griffith could even leave campus, the entire corps of cadets, 700-plus strong, went on strike in protest.

One cadet captain, H.W. Morgan of Washington, D.C., declared that the majority of the cadets was opposed to hazing but that the activities of every individual could not always be controlled.

An emergency meeting of the VMI Board of Visitors was called for that evening to decide what to do with Griffith and the rest of the cadets.

The strike ended the next day, with the cadets saying they had made their point. The day after that, all of the upperclassmen were confined to campus for a month by the board, and Griffith's appeal was denied.

Ten days later, another student - reportedly the 40th that year - was dismissed for hazing.

And on Jan. 10, a former "rat" named Nicholas Orem Jr., son of the superintendent of schools in Prince George County, Md., reported a beating similar to Dinges'. Cocke denied the report, saying it couldn't have happened because all hazing at VMI had since been "eradicated."

Nevertheless, Gov. Harry Byrd ordered an inquiry into the claim.

By the time Byrd addressed the General Assembly Jan. 16, VMI was quite the topic of discussion.

A commission to study education in the state had recommended all state funding to VMI be cut off because its military components were not valuable and the rest of what it offered was duplicated in other colleges.

Byrd said he opposed cutting off VMI.

"The Institute has done a great service to the state," but "brutal hazing must be stopped and no repetition of the student strike will be tolerated."

Two days later, though, Del. Ashton Dovell of Williamsburg offered a bill to end VMI's state aid anyway, citing Byrd's reference to the hazing problems.

Dovell's bill died in committee, but in the last days of the session, Virginia's first anti-hazing law - House Bill 360, sponsored by Del. Clarence Jones of Spotsylvania - was passed with broad support.

That law, signed March 22, 1928, by Byrd, has remained substantially unchanged since then, and therein lies part of the problem, its critics say.

"It looks like someone wanted to stop hazing symbolically," Willis said, so they passed a law to get VMI off the hook from its critics, but that would allow VMI to function as autonomously as it always had.

The last paragraph of the law, which says a hazing charge must be brought by the presiding official of a school, is particularly effective at that.

The law essentially makes a "judge" of a person "with a vested interest in the school not losing face," Nuwer said.

Critics say the law is also remarkably vague, especially in its lack of a hazing definition.

West Virginia's law rambles on for a few hundred words in explaining what hazing is, including whipping, branding, forced consumption of any substance and sleep deprivation. It also prohibits any activity that could result in "extreme embarrassment."

"The mental and emotional aspects of hazing are incorporated into practically every hazing statute I'm aware of," said Stevens, the president of Committee to Halt Useless College Killings (CHUCK), which is named for her son, who was killed in a fraternity hazing incident at Alfred University, in Alfred, N.Y., about 20 years ago.

In Virginia, "it's easy when you've got a physical injury or physical abuse," said Rockbridge/Lexington Commonwealth's Attorney Gordon Saunders, who is investigating Wade's case and whose father taught at VMI for over 40 years.

"But things like mental abuse, when you try to take that into court, it's probably not going to fly."

The Virginia hazing law is also conspicuous in its lack of a mention that consent on the part of the victim cannot be used as a defense against a hazing charge. Both the West Virginia and South Carolina laws include such a clause.

The South Carolina law, while more thorough than the Virginia one, seems to make Nuwer's point that hazing laws are weaker in states with strong military or military school presence.

"This section does not include military training whether state, federal or educational," it reads.

Charleston, S.C., is home to VMI's kindred school, The Citadel, and its brutal "knob system" of training for freshmen.