National Award Renamed for Franklin College Professor

FRANKLIN, IND. – A national organization focused on hazing prevention and intervention has renamed its prestigious annual awards program in honor of Franklin College associate professor of journalism Hank Nuwer.

HazingPrevention.Org will present the first "Hank Nuwer Anti-Hazing Hero Award" in 2009. The award will recognize five individuals, ranging from students, educators, social fraternity advisers, coaches and researchers, for extraordinary effort or accomplishment in the task of standing up to the dangerous and often illegal practice of hazing.

Nuwer's involvement as a social critic and journalist targeting hazing abuses began in 1978 when he wrote about the behavioral aspects of hazing in an essay for Human Behavior magazine. Nuwer has since made hazing education, prevention and intervention a significant part of his life's work.

"One death from hazing diminishes us all as a culture," said Nuwer. "For me as a journalist I saw the grief parents felt when a son or daughter died so tragically and unnecessarily.

I saw how the lives of hazers were forever ruined, knowing every day of their own lives there was one who walked amongst them who would never graduate, never have a child, never have the opportunities he or she was meant to happen.  And then there are the colleges and the Greek groups or athletic teams who will always bear the stigma of having a death from hazing that they somehow failed to prohibit.  

I simply feel that my work gives a voice to the voiceless, all those who died from hazing who cannot tell readers how easily their demise might have been prevented."

Nuwer has written numerous articles and four books on hazing, including the groundbreaking 1990 book Broken Pledges: The Deadly Rite of Hazing . His other books are High School Hazing (Scholastic), Wrongs of Passage and The Hazing Reader (Indiana University Press).

In 2006, the State University of New York awarded Nuwer an honorary doctorate to recognize his scholarly work in the area of hazing prevention. Author Michael Kimmel's 2008 best-selling book Guyland cited Nuwer as "a virtual one-man crusade to eliminate hazing" for more than 30 years. A frequent commentator on TV, Nuwer's appearances include the Today Show with Matt Lauer and CNN with Anderson Cooper. Nuwer also is a nationally-known speaker who has lectured at more than 100 campuses, including Dartmouth, the University of Michigan, Penn State and Syracuse University.

Nuwer serves on the board of HazingPrevention.Org and the advisory board of Security on Campus, a national watchdog organization devoted to rooting out violence on campus. He developed an online hazing prevention educational course for the Human Equation group in 2007-08 and started a collection of educational print and video materials on hazing at Buffalo State College's Butler Library.  He has appeared in numerous documentaries, most recently Haze , the documentary inspired by the death of Colorado student Lynn Gordon Bailey and narrated by Robin Wright Penn.  His regular hazing prevention column appears on the StopHazing.Org Web site.

A resident of Waldron, Ind., the 62-year-old Nuwer advises Alpha Lambda Delta Honor Society at Franklin College. He is a member of Sigma Tau Rho social fraternity at Buffalo State College and Phi Kappa Phi national honor society.

Founded in 1834, Franklin College is a residential four-year undergraduate liberal arts institution 20 minutes from downtown Indianapolis. 

The college prepares men and women for significant careers through the liberal arts, offering its 1,018 students 28 majors including biology, business, education, and journalism.  In 1842, FC began admitting women, becoming the first coeducational institution in Indiana and the seventh in the nation.  Franklin College maintains a voluntary association with the American Baptist Churches USA.