To the editors:
We are writing to correct a most insensitive inaccuracy in your article, "MIT Settles for $6 Million in Krueger Case" (News, Sept. 15). In the opening sentence, Scott Krueger is referred to as "a first-year who drank himself to death." Let us be clear that if Scott Krueger had indeed drunk himself to death, MIT would not have taken responsibility for his death. The President of MIT would not have traveled to Orchard Park, N.Y., to apologize to Kreuger's parents. MIT would not have taken the extreme disciplinary action of rescinding the MIT degree from the fraternity member who had planned the events of the evening that took a brilliant young man's life.
Nor would MIT have banished the fraternity itself from campus. Nor would MIT have established a scholarship in Scott's memory; nor invested in the construction of on-campus housing, required for first-years beginning in 2002.
Krueger did not drink himself to death, and a statement to the contrary undermines the very powerful precedent set by MIT's apology and voluntary settlement. The institution has taken responsibility and publicly apologized for the conditions that led to a student's death during a fraternity initiation.
MIT's message was that Krueger had not drunk himself to death but, rather, his life had been put at intolerable risk by the ungoverned conditions of the freshman pledging event, a risk compounded by the paucity of residential options for MIT first-years, and a risk that could have been avoided if previous studies and warnings of these life-threatening risks had been acknowledged and acted upon by the institution.
Krueger was an exceptional young man with a beautiful heart and a brilliant mind whose life was taken from him in the first moments of college by life-threatening conditions that did not have to exist. As members of Scott's family as well as of the Harvard community, we take offense and ask that The Crimson desist from ever again referencing Scott Krueger as "a first-year who drank himself to death." And, as MIT President Vest said in his press release, let us "now move on with the healing process."
Colleen Burke
Bill Burke-White '98
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