Two young people were set on fire, and the first official account of it says they "took part in a dangerous activity."
That phrasing is where the story already goes wrong. We don't yet know what happened on Indianola Avenue. Police and the fire department's arson unit are still investigating, and a suspended chapter is not a convicted one. But we do know how these stories usually get told. They begin with a passive construction, a vague "activity," and a pair of victims who supposedly participated. By the end, the lesson is that kids make bad choices, and the institution that profits from their presence has cleared its throat and moved on.
Consent inside a hierarchy is not the same as consent between equals. Anyone who has watched the long, grim record of fraternity hazing knows that. Ohio knows it better than most. Collin Wiant died at Ohio University in 2018, and Stone Foltz died at Bowling Green in 2021. The state has since toughened its hazing laws, including Collin's Law, which raised criminal penalties and demanded transparency from schools. The lesson of those deaths was that "voluntary" is a word invoked by the people who benefit from the ritual, not by the people being burned by it.
Sigma Alpha Epsilon is hardly a stranger to this argument. Years of reporting on the fraternity's death toll and litigation pushed its national organization to abolish pledging in 2014. Now, a decade on, a chapter is again at the center of a video no one in authority seems to have seen until someone posted it. Police say they heard about the incident the evening after it happened, from the university and another caller. A fire that injured two people badly enough to need serious medical care became a public matter only because it was filmed and shared. Whatever else this was, it was not an institution catching its own failures.
Now comes the familiar choreography: interim suspension, a statement about working with law enforcement, and the national organization promising to "consider disciplinary action." Each is defensible. Together they are a liability-management routine. The university distances itself, the national organization distances itself from the chapter, and the chapter's members hire lawyers. The only people with no one to manage their exposure are the two who were burned.
We should ask why this arrangement endures. Fraternities are not just social clubs. They are alumni networks that funnel members into jobs, donations and political connections, and they are a major source of campus housing and revenue that universities would otherwise have to provide. That is why schools tolerate a parallel system that operates off-campus, behind private doors, with its own secret rules for admission. When the cost of that tolerance is paid in skin grafts, the people who built the tolerance are rarely the ones who pay.
The Left should be clear about two things. First, accountability has to reach individuals. If someone lit a person on fire for entertainment or initiation, that is a crime, not a campus conduct issue, and "boys will be boys" is not a defense. Second, accountability has to reach the institutions that keep re-creating the conditions. A national that has been burned by this before, and a university that has publicly suspended chapters before, cannot claim surprise.
If this turns out to be hazing, the question isn't whether to suspend this chapter. It's whether anyone with real power over Greek life is prepared to say the system itself is the problem. Ohio State has had its warning. So have the nationals. The next one shouldn't have to be filmed to count.
How it may affect me
If you have a student in Ohio, check your school's public hazing report. Ohio's Collin's Law requires colleges to disclose organizational hazing violations. Ask whether a chapter is recognized, suspended or operating off-campus, and don't rely on its national brand.
