Editor’s note: This is part of our series of regional snapshots examining how campuses are responding to the new federal law requiring hazing transparency.
Colleges and universities across New England report 10 hazing incidents in the past 10 months involving fraternities, sororities, sports teams, and a performing arts group.
That number comes from a new analysis by HazingInfo.org. But it’s likely many more hazing incidents have gone unreported.
Our review found that just 4 out of every 10 campuses in the Northeast have up-to-date hazing incident records.
Massachusetts has the worst record, with just one-third of campuses providing hazing incident records updated since July 1, 2025. That’s when the new Stop Campus Hazing Act began requiring each US college and university to document hazing violations.
The new law is giving students and families their first look at campus-level hazing incidents — and which schools are responding with greater transparency about hazing happening on their campuses.
Hazing incidents that were reported illustrate an important point: Hazing isn’t just a fraternity problem. Hazing also happens in sororities, arts groups, sports teams, honor societies, and many other student organizations.
At the University of Connecticut, potential new members were required to sleep on the floor in a house with no heat at the Lambda Theta Phi Latin Fraternity.
The University of Maine reported two hazing incidents: Pi Beta Phi sorority members were required to steal from campus fraternities. And the Phi Tau Phi sorority was suspended for blindfolding new members, depriving them of sleep, and forcing them to consume an unknown “potion” and trespass on private property.
In Massachusetts, Clark University’s Hip Hop Collabo dance group leaders required members who were late to practice to run laps in front of other students. Northeastern University in Boston posted that Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity violated its hazing policy but shared no details.
The women’s soccer team at Rivier University in New Hampshire was also cited for violating the school’s hazing policy. First-year players were required to respond to personal and derogatory questions posed by upperclass team members.
At the University of New Hampshire, Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity members were caught on camera throwing objects at new members as they crawled down a hallway at the chapter house.
Three students were hospitalized after an event at the University of Rhode Island’s Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity that included forced exercise and “brutal treatment.”
At Johnson & Wales University in Rhode Island, Sigma Delta Tau sorority was cited for imposing social isolation on new members, restricting where they could go and the kinds of relationships and interactions they could have.
And in Vermont, Middlebury College’s women’s soccer team held a scavenger hunt that involved some team members being photographed and recorded partially or fully nude.
That’s particularly true in Massachusetts, where two-thirds of the state’s 51 colleges and universities either have not published a hazing incident record or have not updated their record since before July 1, 2025.
Schools with no hazing report available include Boston University, with an undergraduate student population of nearly 40,000, as well as three out of four University of Massachusetts campuses with a combined student population of more than 55,000. Only the UMass campus in Lowell currently has a Campus Hazing Transparency Report.
Reporting is also lagging in Connecticut, where 63% of schools haven’t produced a Campus Hazing Transparency Report.
That includes Yale University and the University of New Haven. Both have set up webpages where their reports are supposed to be published but have failed to update them with data.
While this is just a partial snapshot of college hazing in New England, it marks the first time a regional picture of hazing has ever been possible.
An earlier report by HazingInfo found campuses in Western states had a somewhat better track record of reporting hazing incidents, with nearly half of schools in the West sharing up-to-date hazing data in the past 10 months.
Experts say we are likely to get a clearer picture of college hazing over time as more schools meet the requirements of the federal Stop Campus Hazing Act and publish their hazing data.
Campuses are not technically required to post a Campus Hazing Transparency Report if there hasn't been a formal finding of a hazing violation.
But HazingInfo requires schools to publish a hazing incident report — even when there hasn’t been a formal finding of hazing — to earn a green checkmark for transparency in our school listings.
That report doesn’t need to be elaborate. It can be as simple as this sentence on the Campus Hazing Transparency Report page created by Worcester State University in Massachusetts:
“There were no findings of responsibility for hazing violations between July 1, 2025, and December 23, 2025.”