All campus administrators face issues of hazing, some with more urgency than others. Southeast Missouri State University faced a worse crisis than most in 1994 when twenty-five-year old Michael Davis -- a journalism major -- died after two weeks of hazing at the hands of his Kappa Alpha Psi brothers.

At that time, a horrified campus held countless discussions about what the college as a whole knew or should have known -- and realized it did not know nearly enough.

Today, Loren Rullman, director of the university center with responsibility for Greek life, says confidently, "There is not hazing that is taking place. I really believe that.

Rullman, who came to Southeast Missouri six months after Davis died, has spent a great deal of time working with fraternities and sororities, both Black and White, to get to the point where he can be so confident.

Whether other campuses can duplicate the procedures that has made him so confident is an open question, he says. The unfortunate death of Michael Davis gave the entire campus "an incredible sensitivity" to the issue of hazing.

"We have never forgotten that, but it isn't something you can program," he says.

Still, he says, other campuses can learn from the experience of Southeast Missouri.

"They need to took at what has happened here and learn something," Rullman advises.

One of the ways Rullman has approached the issue is to emphasize that hazing is not peculiar to Black fraternities and sororities, despite the public attention focused on them.

In my view, hazing is a behavioral problem, not just a Greek problem, and not just a Black Greek problem. Hazing can take place in a variety of circumstances where there is group identity and entrance into the group."

For that reason, many of the responses of the university have been general rather than specific to the fraternities and sororities.

The vice president for student affairs at Southeast Missouri, Dr. SueAnn Strom, was one of the crisis managers at the time of Davis's death. She has since given talks to campus administrators at other institutions about what steps have been taken at her campus.