[Dick Prescott’s First Year at West Point by H. Irving Hancock]@TWC D-Link bookDick Prescott’s First Year at West Point CHAPTER VII 7/8
The way of the hazer is perilous nowadays.
In a word, of late years hazing has been at a very low level at the United States Military Academy. It is, however, a practical impossibility to stamp out hazing wholly in an institution where hazing has been one of the most cherished traditions through many generations of cadets. The hazing of today is milder; there is less of it, and, with rare exceptions, it is less brutal.
Yet hazing, in one form or another, will doubtless continue at West Point through the twentieth century as it did through the nineteenth. The form of hazing has changed, if not the spirit.
Sorely pressed by tac.s, and by other officers stationed at West Point, the yearlings, or second-year men, who do most of the hazing, have developed new forms of the ancient sport, and some of these forms may be carried on in actual sight of an Army officer without exciting his suspicions. Where possible, some of the old-style forms of more innocent and purely mischievous hazing are retained.
Where "necessary" new hazes are employed that are bound to tax the best efforts of disciplinary or other officers to detect. Hazing is one of the diversions of men of mature age on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange.
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