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Harvard has a comp season crackdown on its hands. As clubs at the College welcome new students to their ranks, the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra has found itself in trouble – or should I say treble?

The organization has been suspended for the remainder of the fall semester following an investigation into alleged hazing at their annual retreat. Frankly, the condemned activities seem relatively tame — walking up and down a hill blindfolded before gathering to share one’s hopes and fears for the year with other club members can scarcely be described as hardcore hazing.

Following the suspension, however, the College expressed its commitment to following the Stop Campus Hazing Act, a federal anti-hazing law passed last year. Disregarding criticism about how broad the law’s definition of hazing is, Harvard seems determined to scrupulously abide by its stipulations.

Yet even if one assumes Harvard’s hands are tied by hazing laws, the College must face the music — its attempt to prepare students to navigate the severity of those rules has fallen disappointingly short.

Harvard seemed to be on track to set students up for success in the face of stricter enforcement. The University required campus organizations to send all of their student officers to an in-person hazing-prevention training — a stricter attendance requirement than is in place at other student organization trainings.

As an attendee of the training myself, I found the list of hazing behaviors described to be thorough, perhaps overwhelmingly so. Yet as we flew through different behaviors that could be reported and punished as hazing, few students seemed to be paying attention. The sea of laptops flooding Science Center Hall B flickered between Canvas assignments, games like 2048, and the online HUDS dinner menu.

While students are responsible for their own self control, the lack of an enforced laptop ban in the training I attended felt shortsighted. Yet irresponsible technology use need not make or break the training, especially as we moved into the interactive part of the workshop, which asked students to discuss whether a series of hypothetical scenarios qualified as hazing.

This activity could have been the perfect opportunity to let students practice navigating the murky area that exists between hazing and tradition. It could have prepared them for the harsh realities of brutally strict and even unintuitive hazing policies in the context of their own clubs.

But as we moved through scenarios, they remained frustratingly simplistic, a perspective other students at the College also expressed. The initial presentation built upon the idea that hazing behaviors can be obscure and unexpected, only for the application portion of the workshop to proceed with painstakingly obvious examples of hazing, leaving the line between hazing and tradition blurred.

A pessimist might argue that even if Harvard had provided a training that inspired more critical thinking, organizations like HRO would have gone ahead with behaviors the University deems hazing anyways. Even if this is true, if Harvard is going to punish students so unforgivingly for mild hazing behaviors, it should also be Harvard’s obligation to prepare students to the best of its ability to encounter that disciplinary landscape.

And I believe in giving students the benefit of the doubt. The intricate initiation traditions that have occurred for decades on this campus are no well-kept secret, and Harvard has only apparently doled out this level of punishment more recently. Furthermore, HRO clearly took measures to make their initiation non-threatening. The “quiz” on club upperclassmen had no consequences. The choice between a vodka versus water shot during the retreat, in addition to providing an alternative to alcohol, seems to have been offered in a manner that allowed students to keep their choice private from their peers.

Against the backdrop of Harvard’s vague policies and lackluster training, the HRO suspension seems downright cruel and unusual. The College’s openness to conversations with student leaders to answer questions about initiation traditions is a good first step. But the University needs to do more to avoid a repeat of the HRO fiasco.

Harvard should provide students with training scenarios that actually reflect the intricacies of hazing laws rather than offering blatantly obvious hazing hypotheticals. Then, students could actually practice with these rules in a genuinely constructive way before the College inflicts severe punishment (like, say, a public service ban as was absurdly the case with HRO). A simple step like banning laptops during the training also would have increased the chances students learned something substantive.

Harvard doesn’t need to eliminate its hazing training. Instead, the University needs to change its tune and train us right.

Layla L. Hijjawi ’27, a Crimson Editorial editor, is a Social Studies concentrator in Quincy House.