No place for hazing

It's easy to support Carson High School Principal Glen Adair as he speaks out against hazing at school.

Seeing teenaged boys dressed in gunny sacks and having bottles of Tobasco sauce being dumped down their throats in the 1970s at Virginia City High School churned the stomach.

Through the years, not much changed. At the University of Nevada, Reno in the 1980s young men died after a rabid night of partying and initiation into the Sundowners. In the early 1990s girls in northeastern Nevada were being stripped of their bras and forced to retrieve them from the boys on the baseball team. In the late 1990s, boys at Douglas High School were tossed into trash cans.

Tuesday, we learned students were still running naked and barefoot down C Hill in recent years.

This year, the Gerlach basketball team lost its season after a pair of videotapes were released showing hazing by an upperclassman, flashing by a female player who was also being groping by members of the boys team.

What once seemed like harmless flirtation, initiation -- tradition -- is now hazing and is now against the law.

Parents are calling the Secret Witness hotline but are not naming victims or victimizers -- fearing retribution to their sons and daughters. While understandable, it leads authorities nowhere.

A generation of parents, many of whom may have "run the hill" or survived initiation, may dismiss the traditions. Time has erased some of the degradation and fear they once felt.

But if it continues, it's only a matter of time before someone is seriously injured or another student dies. The traditions of fear, browbeating and bullying at school must soon be set aside, replaced by the traditions of academic excellence, athletic prowess, stellar performances and pride in oneself.

Knowing no parents and no students have called the newspaper outraged after their son or daughter returns from a run up C Hill reinforces the need for the silent culture of fear to end.

We're asking students, future leaders, to step up, take responsibility for their own actions and jump off the bandwagon.

Torture should be reserved for terrorists who won't talk, not for the class of 2005.