Courtesy of Kathleen Wiant
If you were told something was a tradition, would you feel compelled to carry it on? Even if you thought it ethically questionable?
Now, if you learned that carrying on that tradition might be a felony, would that change your answer?
Kathleen Wiant, and the people she worked with to pass Collin’s Law in Ohio, think that factor would give anyone pause. They believe the pause given by that anti-hazing law will save lives in the Buckeye State.
Kathleen is a Dublin resident and a mother of five. One of those five, Collin Wiant, was excited to join the Sigma Pi fraternity shortly after he started attending Ohio University in 2018.
OU’s fall semester begins in August. By November of his freshman year, Collin was dead as a result of a Sigma Pi hazing ritual in which he was pressured to inhale nitrous oxide – commonly known as a whippit.
Kathleen vowed to make sure no other Ohio student suffered her son’s fate. It took almost three years, but today Ohio has far more serious consequences for participating in or tolerating hazing. Kathleen is working to toughen hazing laws in other states so no other person has to suffer the same fate as her son.
The Fight Begins
Photo courtesy of Kathleen Wiant
The death of Collin was shocking enough for Kathleen, but she was also shocked to learn just how lax the penalties for hazing were here in Ohio. It was a slap on the wrist, a fourth-degree misdemeanor – the equivalent of an unpaid parking ticket, she says. At the time, only eight states considered hazing a felony.
This realization led to the formation of the Collin Wiant Foundation, which is dedicated to providing education on the consequences of hazing and how to stand up to it. One of the foundation’s first goals was to get laws punishing hazing on the books.
Kathleen and the foundation were thorough. The team worked with prosecutors, police and universities to specify what the law should cover and with Ohio Sens. Stephanie Kunze and Theresa Gavarone to draft the bill. Though officially titled Senate Bill 126, it was better known throughout the process as Collin’s Law. It took a three-pronged approach to curb the human consequences of hazing: education, penalties and transparency.
Collin’s Law turned hazing violations from fourth-degree misdemeanors to second-degree misdemeanors. If those hazing rituals should involve the forced consumption of drugs or alcohol, the ante is upped significantly: a third-degree felony, punishable by prison time. The law also adds punishments up to a first-degree misdemeanor for those who are aware of hazing but fail to report it.
Photo courtesy of Kathleen Wiant
Collin’s Law doesn’t just stiffen the punishments for those doing the hazing. It also expands the role that learning institutions play. Now, not only are universities required to provide anti-hazing training, they’re also required to post online information about violations over the past five years – with new reports due every six months.
That’s a key component, Kathleen says, because if those requirements had existed in 2018, Collin might still be alive.
After all, both mother and son would then have known that Sigma Pi had sent a pledge to the emergency room a few months prior. They also would have known the fraternity had been suspended years earlier for abuse of pledges.
Kathleen Wiant’s delivered some of her message on hazing in a TedX talk, which can be viewed on her website, www.kathleenwiant.com.
Pledges were beaten and struck with belts. They were forced to strip to their underwear outdoors in the cold. They were pushed to play contact football without protective equipment. They were even waterboarded, Kathleen says.
Kathleen says that she and her husband, Wade, would have voiced serious objections to their son’s rushing Sigma Pi if they had known about the OU chapter’s propensity for hurting its pledges – and that’s if they even had to voice such objections.
“If Collin had seen the signs of hazing, he would have gotten up and walked out,” says Kathleen.
In December 2020, though, it seemed the bill wasn’t going to pass. The Ohio Senate balked, some of its members were unhappy with anti-bullying provisions that were part of the bill. It seemed like the bill’s backers were going to have to go back to the drawing board.
And then Stone Foltz died.
The Final Push
Photo courtesy of Kathleen Wiant
Foltz, a 20-year-old Delaware resident, was pledging to join the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity at Bowling Green State University. On March 4 of this past year, as part of a hazing ritual, he was given an entire bottle of whiskey and told to finish it, which he did in less than 20 minutes.
Shortly after he lost consciousness later that evening, Foltz stopped breathing. He was rushed to the hospital with a blood-alcohol level of 0.394 percent. He would die three days later without ever having regained consciousness.
Collin’s Law was buoyed by protests at BGSU and beyond, and Foltz’s parents, Cory and Shari, joined the fight as well. The foundation worked with Ariel Tarosky, director of sorority and fraternity life at OU, and others in similar positions at Ohio universities to carry out a letter-writing campaign urging legislators to pass the bill.
Each new school year brings at least one new hazing death that makes the national news, Kathleen says, and letter writers asked legislators the big question: Did they want that death to occur at yet another university in Ohio?
“I told them, ‘All eyes will be on you. Everyone will know you failed the students of Ohio,’” she says.
At long last, Collin’s Law passed in July 2021. After Gov. DeWine signed the bill in August, it officially went into effect in October.
In addition to the foundation, Collin’s name lives on via the Miracle League of Central Ohio. As a longtime volunteer there, Collin is part of the baseball league’s hall of fame, and his name is now also on the scoreboard.
The Path Forward
It’s too early to measure the bill’s long-term impact. But college advisers tell Kathleen it’s opening up conversations, she says, and student organizations are cracking down on so-called “traditions” that serve little purpose beyond tormenting newcomers.
“It really is going to be impactful in making change,” Kathleen says.
Through the foundation, Kathleen has been traveling throughout the U.S. to give talks about hazing and push for laws that target it. She presents to fraternities and sororities, student-athletes, marching band members, and sometimes general student bodies. A good number of faculty members often attend as well, Kathleen says.
Now, she’s looking to expand the impact by working with like-minded groups on national anti-hazing legislation: the Educational Notification and Disclosure of Actions risking Loss of Life by Hazing Act, or the END ALL Hazing Act for short.
The Foundation’s Message
One of the key messages Kathleen conveys at presentations is that hazing is a cycle. A freshman pledge doesn’t join a fraternity or sorority hotly anticipating the prospect, years later, of tormenting underclassmen. Institutions that practice hazing embed it in tradition. Students who were hazed as pledges thus feel compelled to do the hazing themselves when they’re put in a position of power.
“It doesn’t matter that the players are different because it’s the tradition,” Kathleen says.
And what about those newcomers who endure the hazing? Why don’t they speak out? That’s another of the insidious parts of the practice. Hazing often starts small and gets progressively worse. By the time a freshman pledge realizes it’s gone too far, they’re afraid to talk about it for fear of embarrassment or punishment. But any amount of hazing is unacceptable, Kathleen says.
Garth Bishop is a contributing writer. Feedback welcome at feedback@cityscenemediagroup.com.
