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Ohio State University will allow Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority to return to campus two years after the campus chapter was suspended for hazing and alcohol abuse.
Dave Isaacs, a spokesman with Ohio State’s Office of Student Life, refused to discuss the details of the 2015 hazing episode that resulted in an intoxicated Kappa Kappa Gamma pledge being struck by a car.
The sorority was suspended through May 7.
The chapter complied with all the necessary requirements to be reinstated, said Ryan Lovell, the university’s senior director of sorority and fraternity life. The national sorority organization petitioned the university to re-establish the chapter, and the decision fell to the Office of Student Life, Lovell said.
Kappa Kappa Gamma needed to revise the process for accepting new members to include training on hazing prevention, and develop a “risk management” plan for future sorority events, among other stipulations. The sorority will resume in spring 2018.
None of the women who were a part of the original chapter will be a part of the new group, said Lovell in explaining why the university permitted the sorority to return.
Initially, there was confusion on the campus about the process for reinstating the chapter. Some believed that the governing council of the university’s sororities, the Panhellenic Association, needed to vote to approve the sorority, per an agreement set up with the National Panhellenic Conference -- this was not the case, Lovell said.
The vote took place anyway -- nine sororities on the association voted in favor of it, and six against, Lovell said.
Both universities and prosecutors have started levying harsher punishments against hazing, experts say, as public patience for the practice wears thin.
