How do I find out whether a fraternity or sorority chapter has been caught hazing before?

Start with the school's Campus Hazing Transparency Report, which is free, public, and required to describe the violation. Then the school's organizational conduct record if it publishes one — in Kansas, only KU, Kansas State and Wichita State do. Then the national organization's own announcements, which in Kansas have repeatedly acted independently of universities. Then the county court docket, which is the only net that finds cases the press never covered.

What if the hazing happened at a private college in Kansas?

The Kansas Tort Claims Act cap does not apply — no $500,000 ceiling and no punitive-damages bar. Kansas open-records law does not reach private colleges, but the federal Campus Hazing Transparency Report obligation does, for any school receiving federal student aid.

What if the hazing was sexual?

Then it is not primarily a hazing case. Sexual assault is separately and far more seriously criminal in Kansas than hazing is, there are time-sensitive medical steps in the first hours including preventive treatment after possible exposure, and the Kansas Tort Claims Act cap does not apply to claims of childhood sexual abuse. RAINN at 800-656-HOPE is available 24/7 and will connect you to a local provider.

What if the organization retaliates against us for reporting?

Retaliation against people who report is the single most documented pattern in the Kansas record. The identical conduct — pledges being urinated on, spat on and struck for reporting — recurred at the same University of Kansas chapter eight years apart, after a complete membership turnover and a re-chartering. It is a separate wrong, it is pleaded as its own count in litigation now pending in Douglas County, and it should be documented the moment it starts.

Has anyone died from hazing at a Kansas university?

One documented case appears in the national hazing-deaths database: Jason Wren, nineteen, University of Kansas, 2009, with a blood alcohol concentration of .362 after fewer than two weeks living in the fraternity house. The wrongful-death complaint alleged coerced drinking challenges. The case settled confidentially and was never adjudicated as hazing. Two further Kansas hazing deaths are recorded, both at high schools, in 1902 and 1957. A 2026 death at a Kansas State fraternity house was affirmatively determined by police not to be hazing and must not be counted as one.

Hazing in Kansas: The Complete Record, the Real Law, and What to Do Tonight

Q: Is hazing a felony in Kansas if someone dies?

Not under the hazing statute. Kansas has no death tier — a hazing that kills is graded identically to one that injures no one. Deaths and catastrophic injuries in Kansas are prosecuted, if at all, under other statutes such as homicide, aggravated battery or involuntary manslaughter. The same death in Michigan is a fifteen-year felony.

Q: Can I sue a fraternity in Kansas?

Yes, but not as a hazing claim and not always the chapter. Kansas recognizes no civil cause of action for hazing; these cases are brought as ordinary torts such as negligence, intentional tort, assault and battery, premises liability and wrongful death. And under Prime v. Beta Gamma Chapter of Pi Kappa Alpha, an unincorporated chapter generally cannot be sued at all in Kansas. The question is which incorporated entity exists — house corporation, alumni corporation, or national organization — and who the individuals are. Both plaintiffs who filed in Douglas County in 2026 structured their cases exactly that way.

Q: How long do I have to file a hazing claim in Kansas?

Generally two years in Kansas for injury and for wrongful death under K.S.A. 60-513, with a discovery rule that can delay the start and a ten-year outer limit. If the person was under eighteen, K.S.A. 60-515 allows roughly one year after turning eighteen, capped at eight years from the act. If a public institution is involved, assume much less time, because a formal written notice requirement runs long before any lawsuit and missing it can end the claim. Get advice early.

Q: He says he agreed to it. Does that end the case?

No. Federal law says hazing counts regardless of the victim's willingness to participate, and the University of Kansas policy presumes hazing is a forced activity regardless of apparent willingness. But be precise about Kansas: the only Kansas hazing decision turned on the absence of coercion. The details of how it was demanded — who set the amount, what happened to people who refused, whether anyone was told they could stop — are the most important facts in the case. Write them down immediately.

Q: Nobody was arrested. Does that mean nothing happened?

No. Not a single criminal hazing prosecution under the Kansas statute could be located anywhere in the state, including for any of the eleven substantiated institutional findings. In Kansas, hazing accountability runs through campus conduct systems, national organizations and civil courts — not criminal courts. The absence of an arrest is close to meaningless here.

Q: The school found the chapter responsible for hazing. Does that mean we win?

No, but it is powerful. A university finding is adjudicated, made by the institution, and published in a federally required document, and it establishes what the institution knew and when. It is not a court judgment and it does not decide a civil case. Findings and allegations must be kept in separate categories.

If someone is hurt right now, stop reading and call 911. Everything else on this page will still be here in an hour. The emergency section is here.

We are The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC — Attorney911 — in Houston, Texas. We represent people and families in hazing cases, and we work with the top hazing lawyers in Kansas. We are not going to spend this page telling you about ourselves. There is a short section near the bottom where we do that, and you can skip it.

We built this because of something we kept hearing. Families would reach us months after the worst night of their lives, and they would all say some version of the same sentence: “I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. I didn’t know what to ask. I didn’t know anyone else this had happened to.”

Everything a Kansas family needs already exists. The medicine exists. The law exists. The university’s own written admission that it found an organization responsible for hazing — that exists too, on a public web page, right now, for free. It is just scattered across a hundred places, written in language nobody says out loud, and almost none of it is anywhere near the rest of it.

So we put it in one place. All of it. Not a summary. Not a teaser with a phone number at the bottom.

You do not have to call us to use this. You do not have to call any lawyer to use this. If you read this page, find one phone number that helps, and never speak to us — this page did its job. That is genuinely how we mean it.

What this page is, and what it is not

This is information, gathered from public and authoritative sources, with every source named so you can check it yourself. It is not medical advice and it is not legal advice, because advice requires knowing your specific situation, and we do not know yours.

Where the Kansas record is strong, we say so and we show you the document. Where it is thin, or contested, or where two sources disagree, we tell you that instead of smoothing it over. Where a protection you might assume exists does not exist in Kansas — and there are several — we say so plainly, because being wrong about that could cost someone their life or their case.

We have deliberately left out clinical dosing, lab thresholds and treatment protocols. Those belong to your doctors, and a frightened person reading numbers out of context at three in the morning is not helped by them. What we have included is what helps you recognise something, ask about it, and insist on it.

One thing before you go any further

Hazing works by making you believe you agreed to it. That you chose it. That you could have said no, and therefore whatever happened is partly yours to carry.

The University of Kansas has written the answer to that into its own policy, and it is worth reading twice:

“It is presumed that hazing is a forced activity regardless of the apparent willingness of an individual to participate in the activity.”

“Apathy or acquiescence in the presence of hazing is not neutral; both are violations.”

— University of Kansas hazing policy, as reproduced in KU’s 2025 Annual Security and Fire Safety Report

The school that would be defending itself wrote that down first. You did not do this to yourself. Neither did the person you love.

If this is happening right now

Call 911. Now. Before you finish reading this sentence.

Nothing on this page is more important than that. Not the organization. Not the chapter. Not whether anyone gets in trouble. Not what it will cost. Not whether you are overreacting.

The thing that kills people in hazing is almost never the moment itself. It is the delay. It is the hour where everyone stands around deciding whether it is bad enough to call. It is somebody being put to bed to “sleep it off.”

We are not speaking abstractly. In the one Kansas university death that appears in the national hazing-death database, a nineteen-year-old freshman was found in a fraternity house with a blood alcohol concentration of .362 — more than four times the legal driving limit — after his fraternity brothers put him to bed instead of calling for help. He had lived in that house fewer than two weeks. His name was Jason Wren, and his record is further down this page.

A person who has passed out from drinking can die.

Cold showers, coffee and walking do not reverse alcohol poisoning. Sleeping it off is not a plan. Blood alcohol keeps climbing after the last drink — alcohol already swallowed is still being absorbed, so someone who looks merely drunk when they lie down can be in respiratory arrest an hour later.

If you cannot wake someone — if their breathing is slow or irregular — if their skin is cold, bluish or pale — if they are vomiting while unresponsive — if they have a seizure — that is an emergency. Put them on their side so they cannot choke on vomit, and call 911.

Source: National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, Understanding the Dangers of Alcohol Overdose

Tell them everything

When help arrives, say exactly what happened and exactly what was taken — how much, over how long, what kind, and what was done to the person. Nobody is in trouble in that moment. Emergency clinicians are not there to punish anyone. They are there to keep someone breathing, and they need the truth to do it.

There is a second reason, and we will be honest that it is a legal one: the medical record created in that room is the single most important document that will ever exist about this. A vague history produces a vague record. “He was drinking” and “he was made to drink” are different sentences, and they follow a family for years.

“Will we get in trouble for calling?” — the honest Kansas answer

Many states have 911 Good Samaritan laws that protect people who call for help during an overdose. Many colleges have their own medical amnesty policies that do the same for campus conduct charges.

Kansas does not currently have a civilian 911 Good Samaritan immunity law. We are telling you that because you deserve accurate information, and because you may have heard otherwise.

Call anyway. Call anyway, and here is why that is not a hard call:

Individual Kansas campuses maintain their own medical amnesty policies, which operate through the student conduct system regardless of what the state statute says. Look up your school’s policy tonight, before you ever need it.
A conduct charge is a survivable thing. It can be answered, appealed, and outlived.
A charge can be fought. A death cannot be appealed.

The numbers, all in one place

Medical emergency — 911
Suicidal thoughts, or you are frightened for someone — 988, the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline. Call or text, 24/7.
If you cannot make yourself talk — text HOME to 741741, Crisis Text Line. Text HOLA for Spanish.
Poisoning guidance when it is not yet an emergency — 1-800-222-1222, Poison Help. If the person is unconscious, not breathing, or seizing, call 911 instead.
Sexual assault — 800-656-HOPE (800-656-4673), RAINN, 24/7.
LGBTQ+ young people — 1-866-488-7386, The Trevor Project, 24/7, or text START to 678-678.
Mental-health information and navigation (not a crisis line) — 1-800-950-6264, NAMI HelpLine, or text HELPLINE to 62640.
Substance use and treatment referral — 1-800-662-4357, SAMHSA National Helpline. Free, confidential, 24/7.
Crime victim support and referral — 1-855-4VICTIM (855-484-2846), VictimConnect. Phone and text.

If nobody is in danger tonight, but something happened

Then the most useful thing you can do in the next few hours is not legal. It is documentary. Group chats auto-delete. Bruises fade. Phones get wiped. Memories blur. What you capture in the first days often cannot be recreated later, and in these cases it is frequently the whole ballgame.

The first-48-hours checklist is here. It takes about ten minutes to start and it does not commit you to anything.

Everything on this page

This page is long on purpose. It is the entire Kansas hazing record and the medicine and law that go with it, and we would rather hand you the whole thing than decide for you which parts you are allowed to have. Use this menu to go straight to what you need. Every section links to the sections it depends on, so you can follow the thread in either direction.

If this is happening right now — the emergency section, the honest answer about calling 911 in Kansas, and every crisis number in one list
What was done to you has a name — the sixteen act types that show up in real cases, and why “he agreed to it” is not the answer people think it is
Kansas law, the whole truth — the statute word for word, everything it does not cover, and the four court decisions that decide whether a Kansas case lives or dies
The Kansas record — every adjudicated finding, every removal, every lawsuit, every death, and the prosecutions that never happened
Every Kansas campus, every organization — all sixty-five institutions, every council, every chapter we can verify, and an honest statement of what is and is not on each school’s record
What hazing does to a body and a mind — the full medical picture, in plain language, including the injuries that do not appear for two days
What to do now — the first forty-eight hours, the records you are legally entitled to demand, and the clock nobody will remind you about
What federal law gives you — the Stop Campus Hazing Act, the transparency report, and the document that used to require a lawsuit to obtain
Who we are — our firm, our licenses, our hazing cases, and exactly how we work in Kansas
Questions families actually ask
Sources, method, and what we do not know — every source named, every gap stated, every date stamped

Every fact on this page carries its source. Where the record is contested, both versions appear. Where something has not been verified, it is labeled unverified. Nothing here is smoothed over to sound better than it is.

What was done to you has a name

One of the cruelest things about hazing is how hard it is to describe afterward. People come to us and start with an apology. “I know this is going to sound stupid.” “It was probably nothing.” “Everyone does this.” Then they describe four days without sleep, or being made to drink until they vomited and then made to keep going, or being hit in a basement while eighteen people watched.

It sounds like nothing to them because it was designed to sound like nothing. That is not an accident of the culture. It is the mechanism. The rituals are built in stages so that each one is only slightly worse than the last, and by the time something genuinely dangerous happens, the person it is happening to has already agreed to twenty smaller things and cannot find the line they crossed.

So we are going to name them. All of them. If you find what happened to you on this list, you are not being dramatic, and you are not the first — you are looking at a category that has a name, a medical literature, and a Kansas paper trail.

The three levels, and why the quiet ones still count

Hazing researchers sort these behaviors into three tiers. We are including the first tier even though it produces no bruises, because almost every catastrophic case began there, and because families often discount the early months as “just how it was” when in fact those months are the evidence that the conduct was organized, repeated, and known.

Level one — the normalized kind. Deception. Enforced silence. Demerits. Errands. Being made to carry things, fetch things, memorize things, answer a phone at any hour. Being placed at the bottom of a hierarchy and reminded of it daily. This is where the record of control begins.
Level two — harassment. Verbal abuse and threats. Sleep deprivation. Forced calisthenics. Degrading clothing. Deliberate humiliation. Isolation from friends, family, and anyone outside the organization.
Level three — violence. Forced drinking. Beating and paddling. Branding. Forced ingestion of things that are not food. Water intoxication. Confinement. Exposure. Restraint. Sexual violence.

Kansas universities have issued formal findings involving conduct at all three levels. Those findings, with the organization named and the conduct described in the school’s own words, are here.

The sixteen things people call “tradition”

Below is every act type that appears in this body of work. For each one we have written what it actually is, what it does to a body, and — where it exists — where that exact conduct appears in a Kansas university’s own adjudicated record. Those citations are not allegations. They are findings the schools published themselves.

1. Forced or coerced alcohol consumption

Not “drinking at a party.” Quantity set by someone other than the drinker. A clock. A penalty for stopping. Drinking on someone else’s behalf. Punishment drinking for failing a recitation or a set of push-ups. Substituting high-proof liquor so the volume looks small.

Why it is different from ordinary drinking, medically: the thing that turns drinking into poisoning is rate, not just total amount. The same quantity of alcohol delivered as spirits produces a peak blood level roughly half again as high as the same quantity delivered as beer, and a large fast dose sits in the stomach unabsorbed and then arrives all at once. The full explanation, including why blood alcohol keeps rising after the last drink, is here.

In the Kansas record: KU found required alcohol consumption in its adjudicated findings against Delta Upsilon and against Alpha Tau Omega. Those are the university’s words, in a federally required report. See the findings.

2. Forced water or fluid consumption

Usually framed as hydration, or as a chaser requirement, or as punishment. Drinking large volumes of water rapidly can drop the body’s sodium to the point where the brain swells. It has killed people who drank nothing but water. What hyponatremia does, and why the early signs are mistaken for drunkenness.

3. Forced ingestion of things that are not food

“Concoctions.” Hot sauce, mouthwash, raw eggs, spoiled preparations, detergents, petroleum products, tobacco, live animals, urine. Frequently designed to induce vomiting, which adds a second and more dangerous mechanism on top of the first. What each category does.

In the Kansas record: KU’s finding against Delta Upsilon expressly includes “consumption of undesirable food concoctions” and liquid poured on students.

4. Paddling, beating, striking, and “the gauntlet”

The most common physical modality, and the one Kansas law handles worst. There is a specific and important reason for that, and you should read it before you assume a beating is automatically a crime in Kansas.

What matters medically is what happens under the skin. Muscle that has been struck repeatedly breaks down and dumps its contents into the blood, and the kidneys can fail trying to filter it. That process — rhabdomyolysis — frequently does not peak for one to two days. The full picture, including the signs families remember.

In the Kansas record: Kansas State University found that Kappa Alpha Psi engaged in “physical beating and paddling of its new members and requiring new members to walk across hot coals,” and found that the organization “demonstrated intent to continue hazing practices.” The chapter was suspended through Fall 2028. That is the most severe conduct on the Kansas record. See the finding.

5. Forced calisthenics and extreme physical exertion

Hundreds of squats. Push-ups to failure and past it. Wall sits held until the legs give out. Running in heat, in gear, without water. This produces the same muscle breakdown as a beating, plus heat injury, plus — in people carrying sickle cell trait, who usually do not know they carry it — a distinct and rapidly fatal collapse. What forced exertion does.

In the Kansas record: mandatory calisthenics appear in KU’s findings against Delta Upsilon and Lambda Phi Epsilon; K-State’s findings describe sit-ups at Pi Kappa Alpha and wall sits at Beta Theta Pi.

6. Sleep deprivation

The most under-rated item on this list, and the one that appears in more Kansas findings than any other. Beyond a certain point it stops being tiredness and becomes a neurological state: judgment collapses, the ability to recognize your own danger collapses, and it multiplies the effect of alcohol, heat and exertion rather than adding to it. It is also the reason a person cannot later explain clearly what happened to them. What sleep deprivation does, and what it multiplies.

In the Kansas record: sleep deprivation appears in adjudicated findings at KU against Delta Upsilon, Alpha Tau Omega and Lambda Phi Epsilon, and at K-State against Delta Upsilon, Pi Kappa Alpha and Beta Theta Pi. Six separate findings, two campuses.

7. Confinement, restraint, wrapping, and burial

Being taped, wrapped, tied, shut in a trunk, buried, or held down. The danger here is not usually the restraint itself — it is that a restrained person cannot move their chest properly, and a person who cannot expand their chest suffocates quietly, without struggling, often while people nearby believe they are asleep or being dramatic. Positional and compressive asphyxia.

8. Exposure to the elements

Being made to stand outside, stripped, wet, or left somewhere overnight. In Kansas this is a winter and a summer risk in equal measure. Alcohol makes it far worse by opening the blood vessels at the skin and disabling shivering. Hypothermia and frostbite.

9. Branding and burning

A deliberate full-thickness burn. It is permanent by design — that is the point of it — and permanent disfigurement is one of the few harms the Kansas statute names by itself. Burns, keloid, and disfigurement as a distinct injury. Why “disfigurement” being named in the statute matters.

10. Chemicals applied to skin, mucosa, or genitals

Icy-hot, bleach, cleaning products, capsaicin, industrial substances. Applied to the body, or poured on someone, or used in an ingestion ritual. Chemical burns and ocular injury.

In the Kansas record: KU’s finding against Alpha Tau Omega describes new members crawling through alcohol; the finding against Delta Upsilon describes liquid poured on students.

11. Forced swimming and water immersion

Drowning does not look like drowning. It is silent and it is fast, and cold water adds an involuntary gasp reflex in the first seconds that fills the lungs before anyone realizes something is wrong. Drowning, cold shock, and immersion hypothermia.

12. Sexual violence, forced nudity, and forced sexual acts

This is the category people are least able to say out loud, and it is the one we most want you to know we have seen before. It includes penetration with objects, forced acts between pledges, forced nudity, and sexual humiliation staged for an audience. Male victims of sexual hazing very often do not name it as sexual assault, sometimes for years. What it does, physically and psychologically.

13. Kidnapping, abduction, and drop-offs

Being taken somewhere and left. The danger is rarely the abandonment itself — it is the drive home, the exposure, the intoxication, and the fact that the person is now somewhere nobody can find them if something goes wrong. Drowsy driving is a documented downstream hazing injury mechanism.

In the Kansas record: Wichita State suspended Chi Sigma Tau following a finding involving hazing that endangered physical and mental health and safety. See the WSU findings.

14. Psychological degradation, humiliation, and isolation

Screaming. Interrogation. Being made to insult yourself or each other. Being cut off from family. Being told your family would be ashamed. Being made to believe you owe the group something you can never repay.

We want to be direct about this: in Kansas, this category is where the law is at its weakest and the medicine is at its strongest. The Kansas criminal statute reaches only bodily harm. It does not reach psychological injury at all. The medical literature, meanwhile, treats these mechanisms as producing measurable, diagnosable, permanent conditions. The injuries with no bruise.

In the Kansas record: KU’s findings against Delta Upsilon and Lambda Phi Epsilon both describe verbal harassment and demeaning tasks; K-State’s finding against Pi Kappa Alpha describes forced silence.

15. Personal servitude

Being someone’s property for a semester. Cleaning, driving, cooking, being on call. It is the item that sounds most harmless on this list and it is the one that most reliably wrecks a semester, a GPA, a scholarship, and sometimes a career trajectory. Academic derailment and lost earning capacity are compensable injuries with an established method of proof.

In the Kansas record: personal servitude appears in KU’s finding against Alpha Tau Omega and K-State’s finding against Beta Theta Pi.

16. Electric shock

Rare, and catastrophic when it happens. The current path matters more than the voltage, and a shock that leaves almost no external mark can cause a fatal arrhythmia or deep tissue destruction along its route. Electrical injury.

In the Kansas record: the earliest documented hazing death in Kansas — 1902, Parsons, Kansas — was an electrocution at a high school club initiation. See the deaths section.

The seventeenth thing, which is not on anyone’s list

There is one more, and it does not appear in the standard taxonomy because it is not an initiation ritual at all. It is what happens to the person who tells.

We are including it because it is the single most documented pattern in the Kansas record, and because if it is happening to you right now you need to know that it is a known phenomenon with a paper trail, not a personal failure.

In 2018, Delta Upsilon’s international organization disbanded its University of Kansas chapter after pledges were urinated on, spat on and hit for reporting hazing. The chapter was revived in 2022 and regained its charter in December 2023. In KU’s 2026 transparency reporting period, new members reported being urinated on, spat on and repeatedly hit by other pledges after coming forward to KU officials.

The same conduct, eight years apart, at the same chapter, after a complete turnover of members and a re-chartering. The full eight-year record is here.

Retaliation is not initiation. It is a separate act, directed at a person for exercising a right, and it is pleaded as its own count in the litigation currently pending in Douglas County. See the 2026 cases.

Every person who has ever been hazed has been handed the same defense to use against themselves: you could have left.

Here is what we would ask you to sit with. You were eighteen, or nineteen. You had moved away from everyone who knew you. The people asking were the people who controlled whether you had a place to live, a social world, a network, and in some cases a job after graduation. You had already been through eleven weeks of smaller things, each of which you had agreed to, each of which made the next one easier to ask for. The request came at three in the morning, in a group, from people who had been through it themselves and needed you to go through it too so that what happened to them would mean something.

That is not a choice. That is a designed environment, and it was designed by people who understood exactly what they were building.

The law’s treatment of this varies, and we will be precise rather than reassuring:

Federal law is explicit. The Stop Campus Hazing Act defines hazing as qualifying “regardless of the victim’s willingness to participate.” See what federal law gives you.
KU’s own policy is explicit. It presumes hazing is forced regardless of apparent willingness, and it makes bystander apathy a violation in itself.
The Kansas criminal statute says nothing at all about consent. It is simply not addressed in the text. We explain what that silence means, and what it does not mean.
In the one Kansas hazing decision ever issued, the absence of coercion is exactly what defeated the claim. The plaintiff conceded he was encouraged but never required to drink, and told the emergency room physician his intoxication “had nothing to do with hazing.” That case, and why compulsion is the fact that changes everything in Kansas, is here.

We put that last one in front of you rather than burying it, because it cuts both ways and you should see it before anyone else shows it to you. Kansas law has never held that fraternities cannot be liable. It held that on a record with no compulsion, there was no duty. The Kansas cases filed since then — and the Kansas findings issued since then — describe something entirely different: required alcohol consumption, pledges locked in a room, a competition where the loser was whoever stopped drinking first.

Compulsion is the whole ballgame in Kansas. If you remember one thing from this page before you talk to anybody, remember that the details of how you were made to do it matter more than what you were made to do. Write those details down tonight. Here is how.

Kansas law, the whole truth

This is the section most families are never given, and it is the reason we built this page.

What you are about to read is not encouraging. Kansas has one of the narrowest hazing statutes in the country, no civil cause of action for hazing, a Supreme Court decision that says an unincorporated fraternity chapter cannot even be sued, no dram shop act, and a damages ceiling on every public university in the state. We are not going to soften any of that, because a family that walks into this uninformed gets hurt a second time.

But there is a second half to it, and it is the more important half: every one of those obstacles is structural, which means it is navigable. Two plaintiffs filed in Douglas County in July 2026, twelve days apart, and both of them structured their cases around every one of these barriers with visible precision. You can see exactly how they did it. That is not theory. That is the current docket.

So read this section as a map of the terrain, not a verdict.

K.S.A. 21-5418, word for word

This is the entire Kansas criminal hazing statute. It is two sentences.

(a) Hazing is recklessly coercing, demanding or encouraging another person to perform, as a condition of membership in a social or fraternal organization, any act which could reasonably be expected to result in great bodily harm, disfigurement or death or which is done in a manner whereby great bodily harm, disfigurement or death could be inflicted.

(b) Hazing is a class B nonperson misdemeanor.

— K.S.A. 21-5418. History: L. 2010, ch. 136, § 53; L. 2011, ch. 30, § 22. Prior law: K.S.A. 21-3434.

Broken into its parts:

The mental state is “recklessly.” There is no intentional or knowing tier. One state of mind, one offense.
The conduct is “coercing, demanding or encouraging.” Note that encouraging is in there. That is broader than most people expect.
The connection required is “as a condition of membership in a social or fraternal organization.” This phrase does an enormous amount of work, and most of it is subtraction. See below.
The harm threshold is “great bodily harm, disfigurement or death” — or conduct done in a manner whereby that harm could be inflicted. The risk counts even if the harm does not occur.
The grade is a class B nonperson misdemeanor. One tier. No escalation. A hazing that kills is graded identically to a hazing that injures no one, because the statute contains no death provision at all.

We want to sit on that last point for a moment, because people do not believe it the first time. In Michigan, a hazing that results in death is a felony carrying up to fifteen years. In Kansas, under the hazing statute itself, the same death is a class B misdemeanor. Kansas death and catastrophic-injury cases are therefore prosecuted — if they are prosecuted at all — under entirely different statutes: homicide, aggravated battery, involuntary manslaughter. Not hazing.

Source: the verbatim text above was recovered from the University of Kansas 2025 Annual Security and Fire Safety Report, a federally required Clery document that reproduces the statute under “Information on applicable local, State, and Tribal laws on Hazing,” and confirmed against the Kansas Office of Revisor of Statutes.

What the Kansas statute does not reach

In December 2024 the federal Stop Campus Hazing Act became law. It defines hazing far more broadly than Kansas does. The gap between the two is not academic — conduct that produces a federally required public hazing finding against an organization may not be a crime in Kansas at all.

Which organizations are covered

The federal Act reaches any student organization — athletic teams, marching bands, performance groups, spirit squads, residence hall communities, student-employee groups. The Kansas criminal statute reaches “social or fraternal organizations” and, on the face of the text, nothing else.

This is not hypothetical. KU has issued hazing sanctions against its Cheer Team, its Rock Climbing Club, and a scholarship hall. None of those is a social or fraternal organization. Every one of those findings is real, published, and adjudicated — and every one of them sits outside the plain language of the state criminal statute.

Which harms are covered

The federal Act reaches physical or psychological injury. Kansas reaches only great bodily harm, disfigurement or death.

The consequence is blunt: the Kansas criminal hazing statute does not reach psychological injury at all. Not humiliation, not degradation, not the systematic dismantling of a nineteen-year-old’s sense of self, not the PTSD that follows. Not at any severity. The medical literature on those injuries is extensive and it is in the injuries section — it simply is not what this particular criminal statute was written to capture.

The federal Act says hazing counts “regardless of the victim’s willingness to participate.” K.S.A. 21-5418 says nothing about consent whatsoever. It is simply not addressed in the text. That silence is not the same as a consent defense being available — but it is not the same as one being foreclosed, either, and Kansas has never had to answer the question because no one has ever been prosecuted under this statute.

Testing it against Kansas’s own findings

Here is the test that matters. Take the eleven hazing findings that Kansas universities have actually issued and adjudicated, and measure each one against the criminal statute:

Kappa Alpha Psi at K-State — beating, paddling, walking across hot coals. Plausibly meets the threshold. It is the only one that clearly approaches it.
Alpha Tau Omega at KU (second incident) — servitude, sleep deprivation, required alcohol, crawling through alcohol. Uncertain.
Lambda Pi Upsilon and Chi Sigma Tau at Wichita State — hazing endangering physical and mental health and safety. Uncertain.
Delta Upsilon at KU and at K-State; Lambda Phi Epsilon at KU; Pi Kappa Alpha and Beta Theta Pi at K-State; Phi Delta Theta at Wichita State — sleep deprivation, calisthenics, verbal harassment, servitude, forced silence, wall sits, required alcohol. Unlikely to meet the threshold.

Most conduct that Kansas universities have formally adjudicated as hazing would likely not satisfy the Kansas criminal statute. That is our reading of the statutory text against the published findings; it is analysis, not an adjudication, and we label it as such. But it explains something that otherwise looks inexplicable, which is the total absence of prosecutions. See below.

The bruising line — the sharpest limit in Kansas law

“Great bodily harm” is the phrase the whole statute turns on. Kansas defines it nowhere in the criminal code. Not in the hazing statute, and not in K.S.A. 21-5413, the battery and aggravated battery statute that is its principal home. We checked that directly against the Kansas revisor, and the absence is real.

Kansas courts have supplied the standard instead:

“Great bodily harm” is more than slight, trivial, minor, or moderate harm, and does not include mere bruising, which is the kind of harm likely to be sustained by simple battery.

Conduct Kansas courts have found to constitute great bodily harm includes stab wounds, gunshot wounds, bite wounds, broken bones and fractures, burns, scarring, and choking a person to the point of blacking out.

A sourcing note we owe you: that formulation and those examples are drawn from Kansas practitioner materials and the reasoning carried in Kansas pattern jury instructions rather than from a single quoted controlling opinion. It is the standard as Kansas practice applies it. Anyone using it in a filed document should pull the underlying Kansas appellate decisions and cite them directly. We flag it rather than present it as more settled than it is.

Now apply it to hazing, and you get a sharply split result:

Choking someone to unconsciousness — yes. Blacking out from choking is expressly recognized.
Branding and burns — yes. Burns and scarring are both expressly recognized.
Fractures from blunt force — yes. Broken bones are expressly recognized.
Permanent disfigurement — yes. The statute names disfigurement independently.
Paddling that produces bruising only — no. “Does not include mere bruising.”
Psychological injury — no. The statute reaches bodily harm only.

This is the single sharpest limitation in Kansas hazing law, and every family needs to understand it. Paddling and beating that stops at contusion — the most common physical hazing modality in the country — falls outside the Kansas statute on its face, because the harm it produces is the exact harm Kansas courts carved out.

Which is why what happened after the beating matters more in Kansas than the beating. A Kansas case built on blunt force is built on what the blunt force caused downstream — rhabdomyolysis with kidney injury, compartment syndrome requiring surgery, necrotizing infection, fracture, visceral injury. Those are documented, measurable, and unambiguously above the line.

That is a medical-evidence problem, not a legal one. It is won or lost in the emergency room, in the labs that were or were not ordered, and in whether anyone wrote down that the injuries came from being struck rather than from “working out.” It is the reason the blunt-force injury section on this page is as detailed as it is, and the reason we push so hard on the medical record in the first forty-eight hours.

Three versions of the law, 1986 to now

The statute above is the third version of Kansas hazing law, and the two earlier versions were materially different. Almost nobody knows this, including people who practice in Kansas, because the history only surfaces if you read the Revisor’s prior-law annotations and then go pull a forty-year-old Attorney General opinion out of a law library archive.

1986 — Senate Bill 777 (L. 1986, ch. 117, § 1). Kansas’s first criminal hazing statute. It provided that “No person shall recklessly participate in the hazing of another,” and defined hazing as “willfully and wantonly coercing, demanding or encouraging” — a much higher mental state than today’s.
1986 to June 30, 2011 — K.S.A. 21-3434, “Promoting or permitting hazing.” Amended in 1992 and 1993. Repealed effective July 1, 2011.
July 1, 2011 to today — K.S.A. 21-5418, “Hazing.” The two-sentence statute above.

The Kansas Revisor of Statutes confirms the lineage directly: the K.S.A. 21-5418 page lists “Source or Prior Law: 21-3434.” The repeal note reads, verbatim: “Repealed, L. 2010, ch. 136, § 307; July 1, 2011.”

The year Kansas deleted organizational liability

Here is what was in the repealed statute, and what is not in the current one.

“No social or fraternal organization shall promote or permit hazing.”

— K.S.A. 21-3434(a), repealed effective July 1, 2011

For twenty-five years, Kansas law contained an express provision reaching the organization itself. Not a member. Not an officer. The chapter, as an entity.

The current statute contains no equivalent clause. K.S.A. 21-5418 addresses only a person who recklessly coerces, demands, or encourages. There is no provision under which a Kansas fraternity chapter can be charged criminally as an organization.

Look at the trade the legislature made in the 2011 recodification:

It lowered the mental state from “willfully and wantonly” to “recklessly” — making an individual easier to charge.
It eliminated the clause that reached the organization — making the chapter impossible to charge.

And then, in the fifteen years since, not one person has been charged under the easier standard. Not one.

One honesty note: the exact mental-state wording of the final, 1993-amended version of 21-3434 comes to us from a secondary compilation of the 2011 Kansas Code, because the primary page would not load. The 1986 original wording is primary-sourced. We are telling you which is which.

The modern hazing law Kansas wrote in 1986 — and vetoed

This is the part of the Kansas record we find hardest to read.

Before the legislature passed Senate Bill 777, the Kansas Senate passed a different bill: 1986 Senate Bill No. 587. It was vetoed by the Governor.

SB 587 would have defined hazing as:

“doing any act that creates a substantial risk of causing mental or physical harm to any person in connection with the activities of a student organization.”

Now compare that to the federal Stop Campus Hazing Act, signed thirty-eight years later in December 2024: physical or psychological injury, reaching any student organization.

Kansas drafted a hazing standard in 1986 that is substantially the same as the federal standard the country adopted in 2024. The Governor vetoed it. What passed instead demanded great bodily harm, disfigurement or death, and reached only social or fraternal organizations. That is still the law today.

Every limitation described in this section — the harm threshold that excludes bruising, the exclusion of psychological injury, the organizations left uncovered — is a direct consequence of which of two 1986 bills survived.

Attorney General Opinion 86-106

Four months after the statute passed, State Senator Ben Vidricksen of Salina wrote to Attorney General Robert T. Stephan asking whether organizations like the Shrine and the Elks Lodge were exempt from the new hazing law. The Senator stated his own view that the legislature had meant to reach only college fraternities and sororities.

The Attorney General rejected that reading.

Synopsis: “Hazing, as defined in 1986 Senate Bill No. 777, is prohibited in all social and fraternal organizations, including the Shrine and the Elks Lodge.”

“It cannot be said from the face of the statute that the legislature intended this bill to apply only to those fraternal and social organizations that are found on college campuses. It would have been a simple matter for the legislature to prohibit hazing specifically in college fraternities and sororities.”

— Kansas Attorney General Opinion No. 86-106, July 18, 1986

Two things follow from this, and they point in opposite directions.

First, the Kansas hazing statute is broader than campuses. It has been formally construed by the state’s chief legal officer to reach adult fraternal organizations — lodges, orders, social clubs. Any analysis of Kansas hazing that looks only at universities, including everything on this page, is under-inclusive as to the statute’s actual reach. We say that about our own work.

Second — and this is the irony — the same words that expanded the statute in 1986 narrow it in 2026. The Attorney General explained the phrase “social or fraternal organizations” as an expansion of the vetoed bill’s “student organization.” In 1986 it was: it reached past campuses to the Elks and the Shrine. Today the federal Act reaches athletic teams, marching bands, performance groups and residence halls, and “social or fraternal organization” does not. Kansas gained breadth of organization and gave up breadth of harm — and it is the harm threshold that actually blocks enforcement.

The opinion also preserves the construction rules that decide these cases, and one of them matters more than the rest:

Criminal statutes are to be strictly construed. Ordinary words are given their ordinary meaning, and courts do not read in what is not there.

— applying State v. Roudybush, 235 Kan. 834 (1984) and State v. Thompson, 237 Kan. 562 (1985)

That is the mechanism. Strict construction of a statute that demands “great bodily harm, disfigurement or death” is precisely how most adjudicated campus hazing conduct falls outside Kansas criminal law.

Prime v. Beta Gamma Chapter of Pi Kappa Alpha — the only Kansas hazing decision

We ran a keyword search for “hazing” across the complete database of Kansas Supreme Court and Court of Appeals decisions.

It returns exactly one case. (“Fraternity” returns sixteen. “Sorority” returns three. “Hazing” returns one.)

Prime v. Beta Gamma Chapter of Pi Kappa Alpha, Kansas Supreme Court No. 85,861, published, filed May 31, 2002, opinion by Justice Allegrucci, on appeal from Douglas County District Court and Judge Michael J. Malone.

Matthew Prime was a nineteen-year-old pledge. On February 26, 1997, at “Pledge Dad Night” at the Pi Kappa Alpha house at the University of Kansas, he drank to a blood alcohol concentration of .294, lost consciousness, and was hospitalized at Lawrence Memorial Hospital. He incurred medical expenses. He had no permanent injuries.

He sued the chapter, the national fraternity, six individual members, and the house corporation. He also sued the University of Kansas and the Kansas Board of Regents — and then dismissed them himself.

Every defendant won. He recovered nothing. The Kansas Supreme Court affirmed. Four holdings came out of it, and all four are still the law.

Holding one: Kansas recognizes no civil cause of action for hazing

The district court found “no authority supporting a cause of action… for hazing pursuant to K.S.A. 21-3434,” and the Supreme Court affirmed. Prime himself conceded that the statute “does not expressly apply to individuals.” His out-of-state authorities were rejected as no longer good law.

What this means, stated carefully, because it is easy to misread: there is no such thing as “suing for hazing” in Kansas as a freestanding claim. The criminal statute has never been held to create a private right of action, and the one time a Kansas plaintiff tried it, the Supreme Court affirmed its rejection.

What it does not mean: that hazing conduct cannot be sued over. It is sued over as ordinary torts — negligence, intentional tort, assault and battery, premises liability, wrongful death. That is exactly how the two cases pending in Douglas County right now are pleaded. See them.

Holding two: an unincorporated fraternity chapter cannot be sued

“In the absence of a statute to the contrary, an unincorporated association is not a legal entity and can neither sue nor be sued in the name of the association.”

— Prime, Syllabus ¶ 1

The rule dates to Kansas Private Club Assn. v. Londerholm, 196 Kan. 1 (1965). Prime argued a procedural statute had overridden it; the court held that statute “plainly applies only to class actions.”

This is the most practically important sentence in Kansas fraternity law. Naming “the chapter” as a defendant, when the chapter is an unincorporated association, does not survive a motion to dismiss. It is why the question in Kansas is never “which chapter did this” but “which incorporated entity exists, and who are the individuals.”

Holding three: no alcohol-supplier liability

The court held that the Kansas statutes criminalizing furnishing liquor to a minor “are not intended to impose civil liability for injuries or death sustained by a minor as a result of having become intoxicated,” and that the statute on dispensing liquor to an incapacitated person “is intended to regulate the sale of liquor and not to impose civil liability.” More below — this one was reaffirmed in 2019.

Holding four: the national fraternity owed no duty

The relationship between Pi Kappa Alpha national and the local chapter was found “insufficient to create a special relationship.” The national’s showing was that “Tennessee did not possess the right nor the ability to control the day-to-day activities of the Chapter at the University of Kansas.”

But note what is also in that record. The district court found that Pi Kappa Alpha national maintained written “Standards for Retention of Membership, Officer Status, and a Chapter Charter in Good Standing” which defined hazing to include physical abuse and sleep deprivation, specifically prohibited it, and made chapters “subject to a charter suspension or termination.”

A national organization that publishes binding anti-hazing standards and reserves the power to terminate a charter is asserting authority over exactly the conduct at issue. That tension was not resolved in Prime, because the case turned on alcohol supply rather than on hazing. It is worth holding onto when you read what Kansas nationals have actually done since.

The crack in Prime: coercion

This is the most important paragraph in the entire Kansas legal record, and it is the reason we tell every family that how matters more than what. The district court, affirmed on appeal:

“In all of the cases relied upon by the Plaintiff there was a strong element of COERCION that the Court finds was NOT PRESENT IN THIS CASE as a matter of law. The Plaintiff admits Brian Harper never told him to drink and he was told repeatedly by members of the fraternity that he was not required to consume alcoholic beverages.”

The uncontroverted facts that defeated Matthew Prime:

He was “encouraged but not required to drink.”
“No one in the fraternity told the Plaintiff that he would have to drink.”
He drank because of “peer pressure” and to “fit in” — insufficient as a matter of law.
And the fact that ended it: the emergency room physician recorded and testified that Prime told her his intoxication “had nothing to do with hazing and that he was told he did not have to drink alcohol if he did not want to.”

Read that last one again, and then read the first-forty-eight-hours section. A sentence spoken to a doctor at nineteen years old, in a hospital bed, while ashamed, decided a Kansas Supreme Court case five years later.

Now compare the coercion described in every Kansas matter that came afterward:

Wren, 2009 — the complaint alleged “man up” challenges: rapid consumption of large quantities of alcohol, where the loser was defined as whoever quit drinking or vomited first.
Delta Upsilon, 2026 — the complaint alleges pledges were locked in a room and forced to drink as many as sixty beers.
KU’s own transparency report — not an allegation but an adjudicated institutional finding of “required alcohol consumption.”

Prime did not hold that Kansas fraternities cannot be liable. It held that on a record of no coercion — where the plaintiff himself told the emergency room it was not hazing — there was no duty. The distinguishing fact in every later Kansas matter is the one Prime lacked: compulsion.

That is an observation about how the opinion is written and which facts it turned on. It is not a prediction of any outcome, and no Kansas court has yet applied Prime to a record of coerced consumption. We are telling you what the terrain looks like, not what will happen on it.

Hawley v. Pi Kappa Phi — a broken jaw and no recovery

We include this one because it shows the rule from Prime doing its work in a real case, fifteen years later, on facts nobody would call ambiguous.

Philip Hawley, a KU student, alleged that at a Halloween party on October 31, 2015, racist comments preceded a physical altercation in which “7 to 10 fraternity members physically attacked me” over roughly fifteen minutes, leaving him with a broken jaw requiring surgery. He sued Pi Kappa Phi’s national organization and the Theta Epsilon chapter in October 2016, seeking nearly $130,000. Douglas County case 2016-CV-000404, pleaded as an intentional tort.

July 2017 — the local chapter was dismissed, because under Kansas law unincorporated associations cannot sue or be sued.
February 2, 2018 — the national organization was dismissed, after arguing it cannot monitor individual chapters’ activities and does not require prior review of chapter events. Its words: “The local chapters… are free to conduct their day to day activities… without any input or direction.”
Both defendants out. He recovered nothing.

Hawley is an assault case, not a hazing case, and we will not present it as one. Its value is procedural: it is the clearest demonstration available of how a Kansas fraternity claim fails when it is aimed at the wrong defendants.

And there is a coda. On November 4, 2020 — five years after the assault that produced no recovery — KU removed Pi Kappa Phi from campus for Harm to Persons and Hazing, reported as “a culture of hazing and illegal drug use.” The civil system produced nothing. The conduct system produced removal. That is worth knowing when you decide where to put your energy first.

A note on the no-control defense

The same defense has now succeeded twice in Kansas, sixteen years apart — Pi Kappa Alpha in 2002, Pi Kappa Phi in 2018. But the Kansas factual record since then is worth setting beside it. In Kansas, national organizations have:

Hired their own investigators in the January 2022 KU case — not the university’s investigators, theirs;
Pulled the KU charter of Sigma Chi in 2022, for hazing and lying;
Pulled the KU charter of Sigma Alpha Epsilon in 2018, four-year minimum;
Disbanded the KU Delta Upsilon chapter in 2018;
and re-chartered that same chapter in December 2023.

An organization that can disband, charter, re-charter, and hire its own investigators is exercising control. Whether that defeats the no-control defense is an open legal question that no Kansas court has answered. We are not claiming it does. We are noting that the factual record contradicting the defense now exists and is public.

Kansas has no dram shop act

In most states, someone who serves alcohol to a visibly intoxicated person or a minor can bear civil responsibility for the harm that follows. Kansas is not one of those states, and it has recently and explicitly declined to become one.

Ling v. Jan’s Liquors, 237 Kan. 629 (1985) — Kansas has no dram shop act; imposing third-party liability on alcohol suppliers is “a policy matter better suited to legislative consideration.” Three justices dissented.
Mills v. City of Overland Park, 251 Kan. 434 (1992) — no cause of action for the alcohol-related death of a nineteen-year-old patron who was served, ejected, and found frozen to death the next morning. Two justices dissented.
Prime (2002) — “We conclude that Ling and Mills are controlling and thus would preclude any common-law right of action against providers of alcoholic beverages.”
Kudlacik v. Johnny’s Shawnee, Inc., No. 115,869 (Kan. May 10, 2019) — “Since Kansas has no dram shop act, the common-law rule prevails in Kansas.” The court was asked to reconsider and answered: “We have done so and today reaffirm the common law under the principles of stare decisis.”

Mothers Against Drunk Driving and the Kansas Trial Lawyers Association both appeared as amici in Kudlacik. The rule was reaffirmed anyway. As of 2019, this is settled Kansas law.

Why this matters so much in hazing: alcohol is the mechanism in a substantial share of serious hazing injuries and deaths, and the instinct of every family is to ask who supplied it. In Kansas, supplying the alcohol is not the theory. Compelling its consumption is a different act — and that distinction, which is the distinction Prime itself drew, is where Kansas hazing cases live. Back to coercion.

The $500,000 ceiling on every public university in Kansas

The Kansas Tort Claims Act, K.S.A. 75-6101 et seq., governs claims against governmental entities, and it is the single most consequential financial fact for any Kansas family considering a claim against a public school.

Damages are capped at $500,000 aggregate per occurrence — and the statute means aggregate: the cap applies “regardless of the number of injured claimants or how serious their injuries.” Five catastrophically injured students share one $500,000 ceiling.
Punitive damages are not available against a governmental entity, at all, regardless of the conduct.
The cap is waived only if the entity carries liability insurance above $500,000, and only to the extent of that excess coverage.
The cap does not apply to claims of childhood sexual abuse.

Who sits behind the cap: the six Kansas Board of Regents universities — KU, Kansas State, Wichita State, Emporia State, Fort Hays State, Pittsburg State — plus Washburn as a municipal university, plus all nineteen community colleges and all six technical colleges. Thirty-three of Kansas’s sixty-five institutions. Every public one. Kansas State publishes its own Tort Claims Act page confirming it operates expressly under the statute.

Who does not: every private institution — and every fraternity chapter entity, every house corporation, and every national organization. No ceiling. No punitive-damages bar.

You do not have to take our word for what that does to real cases. In three Kansas fraternity actions spanning twenty-four years, no plaintiff pursued the public university. Prime sued KU and the Board of Regents and then dismissed them himself. The Wren family never named KU. Neither 2026 Delta Upsilon plaintiff named KU. Three plaintiffs, three decades, same choice.

That is an observation drawn from the statute and from how the cases were actually filed. It is not a statement of anyone’s litigation strategy, and a full Tort Claims Act analysis — including its notice requirements and exceptions, which are strict and short — requires a lawyer looking at your specific facts. The notice deadlines are covered here, and they are shorter than you think.

Who can actually be sued in Kansas

Put Prime, Hawley, and the Tort Claims Act together and Kansas produces a specific, unusual answer to the question every family asks. It is not “the fraternity.”

The question in Kansas is: which incorporated entity exists, and who are the individuals?

The unincorporated chapter — generally not suable. Prime, Syllabus ¶ 1; applied to dismiss a chapter in Hawley in 2017.
The house corporation or alumni corporation — suable. These are incorporated, they hold the real estate, they file tax returns, and they appear in county property-tax dockets. In Kansas they are frequently the entity with the assets.
The national or international organization — suable, subject to a duty fight it has twice won in Kansas on a no-control theory.
Individual members and officers — suable. The Wren complaint named the house corporation’s president personally, plus ten individual chapter members.
The public university — suable, but behind the $500,000 aggregate cap with no punitive damages.
A private college — suable, with no cap.

And these entities are not dormant paper shells. Kansas Greek corporations hold real, documented, publicly filed assets — one KU chapter entity reports $3,550,453, with others reporting $1,480,540, $1,243,436, $1,147,859, $967,514 and $915,371. They appear in Douglas and Riley County property-tax dockets and in Kansas Department of Revenue tax actions. They also appear as plaintiffs — one KU fraternity association filed at least eight debt-collection actions against its own individual members; a K-State chapter corporation filed three eviction actions in 2024 alone.

These are corporations with counsel, real property, tax exposure, and litigation habits. They are in court routinely, by choice, as plaintiffs. The idea that there is nobody to hold responsible in Kansas is not true — it is just that the responsible party has a corporate name rather than a Greek one, and you have to know to look for it.

Both 2026 Delta Upsilon plaintiffs found it. Here is exactly what they did.

The Kansas record

This is the part of the page we could not find anywhere else, in any form, which is why we built it.

Below is every hazing finding, removal, revoked charter, lawsuit and death we have been able to document in Kansas, with the organization named and the conduct described — wherever possible in the institution’s own words, from the institution’s own published record.

How to read this section, and how we name people

We name organizations on this page. We do it carefully, and we want you to understand the rule we follow, because the difference between these categories is the difference between a fact and a defamation claim — and more importantly, it is the difference between information you can use and information you cannot.

Adjudicated. A university investigated, made a finding, and published it. We name the organization, quote the university’s description of the conduct, and give the dates and the sanction. These are findings, not accusations, and they were made by the institution — not by us and not by a plaintiff.
Pleaded. Someone filed a lawsuit. We name the case, the parties as captioned, and the allegations — always as allegations. An allegation in a complaint is unproven. It has not been tested, admitted, or decided. We will say so every single time, and we ask you to hold it that way too.
Present, with no findings. Every other Kansas campus and every other chapter. They appear in the campus section as a neutral inventory, because acknowledging that an organization exists is not an accusation against it — and because sixty-two of Kansas’s sixty-five institutions publish no organizational conduct record at all, which means the absence of a finding tells you almost nothing.

Everything in the University of Kansas portion of this section was retrieved directly from KU’s live published reports on August 6, 2026. Kansas State and Wichita State findings are as recorded in those institutions’ published disclosures as of August 5, 2026. Every one of these documents is free and public, and we tell you where to find yours in the lookup section.

The eleven adjudicated findings

Eleven substantiated hazing findings across three Kansas institutions. Those three institutions are the only ones in the state that publish organizational conduct records at all.

University of Kansas — four findings, quoted from KU’s own transparency report

KU’s Campus Hazing Transparency Report for the 2025–2026 academic year was published in June 2026. It contains four entries. We are reproducing what KU wrote, because nothing we could write would be stronger.

Alpha Tau Omega, Gamma Mu chapter — first finding

What KU found: “The University confirmed hazing activities including sleep deprivation and verbal harassment. Students were also required to complete calisthenics and demeaning tasks, and had liquids poured on them.”
Alcohol or drugs involved: “Yes, alcohol was thrown on students.”
When it happened: September 14, 2024, and October 21–26, 2024. Reported to the University April 24, 2025 — roughly six months later.
Investigation: initiated April 28, 2025. Finding October 7, 2025. Organization notified October 30, 2025.
Violations found: Hazing; Harm to Persons; Registered Organization.
Sanction: Probation until December 18, 2027, plus a minimum of one hazing prevention education workshop per semester and two chapter support meetings.

Note the timeline, because it is the most useful thing on this page for a family deciding whether to come forward. From the conduct to the finding was thirteen months. Six of those months passed before anyone reported it at all. Your legal deadline is running during that entire period.

Alpha Tau Omega, Gamma Mu chapter — second finding

What KU found: “The University confirmed hazing activities including personal servitude, sleep deprivation and verbal harassment. Students were also required to complete calisthenics and demeaning tasks, and had liquids poured on them.”
Alcohol or drugs involved: “Yes, students were required to consume alcohol, alcohol was poured on them, and students crawled through alcohol on the floor.”
When it happened: multiple dates during the Fall 2025 semester. Reported to the University January 14, 2026.
Investigation: initiated January 14, 2026. Finding and notification March 20, 2026.
Sanction: Removal of Organizational Registration until Spring 2031.

Put the two Alpha Tau Omega entries side by side and look at the dates. The chapter was notified of the first hazing finding on October 30, 2025, and placed on probation until December 2027. The conduct in the second finding occurred during the Fall 2025 semester — the same semester. KU’s own record shows a second round of hazing at the same chapter overlapping the moment it was sanctioned for the first.

“Required to consume alcohol” is the phrase to hold onto. That is not our characterization and it is not a plaintiff’s allegation — it is an adjudicated institutional finding of compulsion, in writing, from the university. Compulsion is the fact the only Kansas hazing decision turned on.

Delta Upsilon, Kansas chapter

What KU found: “The University confirmed hazing activities including sleep deprivation and verbal harassment. Students were also required to complete calisthenics and demeaning tasks, ingest undesirable food concoctions, and had liquids poured on them.”
Alcohol or drugs involved: “Yes, students were required to consume alcohol, and alcohol was poured on them.”
When it happened: multiple dates during the Fall 2025 semester. Reported to the University October 6, 2025.
Investigation: initiated October 6, 2025 — the same day. Finding and notification April 10, 2026.
Sanction: Probation until May 12, 2028, plus hazing prevention workshops and chapter support meetings.

This chapter has an eight-year record, and it is the most consequential single record in Kansas. It is below.

Lambda Phi Epsilon, Alpha Psi chapter

What KU found: “The University confirmed hazing activities which included students being required to complete calisthenics and demeaning tasks as well as participation in forced activities which included sleep deprivation.”
Alcohol or drugs involved: No.
When it happened: multiple dates during the Fall 2025 and Spring 2026 semesters. Reported April 2, 2026.
Investigation: initiated April 13, 2026. Finding April 22, 2026. Notified April 28, 2026.
Sanction: Warning status until May 14, 2027.

We include this one deliberately, and we want to be careful and fair about why. There is no alcohol here. There is no beating. There is sleep deprivation, forced physical exertion, and degradation — sustained across two semesters — and KU found it to be hazing and harm to persons.

It is the clearest illustration on the Kansas record of the gap we described earlier: this is an adjudicated finding of hazing that almost certainly would not satisfy the Kansas criminal statute, because nothing in it threatens great bodily harm, disfigurement or death. That is not a comment on this organization. It is a comment on the statute. And sleep deprivation across two semesters is not a trivial injury — the medicine on that is here.

Kansas State University — four findings

Kappa Alpha Psi (Beta Psi chapter) — suspended through Fall 2028. K-State’s disclosure describes “physical beating and paddling of its new members and requiring new members to walk across hot coals,” and records a finding that the organization “demonstrated intent to continue hazing practices.” This is the most severe conduct on the Kansas record.
Delta Upsilon — probation through Fall 2026. Investigation September 17–22, 2025. “Slab Week” eliminated.
Pi Kappa Alpha — disciplinary warning. Conduct: sleep deprivation, forced silence, sit-ups.
Beta Theta Pi — disciplinary warning. Conduct: personal servitude, sleep deprivation, wall sits.

Wichita State University — three findings

Lambda Pi Upsilon — suspension plus probation to December 31, 2025. Six sanctions recorded as incomplete.
Chi Sigma Tau — suspension plus probation to July 1, 2025.
Phi Delta Theta (2017) — deferred suspension plus probation, for an alcohol violation and hazing.

Wichita State is the only Kansas institution that publishes whether each sanction was actually completed — a compliance dimension no other school in the state discloses. It is the reason we can tell you that six sanctions against one organization were recorded as outstanding past their due date.

Four national organizations carry findings at more than one Kansas campus

Reading the three published records together produces something none of them shows on its own:

Delta Upsilon — hazing findings at KU and Kansas State, from investigations running concurrently in fall 2025.
Pi Kappa Alpha — registration removed at KU (2019); warning at K-State (2025).
Beta Theta Pi — probation at KU (2018); warning at K-State (2024).
Phi Delta Theta — registration removed at KU (2022); deferred suspension at Wichita State (2017).

Removals, suspensions, and revoked charters

KU publishes its organizational conduct record for seven years, which is why the public record starts where it does. Across that window:

Thirty-three total sanctions.
Twenty-four involved hazing.
Seven removals of organizational registration — the most severe sanction KU issues. Every single one involved hazing.

The seven removals, with the violations KU recorded:

Alpha Tau Omega — March 20, 2026. Hazing; Harm to Persons. Eligible Spring 2031.
Sigma Chi — July 20, 2022. Harm to Persons; Hazing. Eligible Fall 2025.
Phi Delta Theta — January 4, 2022. Retaliation; Harm to Persons; Hazing; Abuse of Conduct Process. Eligible Fall 2025.
Phi Gamma Delta — January 4, 2022. Harm to Persons; Hazing; Use of Taken Property; Violations of Policy. Eligible Fall 2025.
Pi Kappa Phi — November 4, 2020. Harm to Persons; Hazing.
Pi Kappa Alpha — January 29, 2019. Harm to Persons; Hazing; Alcohol and Drugs.
Delta Upsilon — July 31, 2018. Harm to Persons; Hazing.

Three fraternities removed from one campus in one year

2022 is the largest single-year Greek accountability action documented in Kansas.

In January 2022, Phi Gamma Delta and Phi Delta Theta were both suspended for five years following findings of “systemic hazing” causing physical and mental harm to pledges. The investigators were hired by the national fraternity leadership, not by the university. Reporting described two distinct but comprehensive programs of verbal, emotional and physical abuse, including a locker room “covered in vomit, liquor, pee, old food, trash” — pledges ordered to clean it were then told to go to bed without showering and to sleep in vomit-encrusted sheets. A concussion was reported in connection with the matter.

KU’s spokesman at the time: “Members of these two fraternities — including the organizations’ leadership — knowingly engaged in systemic hazing that threatened the health and safety of students.”

In July 2022, Sigma Chi’s national organization pulled the KU chapter’s charter — suspended at least four years — for hazing and lying. KU removed the organization’s registration on July 20, 2022. That was the third fraternity removed from KU in a single year.

Two of those matters were driven by the national organizations, independently of the university. That is a real and often overlooked accountability track. It also sits awkwardly beside the argument nationals have twice used successfully in Kansas courts — that they cannot control their chapters.

The 2018 system-wide freeze

In March 2018, KU’s Interfraternity Council self-imposed a freeze on all social activity across all twenty-four fraternities it then governed, following multiple investigations and suspensions. KU cited “systemic problems.”

Two fraternities in under a month, in 2026

March 20, 2026 — Alpha Tau Omega removed until Spring 2031, while already on probation through December 2027 for hazing.
April 10, 2026 — Delta Upsilon placed on probation through May 12, 2028.

Student reporting at the time noted that Delta Upsilon’s sanction made it “the second fraternity to be punished for hazing in less than a month” at KU. A fifth KU hazing investigation was reported in 2026; the organization has not been publicly identified. We are recording that as an open, unresolved item rather than guessing.

The rest of KU’s published hazing record

Organizations with completed hazing sanctions in KU’s published seven-year window, each of which has served its sanction: Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. (2024) · Theta Chi (2023 and 2019) · Zeta Beta Tau (2022) · Alpha Kappa Lambda (2021) · Phi Gamma Delta (2021 and 2019) · Delta Chi (2019) · Delta Tau Delta (2019) · Sigma Chi (2019, with retaliation and intimidation alongside hazing) · Pi Beta Phi (2018) · Sigma Pi (2018) · Sigma Alpha Epsilon (2018) · Sigma Phi Epsilon (2018) · Beta Theta Pi (2018) · Alpha Epsilon Pi (2017) · and the KU Cheer Team (2017).

These are closed matters. The sanctions were imposed and they ended. We list them because a complete record is more useful to you than a selective one, and because Phi Gamma Delta carries three separate KU conduct actions — 2019, 2021 and 2022 — more than any other chapter in the state.

And note who is on that list: a cheer team, a sorority, and a scholarship hall. Hazing in Kansas is not only a fraternity phenomenon, and the state criminal statute does not appear to reach any of those three organization types.

Delta Upsilon: the same conduct, eight years apart

If you read one case study on this page, read this one. It is the most consequential single-chapter record in Kansas, and it is the strongest available answer to the question every family eventually asks: does anything actually change?

2018 — Delta Upsilon’s international organization disbanded its University of Kansas chapter. The reported conduct: pledges were urinated on, spat on, and hit — for reporting hazing. KU separately removed the organization’s registration on July 31, 2018 for Harm to Persons and Hazing.
Fall 2022 — the chapter was revived with new members.
December 2023 — the chapter regained its charter.
October 6, 2025 — KU Student Conduct opened a new investigation, the same day it received the report.
April 10, 2026 — sanctioned. Hazing, Harm to Persons, Registered Organization. Probation through May 12, 2028.
July 2026 — two civil actions filed in Douglas County District Court. Below.

The chapter was sanctioned again two and a half years after regaining its charter.

2018, the conduct that caused the international organization to disband the chapter: pledges were urinated on, spat on and hit for reporting hazing.

2026, from KU’s own transparency reporting period: new members reported being urinated on, spat on and repeatedly hit by other pledges after coming forward to KU officials.

The identical conduct — urination, spitting, and striking, directed at the people who reported — recurred eight years apart at the same chapter, across a complete turnover of the membership and a re-chartering.

We want to be precise about what that is and what it is not. It is not initiation conduct. It is categorically different from the calisthenics-and-sleep-deprivation pattern in most Kansas findings. It is retaliation against whistleblowers — punishment directed at a person for exercising a right — and it recurred after the organization had already been dissolved once for exactly that.

And Delta Upsilon carries a separate substantiated hazing finding at Kansas State from the same academic year: investigation September 17–22, 2025, probation through Fall 2026, with an event called “Slab Week” eliminated. The same national organization, both Kansas flagship universities, two independent findings, concurrent investigations.

One more fact, and it is current as of the day we checked. On August 6, 2026, Delta Upsilon remains listed on KU’s official Interfraternity Council roster — while on disciplinary probation through May 2028, and while two civil actions are pending against Delta Upsilon entities in Douglas County. That is not a violation of anything. Probation is not removal. We state it because a parent researching this chapter today will find it on the university’s recruitment page, and should know the rest.

The two 2026 lawsuits — including the one nobody reported

Every news account we located reported a single Delta Upsilon lawsuit. The Douglas County docket shows two, filed twelve days apart, by different plaintiffs, against different defendants, on different legal theories.

Case DG-2026-CV-000387 — premises liability

Plaintiff: N. Vinduska.
Defendant as captioned: Delta Upsilon International Fraternity, Inc., et al — the national corporation.
Cause of action: premises liability.
Filed: July 9, 2026, Douglas County District Court.

This plaintiff appears in no press coverage we were able to locate. The case exists on the public docket and nowhere else we could find.

Case DG-2026-CV-000404 — intentional tort

Plaintiff: N. Miller.
Defendant as captioned: Alumni of Kansas Chapter of Delta Upsilon, et al — the incorporated alumni entity.
Cause of action: intentional tort.
Filed: July 21, 2026, Douglas County District Court.
Relief sought, per reporting: jury trial, $75,000 per count across six counts, $450,000 total.

Why the way these two were filed is the most instructive thing on this page

Neither plaintiff sued the chapter. One sued the national corporation. The other sued the incorporated alumni corporation.

That is Prime and Hawley being executed with precision. Those two decisions killed claims aimed at unincorporated chapters. Both 2026 plaintiffs went straight at entities that survive a motion to dismiss.

And the two theories are complementary rather than duplicative. Premises liability reaches the party with control of the property — a property-based theory. Intentional tort reaches the actors and the entity responsible for them — a conduct-based theory. Note also what neither of them did: no governmental entity was named in either case, which means the Kansas Tort Claims Act’s $500,000 cap and punitive-damages bar were never in play.

Whether the two actions are related, consolidated, or coordinated is not established by the public docket. Both simply exist.

What is alleged — and these are allegations

The following come from the complaint as reported. They are unproven. They have not been admitted, tested, or decided by any court. We reproduce them because you asked what these cases look like, and because you will encounter them elsewhere without that warning attached.

Pledges locked in a room and forced to drink as many as sixty beers.
A prospective member dunked headfirst into a bucket of water contaminated with human feces.
Urinating on a pledge’s bed.
Throwing ice cubes at pledges’ heads.
Blasting loud music near them.
Forcing them into isolation.
Sleep deprivation and physical exertion.
Retaliation.

One allegation is legally distinctive enough to flag separately: the plaintiff alleges he chose Delta Upsilon partly because the fraternity advertises itself as the “world’s oldest nonsecret, non-hazing fraternity.” That frames the organization’s own anti-hazing marketing as an inducement — a materially different theory from a pure tort claim, and one worth understanding if you were recruited on similar representations.

On the $75,000-per-count structure: Kansas civil pleading practice requires a party to state whether damages sought exceed $75,000. Pleading exactly that figure per count tracks that threshold; it is not a valuation of each claim. The same structure appears in the 2009 Wren complaint, seventeen years earlier.

Three more Kansas fraternity cases that no press coverage exists for

A docket sweep surfaces cases that reporting never touched. We are listing these because their existence is a public fact and because they are a reminder that press coverage is not a proxy for litigation.

DG-2025-CV-000153 — Philip N. Jaax v. Sigma Nu, et al. Filed March 27, 2025, Douglas County. Case type: Other Civil. No press coverage located. Sigma Nu at KU is the wealthiest chapter entity documented anywhere in our Kansas work, with IRS-reported assets of $3,550,453. The nature of the claim and its status are unknown to us. We are not characterizing it.
2016-CV-000373 — Blake Hartwell v. Luke Wassel, et al. Filed September 13, 2016, Douglas County. Other Tort. Surfaced under a Sigma Chi entity search. Connection and nature of claim unverified.
2002-CV-000087 — James Bland, et al. v. Sean M. Scott, et al. Filed February 11, 2002, Douglas County. Other Tort. Surfaced under a Phi Gamma Delta entity search. Connection and nature of claim unverified.

An important limit on all of this: the Kansas public court portal returns a summary row only — case number, caption, filing date, case type, county. Party lists, attorneys, docket entries and dispositions are not available online. And the portal’s electronic coverage does not reach back before roughly 2002: a party search for the Prime plaintiff returns nothing, even though the Kansas Supreme Court decided his appeal from that exact court. A zero from that portal is not proof that nothing exists.

Jason Wren, University of Kansas, 2009

Kansas has one documented university death in a fraternity house that appears in the national hazing-deaths database.

Jason Christopher Wren, 1989–2009. Nineteen years old. University of Kansas freshman and a new member of Sigma Alpha Epsilon.
Found Sunday, March 8, 2009, at approximately 2:30 p.m., in the Sigma Alpha Epsilon house.
Cause of death: alcohol poisoning, confirmed by autopsy. Blood alcohol concentration .362% — more than four times the .08% legal driving limit.
He had consumed margaritas at a restaurant, then ten to twelve beers, plus whiskey.
He had lived in the house fewer than two weeks. His father: “One week of fraternity living killed him.”
After he passed out, fraternity brothers put him to bed rather than seeking medical help.

His parents, Jay and Mary Wren, filed a wrongful-death action in Douglas County District Court, case 2009-CV-000728, on November 12, 2009, before Judge Michael Malone. Causes of action: wrongful death, breach of contract, and multiple counts of negligence.

Look at who they sued, because it is the template we described in the law section, executed seventeen years before the 2026 cases: the chapter, the national association, the Kansas Alpha House Corporation, the house corporation’s president personally, and ten unnamed individual chapter members. Four entity layers plus ten individuals. The University of Kansas was not a defendant.

The case settled on April 5, 2011. The amount is confidential and has never been publicly disclosed. Nothing regarding settlement terms was filed with the court. The parties’ joint statement noted they were pleased that the Jason Wren Initiative would continue annually; the Wrens had said they intended to direct part of any recovery to KU, to educate students about hazing and alcohol.

Five things that are all true at once, and we use them together or not at all

This matters, and we are not going to blur it to make a stronger story.

A KU student died in a fraternity house in 2009 of alcohol poisoning. True.
The national hazing-deaths database carries a dedicated entry for him. True.
The wrongful-death complaint alleged coerced “man up” challenges — rapid consumption of large quantities of alcohol, with the loser defined as whoever quit drinking or vomited first. True — and it is an allegation from a complaint.
The case settled confidentially, without any finding. True.
The database entry itself emphasizes alcohol overconsumption and does not narrate a coerced ritual. Also true, and it belongs beside the others.

This death was never adjudicated as hazing. The correct sentence is “the complaint alleged,” never “the fraternity hazed him.” We hold to that even though the other version would serve us better.

A date conflict, surfaced rather than resolved: one secondary source gives May 8, 2009 as the date of death. The database entry and contemporaneous Lawrence Journal-World reporting both give Sunday, March 8, 2009, and the autopsy-confirmation article dated May 26, 2009 is consistent with March and not with May 8. We use March 8 and we are telling you the conflict exists.

What happened afterward

2018 — Sigma Alpha Epsilon’s KU charter was pulled by the national organization, four-year minimum. Jason Wren’s father has publicly stated the fraternity “hasn’t changed.”
Jay Wren has stated that KU officials never informed him of his son’s alcohol-related conduct issues — he learned of them from his son. Parental-notification practice is a distinct institutional question from the hazing conduct itself, and it is one families should ask about early.

The rest of the Kansas death record

The standard national hazing-death chronology, searched in full across both halves (1838–1999 and 2000–2026), documents two Kansas hazing deaths, both at K-12 institutions:

1902 — Lee Watson, Parsons, Kansas. A high school club initiation. Electrocuted by a live wire he intended to use to shock a new member.
1957 — W. H. Sallee, Utica High School, Kansas. Accidental hanging during a supervised initiation meant to frighten first-year students. Sallee was an educator, not a student. The initiation killed the adult supervising it.

Beyond the Wren entry, no hazing death at a Kansas university appears anywhere in that chronology. For context, the same database records 105 U.S. college hazing deaths in the last twenty-three years.

Floor, not ceiling. That database is an unofficial clearinghouse. A Kansas university hazing death that never entered national reporting would not appear in it. We record this as “none documented,” never as a proven zero.

A death that was not hazing — and why we say so

We are including this because leaving it out would be worse, and because you will encounter it.

Jack Fleischaker, 19, a Kansas State freshman and Sigma Chi member, died in April 2026 after falling from a second-story window of the Sigma Chi house on Fremont Street at approximately 3:15 a.m. on April 25, 2026. He was taken to Via Christi Hospital in Manhattan, transferred to Stormont Vail in Topeka, and died several days later.

The Riley County Police Department has stated: “No foul play or hazing is suspected.”

Sigma Chi International’s spokesperson said: “This was a heartbreaking accident, and there is no indication that anyone is at fault.”

This is not a hazing death and it must never be counted, cited, or implied as one. We record it here for one reason: so that no one reading a page like this connects it to something it is not.

Riley County police did confirm an ongoing investigation into the role of alcohol, because Fleischaker was underage — including when and where he may have been drinking. An underage-drinking investigation at a fraternity house is a live matter. It is not a hazing finding. A family lost their son. That is the whole of what we know and the whole of what we will say.

Zero criminal prosecutions, ever

We could not locate a single criminal hazing prosecution under K.S.A. 21-5418 anywhere in Kansas. Not for any of the eleven substantiated institutional findings. Not for the 2022 mass removal. Not historically.

Set the four accountability tracks side by side:

Institutional — highly active. Eleven substantiated findings, ten organizations removed across three campuses, one system-wide freeze.
National organization — active. Two charters pulled independently of any university, plus one chapter disbanded. Three national-level actions at KU alone.
Civil — emerging. Two actions filed in July 2026; one settled in 2011; several older matters with no public detail.
Criminal — none documented.

In Kansas, hazing accountability runs through campus conduct systems and national organizations — not through the criminal courts. A statute that exists and is essentially never charged is itself a fact you can rely on when you decide where to spend your energy.

And it is consistent with the statute’s construction rather than an oversight: a threshold of great bodily harm, disfigurement or death; a single misdemeanor grade; and no provision reaching the organization at all since 2011.

We record this as “none located,” not as a definitive zero. County attorney charging records and Kansas criminal dockets were not searched directly, and we will not claim a proven negative we did not prove.

Every Kansas campus, every organization

There are sixty-five degree-granting institutions operating in Kansas. Thirty-three of them are public. Below is what exists at each one, who governs it, and what — if anything — is on the public record.

Read this before you read the rosters

We are about to name a great many organizations. Almost none of them has ever been found responsible for anything.

Being on a roster is not an accusation. These chapters exist, they recruit, they house students, and a family trying to make a decision deserves to see the actual landscape rather than a curated slice of it. Where an organization carries a published finding, we say so in the record section and we say it in the institution’s words, with dates. Where it does not, it appears here as what it is: an organization operating on a Kansas campus with no public hazing finding against it.

And the reverse matters just as much. Only three of Kansas’s sixty-five institutions publish organizational conduct records at all. At the other sixty-two, there is no record to check — not a clean record, no record. That distinction is the most important thing in this entire section, and it has its own heading at the bottom.

Rosters marked “verified live” were retrieved directly from the institution’s own published pages on August 6, 2026. Chapter rosters change every semester. Check the university’s page before relying on any list, including ours.

University of Kansas — Lawrence

Office: Sorority & Fraternity Life. Four governing councils. 44 recognized chapters — verified live August 6, 2026 against all four council rosters.

Interfraternity Council — 18 chapters

Alpha Epsilon Pi · Alpha Kappa Lambda · Alpha Sigma Phi · Delta Chi · Delta Tau Delta · Delta Upsilon · Lambda Chi Alpha · Phi Gamma Delta · Phi Kappa Tau · Pi Kappa Alpha · Sigma Alpha Epsilon · Sigma Nu · Sigma Phi Epsilon · Sigma Pi · Triangle · Theta Chi · Zeta Beta Tau · Zeta Psi

Five of those eighteen appear elsewhere on this page, and we have bolded them so you can follow the thread rather than take our word for it: Delta Upsilon (on probation to May 2028, two suits pending) · Phi Gamma Delta (three prior conduct actions; removed in 2022, later reduced and returned) · Pi Kappa Alpha (removed in 2019; since returned) · Sigma Alpha Epsilon (the Wren house; charter pulled 2018; currently on a falsification warning to December 2026) · and Sigma Nu (a 2025 civil action of unknown character). All five are currently recognized chapters in good enough standing to recruit. That is a fact about the present, not a charge about the past.

Alpha Tau Omega is not on this roster. Its registration was removed on March 20, 2026 until Spring 2031.

Panhellenic Association — 11 chapters

Alpha Chi Omega · Alpha Delta Pi · Chi Omega · Delta Delta Delta · Delta Gamma · Gamma Phi Beta · Kappa Alpha Theta · Kappa Delta · Kappa Kappa Gamma · Pi Beta Phi · Sigma Kappa

National Pan-Hellenic Council — 8 chapters

Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. · Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. · Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc. · Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Inc. · Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc. · Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc. · Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority, Inc. · Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc.

Multicultural Greek Council — 7 chapters

alpha Kappa Delta Phi Sorority, Inc. · Kappa Delta Chi Sorority, Inc. · Lambda Phi Epsilon International Fraternity, Inc. · Phi Iota Alpha Fraternity, Inc. · Sigma Lambda Gamma Sorority, Inc. · Omega Delta Phi Fraternity, Inc. · Sigma Psi Zeta Sorority, Inc.

Lambda Phi Epsilon carries a hazing finding from April 2026 and is on warning status to May 14, 2027. It remains a recognized chapter, which is what a warning-level sanction means.

The chapters that are not on any of those lists

This is the part of KU that a survey of the university’s own pages misses entirely, and parents should know it exists.

In Fall 2023, a group of KU fraternity chapters disaffiliated from the Interfraternity Council and formed the Kansas Fraternity Leadership Council (KFLC). It describes itself as operating “similarly to an intrafraternal council” but “without the constant oversight and approval needed for normal operations,” and it was formed by “a coalition of houses that didn’t want to be affiliated with the IFC anymore, due to overbearing” administrative constraints. It maintains its own bylaws, code of conduct, philanthropy and recruitment. Its parent body is the Kansas Fraternity Landlords’ League, an independent nonprofit business league representing eleven fraternity houses housing approximately one thousand students.

Chapters identified with the KFLC: Beta Theta Pi (Alpha Nu) · Phi Kappa Psi (Kansas Alpha) · Phi Delta Theta · Kappa Sigma (Gamma Omicron). Phi Gamma Delta appears on both KU’s official IFC roster and the KFLC — a conflict we record rather than resolve.

So the honest count is: 44 university-recognized chapters, plus roughly four to five operating outside university recognition — about 48 to 49 fraternal organizations operating at KU. A survey limited to KU’s pages undercounts the Greek presence in Lawrence by roughly ten percent, and the chapters it misses are the ones with the least university oversight.

Why this matters to a family, practically: the federal transparency report covers organizations the university adjudicates. A disaffiliated chapter’s relationship to that process is not something we can tell you from public records, and we are not going to guess. Ask the question directly before your child pledges anywhere. The eleven houses in the landlords’ league are larger than the four chapters publicly named in the council — six houses are unaccounted for, and we could not identify them.

Reporting at KU

Office of Student Conduct & Community Standards. Online hazing report form, 785-864-4060, studentconduct@ku.edu. KU also maintains an anonymous hazing report form. KU’s transparency report and conduct report are both public and free.

Kansas State University — Manhattan

Office: Fraternity and Sorority Life. K-State states publicly that it has “35 chapters” and that “over 3,000 students” are involved — approximately 20% of the student body.

Interfraternity Council — 21 chapters, verified live

Acacia · Alpha Gamma Rho · Alpha Sigma Phi · Beta Sigma Psi · Beta Theta Pi · Delta Chi · Delta Sigma Phi · Delta Upsilon · FarmHouse · Kappa Alpha · Kappa Sigma · Lambda Chi Alpha · Phi Delta Theta · Phi Gamma Delta · Pi Kappa Alpha · Pi Kappa Phi · Sigma Alpha Epsilon · Sigma Chi · Sigma Phi Epsilon · Sigma Tau Gamma · Theta Xi

Bolded because they appear elsewhere on this page: Beta Theta Pi and Pi Kappa Alpha (disciplinary warnings) · Delta Upsilon (probation through Fall 2026, “Slab Week” eliminated) · and Sigma Chi, which is the chapter where Jack Fleischaker died in April 2026 — a death that police have affirmatively stated was not hazing, and which we include only so that no one connects it to something it is not.

Panhellenic Council — 14 chapters, verified live

Alpha Chi Omega · Alpha Delta Pi · Alpha Gamma Delta · Alpha Omega Epsilon · Alpha Xi Delta · Chi Omega · Delta Delta Delta · Gamma Phi Beta · Kappa Alpha Theta · Kappa Delta · Kappa Kappa Gamma · Pi Beta Phi · Sigma Kappa · Zeta Tau Alpha

The fourteen chapters that are not in the “35”

Twenty-one plus fourteen is thirty-five. That is K-State’s stated chapter count — and it covers the Interfraternity and Panhellenic Councils only.

K-State’s NPHC chapters (the Divine Nine, historically Black fraternities and sororities) and its multicultural Greek chapters are not on the Fraternity and Sorority Life site at all. They are published by a different office entirely — the Morris Family Multicultural Student Center — and that page opens by stating the number outright:

“Fourteen multicultural Greek Letter organizations are active at K-State.”

— K-State Morris Family Multicultural Student Center, retrieved August 6, 2026

Thirty-five plus fourteen is forty-nine. That is the real size of the Greek community at Kansas State, and you cannot get to it from the Fraternity and Sorority Life site.

National Pan-Hellenic Council — 8 chapters, chartered December 4, 1982

Every one of these is a Divine Nine organization, and several substantially predate the council itself:

Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority — Kappa Pi chapter, chartered May 1, 1976
Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity — Kappa Tau chapter, chartered April 15, 1976
Delta Sigma Theta Sorority — Eta Gamma chapter, chartered January 17, 1970
Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity — Beta Psi chapter, chartered March 17, 1947
Omega Psi Phi Fraternity — Delta Delta chapter, chartered April 19, 1972
Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity — Delta chapter, chartered April 9, 1917 — the oldest chapter charter date published anywhere in this section
Sigma Gamma Rho Sorority — Nu Beta chapter, chartered October 3, 1992
Zeta Phi Beta Sorority — Epsilon Mu chapter, chartered December 4, 1982

Multicultural Greek Council — 6 chapters

Kappa Delta Chi Sorority — Gamma Delta chapter, chartered April 28, 2018
Omega Delta Phi Fraternity — Beta Chi chapter, chartered April 22, 2018
Sigma Lambda Beta Fraternity — Phi chapter, chartered April 9, 1994
Sigma Lambda Gamma Sorority — Iota chapter, chartered October 15, 1994
Alpha Phi Gamma — KSU charter, 2022
Delta Alpha Sigma Sorority — Zeta Colony, chartered April 30, 2022

Two K-State pages disagree about whether the MGC exists

We surface this rather than resolve it, because both statements are official, both are current, and they cannot both be right.

K-State’s Fraternity and Sorority Life site says the multicultural chapters have no council:

“MGCs… do not have a formal council at K-State, but instead, flourish independently through the dedicated involvement of their undergraduate members and advisors… While our IFC and PHC chapters at K-State average more than a hundred members, NPHC and MGCs are usually no larger than twenty members total.”

K-State’s Multicultural Student Center says the MGC is a chartered council with a named advisor:

“Multicultural Greek Council (MGC) — K-State Council. Chartered: Fall 2023. Advisor: [named]. Members: ΚΔΧ, ΩΔΦ, ΣΛΒ, ΣΛΓ, ΑΦΓ, ΔΑΣ”

Both retrieved the same day, August 6, 2026. One K-State office says there is no formal MGC; another K-State office lists it as a chartered K-State Council with an advisor and six member organizations. We do not know which is current, and we are not going to guess.

Why any of this matters to a family

It is a safety point, not a criticism. The most severe hazing conduct on the entire Kansas record — “physical beating and paddling of its new members and requiring new members to walk across hot coals” — was found at Kappa Alpha Psi, Beta Psi chapter, and that chapter is suspended through Fall 2028.

Beta Psi is still listed as an active chapter on K-State’s Multicultural Student Center page as of August 6, 2026. We are stating that neutrally and we want to be careful about what it does and does not mean. A directory page is not a conduct record, offices update on different cycles, and a suspension is not a dissolution — the chapter continues to exist and is eligible to return. But the practical consequence for a parent is real: the page that lists the chapter does not mention the suspension, and the page that records the suspension is maintained by a different office.

A parent who reads “35 chapters,” checks the two council rosters, and stops there will never encounter the part of the K-State community where the most serious documented hazing finding in Kansas occurred. You have to know that a second office publishes a second roster, and you have to know to cross-check it against a third document. That is exactly why we wrote the lookup section.

And the obvious thing, stated plainly: one finding against one chapter says nothing whatsoever about the other thirteen organizations in that community. Several of them have been at Kansas State since the 1940s and 1970s — one since 1917 — and none of them has a published hazing finding of any kind.

What K-State publishes

K-State publishes Community Standards Reports for each IFC and PHC chapter alongside its rosters, plus Grade Reports under Policies and Resources. Its Campus Hazing Transparency Report was published July 1, 2026, covering 2024–2026. K-State is one of only three Kansas institutions that publish organizational hazing findings.

Wichita State University — Wichita

Office: Fraternity and Sorority Life, under Student Engagement & Belonging. WSU states publicly, as of August 6, 2026, that the community has “25 chapters across four councils” — Interfraternity, Panhellenic, National Pan-Hellenic, and a multicultural council.

Wichita State publishes an RSO discipline record, and it does something no other Kansas institution does: it records whether each sanction was actually completed or remains outstanding past its due date. That is how we can tell you that six sanctions against one organization were recorded as incomplete. It is a genuinely better disclosure practice than anything else in the state, and it is worth saying so.

Three hazing findings are on WSU’s record — Lambda Pi Upsilon, Chi Sigma Tau, and Phi Delta Theta (2017). The detail is in the record section. WSU does not publish a distinctly labeled Campus Hazing Transparency Report; its RSO discipline page appears to serve that function.

Washburn University — Topeka

A municipal university — which matters legally, because it sits behind the same $500,000 Kansas Tort Claims Act cap as the state universities. 11 chapters — verified live August 6, 2026 against Washburn’s own Fraternity and Sorority Life pages.

Fraternities — 5

Alpha Delta · Kappa Sigma · Phi Delta Theta · Sigma Phi Epsilon · Sigma Lambda Beta

Washburn’s page states it “is home to four chartered fraternity chapters” that make up the Interfraternity Council — and then lists five. The fifth, Sigma Lambda Beta, is a multicultural fraternity governed elsewhere. We record the discrepancy rather than picking a number.

Sororities — 6

Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. · Alpha Phi · Delta Gamma · Sigma Lambda Gamma National Sorority, Inc. · Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc. · Zeta Tau Alpha

Alpha Phi, Delta Gamma and Zeta Tau Alpha are Panhellenic. Alpha Kappa Alpha, Sigma Lambda Gamma and Zeta Phi Beta are Multicultural Greek Council, and recruit through membership intake rather than formal recruitment. Washburn’s page refers to “our seven sororities” in one sentence and “six chartered sorority chapters” in the next, and lists six.

The housing finding, confirmed from Washburn’s own page

Washburn publishes its chapter houses with bed counts. Five are listed, on a page whose text says six:

Alpha Phi — 35 beds
Delta Gamma — 30 beds
Alpha Delta — 35 beds
Phi Delta Theta — 24 beds — “Managed through Residential Living”
Sigma Phi Epsilon — 28 beds

Read two sentences on that same page together, because they are in tension: “each chapter house is a private residence” — and one of them is managed through the University’s own Residential Living office.

Every other Kansas institution we examined states that all chapter facilities are privately owned. Washburn is the exception, and it publishes the exception itself. Institutional control of a premises is a materially different legal posture from private ownership, and in a premises-liability case — which is exactly how one of the two 2026 Delta Upsilon actions is pleaded — it is the fact that decides who the defendant is. It also pulls the $500,000 Tort Claims Act cap into a case that would otherwise have no ceiling.

Washburn’s hazing policy is far broader than Kansas law

Washburn maintains an anonymous hazing report form and publishes its Student Conduct Code definition, which does three things the Kansas criminal statute does not:

“…an act that endangers the mental or physical health or safety of a student… for the purpose of initiation, admission into, affiliation with, or as a condition for continued membership in a group or organization. Participation or cooperation by the person(s) being hazed does not excuse the violation. Failing to intervene to prevent and/or failing to discourage and/or failing to report those acts may also violate this policy.”

— Washburn University Student Conduct Code, as published August 6, 2026

It reaches mental health — Kansas criminal law does not. It removes consent as an excuse — the Kansas statute says nothing about consent. And it makes failing to intervene, discourage, or report a violation in itself.

Reporting: Office of Student Life, Morgan Hall Room 240, 785-670-2100, studentlife@washburn.edu; Office of Student Involvement & Development, 785-670-1723. Washburn’s own guidance is worth repeating verbatim: “If you are unsure whether or not to report an event as hazing, it is better to report and have it determined the incident not be hazing than to not report anything at all. When in doubt, say something.”

Two more things, and the second one is the important one

Washburn has no NPHC — and this is a trap. Washburn’s own pages confirm it: its Divine Nine organizations sit under the Multicultural Greek Council. Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. and Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc. are both there. Searching for an NPHC at Washburn returns nothing, and would wrongly suggest no historically Black organizations exist there. They do. Search by organization name, never by council name. This is the single most likely way to get Washburn wrong.
There may be no suable chapter entity at Washburn at all. An entity search of all five known Washburn chapter house addresses found zero registered corporate entities. Under Prime, that is not a footnote — it goes directly to whether a defendant exists. The sharpest example is Alpha Delta: chartered in 1912, the largest Greek residence on campus at 35 beds, with no national headquarters and no tax record. It exists only on the university’s own pages. Registry-first research would miss the oldest fraternity on campus entirely — and a plaintiff who named “Alpha Delta” as a defendant might find there is nothing there to name.

But no transparency report

Washburn is now the only Kansas public four-year university where we could not locate a Campus Hazing Transparency Report, and it publishes no organizational conduct record. On August 6, 2026 we checked its entire Fraternity and Sorority Life section, its student-life directory, its site search, and multiple URL patterns.

What Washburn publishes is a reporting form and a policy — the input side. A transparency report is the output side: what was found, against whom, and what happened. We record this as not located, not as non-compliance — a report can sit inside an unparsed PDF or an Annual Security Report. But it is worth asking about, and now Washburn is the only one left to ask.

Fort Hays State University — Hays

Roughly 9 chapters across two councils. Notably, FHSU governs Sigma Alpha — a professional agricultural sorority explicitly founded as an alternative to social Greek life — under its Panhellenic Council. Council membership does not tell you what kind of organization something is.

Fort Hays State publishes a Campus Hazing Transparency Report, under the Office of the President’s Compliance Office, and it is one of the better ones in the state. Verified live August 6, 2026, it carries the full federal hazing definition — including “regardless of the willingness of such other person or persons to participate” and “physical or psychological harm” — and gives three separate reporting routes: Student Engagement at 785-628-4664, the Compliance Officer at 785-628-4175, and an online Report a Concern form.

FHSU has an affirmative zero — no hazing findings. One design detail is worth noting neutrally, because it changes how you should read a blank page: FHSU states that reports are updated twice a year and that “Should there be no incidents or updates, a report will not be generated.” So at Fort Hays, the absence of a report is the disclosure. That is a defensible reading of the federal requirement, and it means a missing report there does not mean the same thing a missing report means elsewhere.

One dating caution: FHSU’s newest published chapter semester and grade reports are from Fall 2018, while KU publishes through Spring 2026. Institutional reports in Kansas vary in currency by up to eight years. Date every figure you rely on.

Pittsburg State University — Pittsburg

Roughly 10 chapters across three councils. Pittsburg State’s chapter roster pages did not resolve on any URL pattern we checked, so we are not going to publish a stale roster as though it were current. For the chapter list, call the Office of Student Life and ask for it in writing.

A correction to our own record — Pitt State does publish a transparency report

Our earlier Kansas research recorded that no Campus Hazing Transparency Report could be located at Pittsburg State, after checking five URL patterns. That was wrong. It exists, under Student Life → Getting Help → Hazing Prevention, and we found it on August 6, 2026.

What it says:

“Pittsburg State University is dedicated to promoting a safe educational setting for everyone on our campus. Hazing is unacceptable and will not be tolerated by any organization or individual member of Pittsburg State University.”

“Hazing Violations: Currently there are no hazing violations to report.”

And Pitt State commits to something broader than the law requires

This is the sentence that makes Pittsburg State worth reading closely, and we want to give the university full credit for it:

“Regardless of a violation of policy being determined or not, all reports of hazing within Pittsburg State University’s jurisdiction will be listed in the Annual Security and Fire Safety Report.”

— Pittsburg State University, Hazing Prevention, retrieved August 6, 2026

Understand what that commits to. A Campus Hazing Transparency Report is only required to list organizations found responsible. Reports that did not result in a finding are excluded — KU says so expressly on its own report. That exclusion is the single biggest blind spot in the federal transparency scheme, because a report that goes nowhere disappears completely.

Pittsburg State says every report gets listed in the Annual Security Report, finding or no finding. If that commitment is carried out, Pitt State’s ASR will show something no Kansas transparency report shows: the denominator. How many hazing reports were made, not merely how many were substantiated.

That distinction matters enormously to a family deciding whether to come forward, and to anyone trying to read a blank report. We have not yet seen a Pitt State ASR carrying such a list — the commitment is what is published, and the first ASRs carrying hazing statistics arrive October 1, 2026. We will check.

What else Pitt State publishes

Hazing prevention and awareness programming twice per year to registered student organizations, with one program aimed specifically at new fraternity and sorority members.
Three national programs or speakers this past year, covering hazing, bystander intervention, ethical leadership and personal accountability.
Information provided to the campus community on how to file a report, how reports are investigated, and local, state and national organization laws and policies.
Its hazing policy is Article 23 of the Code of Student Rights and Responsibilities.
An online hazing report form, and University Police and Safety available 24/7 at 620-235-4624.

One scope limit Pitt State states plainly, and every family should notice it: “The Campus Hazing Transparency Report only includes violations… by recognized student organizations.” An unrecognized or disaffiliated group is outside it — which is not a Pitt State problem, it is a feature of the federal scheme, and it is why the disaffiliated chapters at KU matter.

Emporia State University — Emporia

Roughly 9 chapters across three councils, though ESU’s own materials have stated eight.

We are correcting our own record here. Our earlier Kansas research recorded that no Campus Hazing Transparency Report could be located at Emporia State, and noted that ESU’s own Policy 1.33 requires one twice yearly. That is no longer accurate. As of August 6, 2026, ESU publishes a dedicated Hazing Prevention page carrying its policy, the Kansas statute, its prevention program, and this line:

“Emporia State University has had zero findings of hazing during the last 12 months.”

ESU’s policy definition adopts the federal standard nearly verbatim — hazing committed “regardless of the willingness of such other person or persons to participate” and creating a risk of “physical or psychological injury.” Like KU’s, ESU’s institutional policy reaches conduct the Kansas criminal statute does not. ESU also makes failing to report hazing an independent policy violation, and requires prevention training for students, faculty and staff. Questions on that training go to the Office of Student Success, 620-341-5269.

We are flagging our own correction rather than quietly fixing it, because you are entitled to know when a source you are relying on — including us — has been wrong about something.

Kansas private colleges and universities

Kansas has a substantial private sector, and it operates under materially different rules than the public one:

No Kansas Tort Claims Act cap. Private institutions are not governmental entities. There is no $500,000 ceiling and no punitive-damages bar. This is the single biggest legal difference between suing a private Kansas college and a public one.
The Stop Campus Hazing Act still applies to any institution receiving federal student aid, which is nearly all of them. The transparency report obligation does not depend on whether the school is public.

Institutions with documented Greek or fraternal organizations include Baker University (Baldwin City), Benedictine College (Atchison), Ottawa University (Ottawa, with Kansas City and Overland Park sites), MidAmerica Nazarene University (Olathe), Newman University (Wichita), Friends University (Wichita), Bethel College (North Newton), Hesston College, Bethany College (Lindsborg), McPherson College, Southwestern College (Winfield), University of Saint Mary (Leavenworth), Kansas Wesleyan University (Salina), Sterling College, Tabor College (Hillsboro), Central Christian College of Kansas (McPherson), Cleveland University–Kansas City (Overland Park), Kansas Health Science University (Wichita), and Donnelly College (Kansas City, Kansas).

One private institution deserves specific credit. MidAmerica Nazarene University’s Annual Security Report contains a full hazing framework — including sections titled “Stop Campus Hazing Policy and Programming,” “Students Hazing State Laws,” and a hazing prevention and awareness program for employees. MNU is the only Kansas institution we found that addresses hazing for both students and employees.

And one caution. Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence is federally operated by the Bureau of Indian Education and is tuition-free. We extracted and searched its entire Annual Security Report — 354,242 characters — and a search for “hazing” returns zero. The extraction is provably sound; the content is simply not there. But whether the Stop Campus Hazing Act binds Haskell at all is genuinely unresolved, because the Act attaches to Title IV federal student aid participation. We record that as a gap, not as a compliance failure, and it should not be read the way the same absence would be read at a Regents institution.

The nineteen community colleges

Kansas has nineteen community colleges, and the structural finding that governs the entire sector is this: social Greek life is largely absent, and the defining organization is Phi Theta Kappa — the international honor society for two-year colleges — which is confirmed present at all nineteen.

That does not make the sector irrelevant to hazing. Every one of these institutions sits behind the $500,000 Kansas Tort Claims Act cap, and honor societies, athletic teams and student organizations all have documented hazing histories nationally. Note also that an honor society is very unlikely to be a “social or fraternal organization” under the Kansas criminal statute, and an athletic team almost certainly is not.

Colleges include Kansas City Kansas Community College, Butler Community College (El Dorado), Cowley College (Arkansas City), Cloud County Community College (Concordia), Hutchinson Community College, Johnson County Community College (Overland Park), Barton Community College, Allen Community College, and eleven others across the state.

The technical colleges

Six technical colleges, and the sector’s defining organization is not Phi Theta Kappa — it is SkillsUSA and the trade-competition organizations. Flint Hills Technical College (Emporia) · WSU Tech (Wichita) · Manhattan Area Technical College · Salina Area Technical College · Fort Hays Tech Northwest · Fort Hays Tech North Central. All six are public and all six sit behind the Tort Claims Act cap.

Two categories nobody counts

Two classes of Kansas educational site sit outside every standard list, and we mention them because a hazing incident at one of them would be genuinely difficult to research:

Military installation education centers. Kansas has three — Fort Leavenworth, Fort Riley, and McConnell Air Force Base — hosting institutions from Iowa, North Dakota, Texas, Michigan, Florida and Missouri alongside Kansas ones. Institutions operating solely on federal property are statutorily exempt from Kansas registration and file their federal data in their home states, which means they appear on neither the Kansas state registry nor a Kansas federal data filter.
Correctional education. Donnelly College has operated an on-site associate degree program at Lansing Correctional Facility since 2001, and the University of Saint Mary has taught there since 1991, with residents earning bachelor’s degrees.

The sixty-two schools that publish nothing

This is the most important paragraph in this section, and we would like you to read it twice.

Only three of Kansas’s sixty-five institutions publish organizational conduct records: the University of Kansas, Wichita State, and Kansas State. The other sixty-two publish no organizational conduct history at all.

Every finding on this page — all eleven — comes from those three schools. That is not because hazing happens only at those three. It is because those three are the only places you can see it.

Some further limits on the record, stated plainly:

KU’s conduct record is published for seven years and no longer. Anything before that exists only in press archives and national-organization files.
Kansas Open Records Act responses on hazing are routinely and heavily redacted, with the description of the behavior that led to discipline frequently removed — which is the single most valuable field. The federally required transparency report is the better instrument, because it is required to describe the violation.
Transparency reporting across the seven public four-years is better than it looks, and we had it wrong twice. As of August 6, 2026: KU publishes findings (four) · Kansas State publishes · Fort Hays State publishes an affirmative zero · Emporia State publishes an affirmative zero · Pittsburg State publishes an affirmative zero · Wichita State has no distinctly labeled report, its RSO discipline page appearing to serve the function · and Washburn is the only one where we could not locate one at all. Five clearly publish. We previously recorded three of these as “not located,” and two of those three were our error. Both corrections are recorded below.
Every transparency report has the same structural blind spot: it covers organizations found responsible. Reports that produced no finding, and matters still under investigation, are excluded — so a blank report is not proof of a quiet campus. Pittsburg State is the one Kansas institution that has publicly committed to listing all hazing reports in its Annual Security Report regardless of outcome.
The first Clery Annual Security Reports containing hazing statistics are due October 1, 2026. That is the date this entire picture changes, and we will re-run every one of these checks then. See the dating note.

So here is the honest instruction. If your school is not KU, K-State, or Wichita State, the absence of a hazing finding tells you essentially nothing. Do not read it as reassurance. Go look for the transparency report yourself — here is exactly how — and if there is not one, that is itself worth asking about.

What hazing does to a body and a mind

You do not need to become a doctor. You need enough to recognize when something is wrong, enough to ask the right question in an emergency room, and enough to know which of these injuries do not show up for two days.

We have deliberately left out dosing, lab thresholds and treatment protocols. Those belong to your doctors, and a frightened person reading numbers out of context at three in the morning is not helped by them. What follows is what helps you recognize something, ask about it, and insist on it.

Two rules that run through every injury below

Rule one: the dangerous window is usually after everyone has gone to bed. Alcohol keeps being absorbed after the last drink. Muscle breakdown peaks a day or two later. Bleeding from a struck spleen can be delayed. Swelling inside a muscle builds over hours. Almost every death and permanent injury in this literature has a gap in it — a period where somebody looked fine, or looked merely drunk, and was left alone. “He seemed okay when we put him to bed” is the sentence that appears in these cases over and over.

Rule two: what gets written in the chart becomes the case. We are going to say this in several places because it is that important. A Kansas Supreme Court case turned on a single sentence a nineteen-year-old said to an emergency room physician. The medical record is not paperwork. It is the most durable evidence that will ever exist about what happened, and it is written by strangers in the first hour, based entirely on what they are told.

And one rule specific to Kansas

Throughout this section we note whether an injury clears the Kansas “great bodily harm” line. That is a comment on the criminal statute only. It is not a comment on whether an injury is real, serious, permanent, or compensable in a civil case. Psychological injuries fall entirely outside the Kansas criminal statute and are among the most disabling and best-documented harms in this entire body of medicine. Do not let a narrow criminal statute tell you what your injury is worth.

Alcohol: poisoning, aspiration, and brain injury

Produced by forced drinking, and made worse by sleep deprivation, cold exposure, and being left somewhere.

Why forced drinking is not the same as drinking

The mechanism that turns drinking into poisoning is rate, not simply total quantity. Three facts explain nearly every alcohol death in this literature:

Alcohol is absorbed from the small intestine, not the stomach. A large volume swallowed quickly sits in the stomach as a reservoir. When the stomach empties, a huge fraction of the dose reaches the absorbing surface essentially at once. This is why “a fifth in an hour” and “finish the handle” are structurally different from a night of drinking — the body never gets to meter the dose.
The same amount of alcohol delivered as liquor produces a substantially higher peak than the same amount delivered as beer. Hazing rituals overwhelmingly use spirits. “He only had a few drinks” is not the defense it sounds like.
An empty stomach makes it worse, and food deprivation is frequently built into the ritual rather than incidental to it.

The central fact, and the one that kills people: blood alcohol keeps rising after the last drink. Elimination is slow and fixed — the liver removes roughly the same amount per hour no matter how much is in the blood. Absorption is fast. So for a substantial period after someone stops drinking, the level in their blood is still climbing, and the largest single jump usually comes in the first fifteen minutes after they stop.

The person who is put to bed at their worst-looking moment is not at their worst moment yet.

A nineteen-year-old pledge also has none of the physiological adaptation a habitual drinker has. There is no tolerance, behavioral or metabolic, to fall back on.

What to watch for

Cannot be woken, or wakes only briefly and goes back under.
Breathing that is slow, shallow, or irregular &mdash or long pauses between breaths.
Skin that is cold, pale, clammy, or bluish, especially lips and fingertips.
Vomiting while unresponsive.
A seizure.
Low body temperature. Alcohol opens the blood vessels at the skin and disables shivering, so an intoxicated person outdoors or in an unheated basement loses heat far faster than a sober one.

Put them on their side and call 911. Coffee, cold showers and walking do nothing. There is no way to speed up elimination outside a hospital.

Aspiration — the mechanism people never see coming

Alcohol suppresses the reflexes that keep vomit out of the airway. When a deeply intoxicated person vomits, stomach contents can enter the lungs. That causes a chemical burn of the lung tissue, which can progress over hours into respiratory failure requiring a ventilator.

This is why an unconscious person is never left alone and never left on their back. It is also why aspiration is frequently the actual mechanism of death in cases the public calls “alcohol poisoning.”

Anoxic brain injury — surviving and not recovering

If breathing stops or becomes inadequate for long enough, brain tissue is injured by lack of oxygen. This is the outcome families are least prepared for, because the person survives. They may spend weeks in intensive care and emerge with permanent deficits in memory, attention, executive function, movement, or consciousness itself.

The severity is driven almost entirely by how long the brain went without adequate oxygen — which is to say, by how long everyone waited before calling. The delay is not a detail of the case. It is the injury.

The coding problem — read this if nothing else in this section

This is a small, technical, enormously consequential thing that almost nobody tells families.

Hospitals code alcohol emergencies in two very different ways. One family of codes describes a poisoning inflicted by another person. The other describes the patient’s own alcohol use or abuse. A hazing victim who was made to drink is routinely coded into the second category — because that is the ordinary case the emergency department sees twenty times a semester, and because nobody told them otherwise.

Both codings may be clinically defensible. Only one of them is factually complete. Expect anyone defending this case to lead with the chart and argue that the treating physicians themselves characterized it as ordinary intoxication.

What you do about it is simple and it costs nothing: when you speak to the treating clinicians, say plainly that the alcohol was required, or administered, or consumed under compulsion — and say who set the amount. You are not asking them to take sides. You are giving them the history, which is their job to record.

This is the same fact that decided Prime. A sentence in a chart, five years before anyone read it.

Kansas line: alcohol poisoning severe enough to cause respiratory arrest, coma, aspiration requiring ventilation, or anoxic brain injury is plainly above the “great bodily harm” threshold. An intoxication that resolves without complication is a much harder argument. And remember that in Kansas the theory is never that someone supplied the alcohol — it is that someone compelled its consumption.

Forced water: hyponatremia and brain swelling

Produced by forced fluid consumption, often disguised as hydration or a chaser requirement.

Forced water can kill, and it has. This is the injury people refuse to believe is possible, which is exactly why it is dangerous.

Drinking a large volume of water rapidly dilutes the sodium in the blood. Sodium is what holds water in the right compartments of the body. When it falls fast enough, water moves into cells — including brain cells. The skull does not expand. A swelling brain has nowhere to go, and pressure rises until brain tissue is forced downward through the base of the skull.

What to watch for

Headache, nausea, and vomiting after being made to drink large amounts of fluid.
Confusion, disorientation, strange behavior — which is routinely mistaken for drunkenness, and is the reason this is missed.
Weakness, unsteadiness, muscle cramps.
Seizure. Unresponsiveness. These are late signs.

If someone was made to drink water — even if there was no alcohol at all — say the words “forced water intake” and “check the sodium” at triage. It is a single blood test. It takes minutes. And the early picture is genuinely indistinguishable from being drunk, which means it will not be checked unless somebody says so.

The second injury, which comes from the treatment

There is a cruel corollary here that families should understand, because it explains outcomes that otherwise look inexplicable. Correcting the sodium too quickly can itself cause permanent brain injury — a distinct condition affecting the brainstem, which can leave a person with severe, lasting neurological deficits after the original crisis was survived.

This is a known hazard that clinicians manage carefully. We mention it because a family whose child came through the emergency and then deteriorated days later deserves to know that this is a recognized phenomenon with a name, and not something they imagined.

Kansas line: hyponatremia producing seizure, brain swelling, coma or permanent neurological deficit is clearly above the threshold. This is also one of the injuries where Kansas’s narrowness bites hardest — the ritual that causes it often involves no violence at all, so nothing about it looks like a crime until someone is dying.

Paddling and beating: what happens under the skin

Produced by paddling, beating, striking, and “the gauntlet.”

This is the cluster that matters most in Kansas, for a specific legal reason we explained above and will repeat here because it changes what you do: Kansas courts have held that “great bodily harm” does not include mere bruising. A beating that stops at contusion falls outside the Kansas criminal statute on its face.

So the Kansas question is never “how bad were the bruises.” It is “what did the beating cause underneath.” And the honest answer is that blunt force to the buttocks, back and thighs — the classic paddling target — produces a set of injuries that are severe, well-documented, and frequently missed on the night it happens.

Rhabdomyolysis — the signature hazing injury

Say it once out loud so it stops being frightening: rab-doe-my-OL-uh-sis. People call it “rhabdo.”

When muscle is destroyed — by being struck, by being crushed, by extreme exertion, by prolonged restraint — it spills its contents into the bloodstream. One of those contents is a large protein that the kidneys must filter. In quantity, it clogs and poisons them. The kidneys can fail. The blood chemistry also shifts in ways that can stop the heart.

It appears again and again in hazing cases, including in matters this firm has filed. In one of our Texas cases, the injuries pleaded expressly include hospitalization for rhabdomyolysis.

What to watch for:

Muscle pain far out of proportion to what happened — worse than ordinary soreness, and not improving.
Weakness — cannot stand, climb stairs, or raise the arms.
Dark urine — tea-colored, cola-colored, brown. This is the sign families remember, and it is the one that should send you to an emergency room immediately.
Swelling of the arms, thighs, or calves.
Confusion, nausea, and dramatically reduced urination.

Two things about rhabdo that mislead people, and both have cost lives:

It can look fine at first. Symptoms and blood markers often do not peak for a day or two. Someone who seems all right the morning after can be in serious trouble by the second day.
Severe pain is not required. The full classic set of symptoms appears in only a minority of patients. “He wasn’t complaining that much” has never ruled this out.

If you see dark urine after a beating, extreme exertion, or prolonged restraint — go to an emergency room and say the word “rhabdomyolysis” out loud. You are allowed to. It tells the triage nurse exactly which blood test to run.

Compartment syndrome — a surgical emergency with a clock on it

Muscles are wrapped in tough, unyielding sheaths. When a struck or crushed muscle swells inside that sheath, pressure rises until it cuts off the muscle’s own blood supply. The muscle then begins to die, and nerves along with it.

The hallmark is pain far greater than the injury should cause, often with tightness, numbness, tingling, or pain on stretching the limb. There is a limited window — measured in hours — in which surgery can save the muscle. Beyond it the damage is permanent: contracture, weakness, loss of function, sometimes amputation.

This is one of the injuries where a delay of a single night is the difference between a full recovery and a permanent disability.

Injuries to organs, which bleed on a delay

Spleen and liver. Strikes to the trunk can tear these organs. Bleeding can be delayed by hours or even days — the classic pattern is someone who seemed fine and then collapses. Pain in the upper-left abdomen or referred to the left shoulder after being struck is not “just a bruise.”
Bowel. A perforated intestine spills its contents into the abdomen, producing infection and, untreated, sepsis. The early hours can look like ordinary abdominal pain.
Kidneys. Strikes to the flank — a common paddling variant — can bruise or lacerate a kidney. Blood in the urine after being struck is never normal.
Testicles. Blunt force to the groin can rupture a testicle. There is a surgical window here too, and it is short. This injury is chronically under-reported because of embarrassment.

Head injury, including the one that does not need a second big hit

Blows to the head, falls, and being struck while intoxicated all produce brain injury. Bleeding between the skull and brain can accumulate over hours — someone can walk, talk and seem lucid, then deteriorate rapidly.

There is also a specific danger in rituals involving repeated impacts: a second head impact sustained before a first concussion has healed can produce catastrophic, rapid brain swelling. It is rare and it is disproportionately a young person’s injury. It is a reason the “he already got hit yesterday, he’s fine” reasoning is exactly backwards.

Infection, and the scars

Paddling injuries in unsanitary conditions can seed deep infection, including the aggressive soft-tissue infections that require emergency surgical removal of tissue. And blunt trauma severe enough to break skin heals into permanent scarring — which is legally significant in Kansas, because disfigurement is named in the statute independently of great bodily harm.

Kansas line: fractures, burns, scarring, organ injury, kidney failure, and surgery-requiring compartment syndrome are above the line. Bruising alone is expressly below it. Everything in this section exists to tell you that the bruise is rarely the whole injury, and that the labs that prove it are the ones nobody orders unless somebody asks.

Forced exercise: rhabdomyolysis, heat stroke, cardiac arrest

Produced by forced calisthenics and extreme physical exertion.

Forced exercise produces the same muscle destruction as a beating — everything in the rhabdo section above applies here — plus two mechanisms of its own that can kill a healthy nineteen-year-old in under an hour.

Exertional heat stroke

Heat stroke is not severe dehydration. It is a failure of the body’s ability to shed heat, and once core temperature passes a certain point, proteins throughout the body begin to break down. It damages the brain, liver, kidneys, muscle, and the blood’s ability to clot — simultaneously.

The defining sign is a change in mental state during or right after exertion in heat: confusion, aggression, stumbling, slurred speech, bizarre behavior, collapse. The person may not be sweating, and may not be. Waiting to see if they “walk it off” is how this becomes fatal.

Rapid cooling is the treatment, and minutes matter more than transport. Survivors can be left with permanent heat intolerance — a genuine, lasting disability in which the body never regains normal temperature regulation. For a young athlete, that can end a career.

Exertional sickling — the risk nobody knows they carry

Roughly one in twelve Black Americans, and a meaningful number of people of other backgrounds, carry sickle cell trait. It is not sickle cell disease. Most carriers live entire lives without symptoms and most do not know they have it.

Under extreme exertion — especially all-out, unrelenting exertion without rest — red cells can deform and block small blood vessels in working muscle. It comes on fast, often within the first several minutes of maximal effort, and the collapse is frequently mistaken for someone quitting or being dramatic.

Sickling collapse presents as weakness and inability to continue, not as the cramping-and-seizing picture people expect. Athletes have died being told to push through it.

We include this because forced calisthenics is the single most common hazing modality in the country, and because “until someone drops” is a ritual design that specifically finds the people who cannot survive it.

Sudden cardiac arrest

A small number of young people have undiagnosed heart conditions that make extreme exertion dangerous. Sudden collapse without warning during forced exercise is a cardiac arrest until proven otherwise. Start CPR and get a defibrillator. Survival falls with every minute.

Massive muscle breakdown also releases potassium into the blood, and enough potassium stops the heart. This is a mechanism by which someone can die after the exertion has ended and everyone thinks the danger has passed.

Kansas line: heat stroke with organ failure, kidney failure requiring dialysis, cardiac arrest, and permanent heat intolerance are all well above the threshold. Note the irony: forced calisthenics is most common in athletic and spirit organizations, which the Kansas criminal statute may not reach at all.

Restraint, wrapping, burial, and drowning

Produced by confinement, restraint, wrapping and burial, and by forced water immersion.

Positional and compressive asphyxia

This is the quietest killer on this page, and the least understood.

Breathing requires the chest and diaphragm to expand. A person who is taped, wrapped, held down, piled on, folded into a small space, or buried may be physically unable to expand their chest — even with a completely clear airway and no hand anywhere near their throat.

They do not thrash. They do not shout. There is nothing dramatic to watch. Someone slowly suffocating under restraint often goes quiet, and the quiet is misread as calming down, or falling asleep, or giving up on the joke. Intoxication and exhaustion make it faster and quieter.

If someone in any kind of restraint or confinement stops responding, free them immediately and call 911. Do not wait to see.

Strangulation

Pressure on the neck — by hand, by arm, by ligature — can cause unconsciousness in seconds and death in minutes, and it can also cause delayed death days later from injury to the blood vessels of the neck. Anyone who has been choked to the point of losing consciousness, or who has voice changes, difficulty swallowing, neck pain or petechiae afterward, needs to be evaluated. Kansas courts have expressly recognized choking someone to unconsciousness as great bodily harm.

Drowning, and cold water

Drowning does not look like drowning. It is quiet and it is fast — there is usually no splashing and no calling out, because a drowning person’s mouth is at water level and every breath is spent on air, not sound.

Sudden entry into cold water adds a separate mechanism: an involuntary gasp reflex in the first seconds that can pull water directly into the lungs, followed within minutes by loss of the ability to use the hands and arms. A strong swimmer can be unable to swim within a few minutes of cold immersion.

And a person can survive the water and deteriorate afterward as the lungs react over the following hours. Anyone pulled from water who required rescue should be evaluated, even if they are talking and seem fine.

The shared endpoint

All of these mechanisms converge on the same place: the brain without oxygen. The outcomes range from full recovery through permanent cognitive and physical impairment, to prolonged disorders of consciousness, to death by neurological criteria. The single biggest determinant is elapsed time. Which means, again, that the delay is the injury.

Kansas line: asphyxial injuries producing unconsciousness, anoxic brain injury, or death are unambiguously above the threshold, and choking to unconsciousness is expressly recognized.

Branding, burns, chemicals, and cold

Produced by branding and burning, chemical application, exposure, and electric shock.

Branding

Branding is a deliberate full-thickness burn — destruction of the entire depth of the skin, including the structures that would otherwise allow it to regenerate. It is permanent by design. That is the point of it.

The wound is a serious injury in its own right: it is prone to infection, it can require grafting, and it heals into thickened, raised, contracted scar — often keloid, which in some people grows well beyond the original wound and recurs after removal. Scar over a joint can restrict movement permanently.

Legally, this is one of the clearest cases in Kansas. The statute names disfigurement independently, and Kansas courts have expressly recognized both burns and scarring as great bodily harm.

And we would add something that is not medical. Permanent visible disfigurement is a distinct, separately compensable harm in a way people underestimate — it is carried into every job interview, every relationship, every summer, for the rest of a life. It is not cosmetic.

Chemical injury

Household and industrial products applied to skin, mucous membranes or genitals cause burns that continue to injure tissue as long as the substance remains in contact — which is why prolonged flushing with water matters more than anything else in the first minutes.

Chemical injury to the eye is a true emergency. Immediate, copious, prolonged irrigation — before transport, not after — is the single greatest determinant of whether vision is preserved. Alkaline substances, including many cleaning products, penetrate deeper and do more damage than acids.

Forced ingestion of caustic substances is covered separately below, because it produces a different and longer-lasting problem. See forced ingestion.

Hypothermia and frostbite

Being left outside, stripped, wet, or immersed — alone or intoxicated — is a documented hazing death mechanism, and Kansas has both the winters and the summers for it.

The cruel feature of hypothermia is that it removes the victim’s ability to recognize their own danger. Judgment fails, shivering eventually stops, and people have been found having removed their own clothing. Alcohol accelerates every part of this. Confusion, clumsiness, slurred speech and drowsiness in someone who has been cold are medical emergencies, not signs they are merely uncomfortable.

Frostbite destroys tissue outright and can cost fingers, toes, ears and nose — loss of a body part is permanent disfigurement in anyone’s reading of the statute.

Electrical injury

What matters is the path the current takes, not the visible mark. Current crossing the chest can stop the heart. Current traveling through a limb can destroy muscle deep along its route while leaving almost nothing to see on the surface — producing the same muscle-breakdown and kidney-failure cascade as a beating. Anyone shocked badly enough to be thrown, to lose consciousness, or to have felt current cross their body needs cardiac monitoring, regardless of how they look.

The earliest documented hazing death in Kansas, in 1902, was an electrocution.

Kansas line: burns, scarring, disfigurement and tissue loss are expressly recognized categories. This cluster is the strongest fit for the Kansas statute of anything on this page.

Sleep deprivation, and what it multiplies

Produced by enforced wakefulness — and present in more Kansas adjudicated findings than any other single act type.

Six of the eleven substantiated Kansas hazing findings involve sleep deprivation. It is the most common documented hazing conduct in this state, and it is the one most likely to be dismissed as trivial. It is not trivial.

What extended wakefulness actually does

Sustained sleep deprivation is not tiredness. It is a progressive neurological impairment. Attention fragments. Working memory degrades. Reaction time slows. Judgment and risk assessment deteriorate before the person notices anything is wrong — and the loss of self-assessment is itself one of the effects. People who are severely sleep deprived consistently rate their own performance as far better than it is.

At sufficient duration it produces microsleeps — brief lapses of consciousness the person does not know are happening.

The multiplier — why it belongs in every other section

Sleep deprivation does not add to the other hazing mechanisms. It multiplies them.

It deepens alcohol’s suppression of breathing, and makes an intoxicated person harder to rouse — so the “he’s just asleep” misreading becomes far more likely, and far more wrong.
It impairs the body’s response to heat and exertion.
It strips the victim of the ability to recognize their own deterioration and ask for help — which is precisely the capacity everyone downstream is relying on.
It degrades the memory of the event itself, which is why survivors often cannot give a clean chronological account afterward, and why they are then accused of inconsistency.

That last one deserves emphasis for anyone building a record. If a survivor’s account is fragmentary or out of order, that is consistent with what was done to them, not evidence against them.

Psychiatric decompensation

Extended sleep deprivation can precipitate genuine psychiatric emergencies — severe agitation, mania, paranoia, hallucinations, and psychosis — particularly in young people with an underlying vulnerability nobody knew about. These are real medical events requiring real treatment, not “acting weird from being tired.”

The injury that happens on the drive home

Being awake for extended periods impairs driving comparably to alcohol intoxication. Pledges are routinely made to drive — on errands, to pick people up, to drop-offs — while severely sleep deprived. A crash on that drive is a downstream hazing injury, and it should be investigated as one rather than written off as an ordinary accident.

Kansas line: here is the hard truth. Sleep deprivation alone almost certainly does not satisfy the Kansas criminal statute, no matter how long it went on, because it does not create a risk of great bodily harm, disfigurement or death in the way the statute contemplates. It is the clearest example of the gap between what Kansas universities adjudicate as hazing and what Kansas criminalizes. That has nothing to do with whether it is a real injury or whether it is compensable civilly.

Forced ingestion of things that are not food

Produced by forced ingestion of non-food and noxious substances. KU’s adjudicated finding against Delta Upsilon uses the phrase “ingest undesirable food concoctions.”

Caustic substances

Swallowed cleaning products, drain openers, and industrial chemicals burn the esophagus on the way down. The immediate injury is bad enough. The lasting one is scarring that contracts over weeks and months, narrowing the esophagus — which can require repeated procedures to stretch it open, sometimes for years, sometimes permanently.

Do not induce vomiting. Bringing a caustic substance back up burns everything a second time. Call Poison Help at 1-800-222-1222, or 911 if the person is in distress.

The injuries caused by the vomiting itself

Many of these rituals are designed to provoke vomiting. Forceful, repeated retching can tear the lining where the esophagus meets the stomach, causing bleeding — and, rarely but catastrophically, can rupture the esophagus outright. That is a surgical emergency with high mortality if it is not recognized quickly, and its presentation — severe chest pain after violent vomiting — is routinely mistaken for something else.

Severe chest, neck or upper abdominal pain after forced vomiting is an emergency.

The rest of the category

Nicotine — swallowed tobacco, dip, or pouches can cause serious poisoning surprisingly quickly, especially in someone who does not use nicotine.
Aspiration during forced feeding — material forced into a resisting or intoxicated person can enter the lungs directly, with the same consequences as alcohol-related aspiration.
Choking and obstruction — objects and large boluses swallowed under compulsion can obstruct the airway outright or lodge in the gut and perforate it.
Anaphylaxis — forcing someone to eat something they are allergic to can kill them in minutes. Allergies are frequently known to the group and treated as part of the joke. If that happened, say so; it goes directly to state of mind.
Concentrated capsaicin, spoiled food, animal products and bodily fluids — ranging from severe distress to serious infection.

Kansas line: esophageal rupture, stricture requiring long-term treatment, anaphylaxis, aspiration and perforation are above the threshold. Being made to eat something disgusting, without more, is not.

Sexual violence and forced nudity

Produced by sexual violence, forced nudity, and forced sexual acts.

We are going to handle this section differently, because most of what needs saying is not clinical.

If this is what happened, we want you to know it is not rare, and that you are not the only one. Sexual hazing includes penetration with objects, forced acts between pledges, forced nudity, and sexual humiliation staged for an audience. It happens to men. It happens in organizations that would never describe themselves as violent. And it is very often not named as sexual assault by the person it happened to — sometimes for years — because it was framed as a prank, a tradition, or something everyone went through.

The framing does not change what it was.

What matters medically, in the first days

Physical injury to the anorectal or genital area can be serious and can have permanent consequences, including damage to the muscles that control continence. These injuries are chronically under-reported and under-treated because of shame, and the long-term costs of not treating them are high.
Infection risk is real and time-sensitive. Preventive treatment after a possible exposure works best when started quickly — within hours to a small number of days, not weeks. This is the single most time-critical reason to be seen.
A forensic examination is available and it is your choice. In most places you can have evidence collected without deciding then and there whether to involve police. Asking about that option costs you nothing and preserves a door you can walk through later.

Two phone numbers

RAINN — 800-656-HOPE (800-656-4673), 24/7, confidential, and it will connect you to a local provider.
988 if you are in crisis.

Kansas line: penetrative injury, permanent functional damage, and disease transmission are above the criminal hazing threshold — and it is worth saying plainly that sexual assault is separately and far more seriously criminal in Kansas than hazing is. A sexual hazing case is not primarily a hazing case. Note also that the Kansas Tort Claims Act cap does not apply to claims of childhood sexual abuse — if the victim was a minor, the financial landscape is different.

The injuries with no bruise

Produced by psychological degradation, humiliation and isolation, servitude, and by every other act on this page.

This is the part people skip, and it is the part that lasts longest.

Hazing is not simply an injury. It is an injury delivered by people you chose, who you wanted to belong to, in a group you were proud to be joining. That combination has a name — betrayal trauma — and it does something distinct. It does not only hurt. It rearranges how a person decides who is safe.

Things survivors describe, that they usually think only they feel

“I should have said no.” Nearly universal. And federal law and every institutional policy quoted on this page expressly disagree with it.
Shame that outlives the injury. The body heals faster than this does.
Loyalty to the people who hurt them. This is not weakness or foolishness. It is what the process was engineered to produce.
Grief for the friendship they thought they were getting. Real, and rarely spoken out loud.
Not being believed, or being told to move on.
Retaliation — from the chapter, from mutual friends, sometimes from an entire campus. In Kansas this is documented, at the same chapter, eight years apart.

The recognized conditions

These are diagnosable, studied, treatable, and — in a civil case — provable:

Acute stress disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder. Intrusive memories, nightmares, hypervigilance, avoidance, and a nervous system that will not stand down.
Complex PTSD, which follows sustained, repeated, inescapable trauma — which is a fair description of a pledge semester. It adds persistent problems with emotional regulation, self-concept, and relationships.
Depression, and suicidality. This is the outcome we are most concerned about and the reason 988 appears at the top of this page.
Substance use that begins as a way to sleep or to stop thinking.
Social and generalized anxiety, including a specific and under-recognized avoidance of ever joining a group again — which quietly closes off careers, teams, and communities.
Moral injury — the damage done to people who were forced to participate in hazing others, or who watched and did not stop it. Coerced perpetrators are also injured people, and they are frequently the best witnesses in a case precisely because they have been carrying it.
Institutional betrayal — a distinct and measurable additional harm when the institution the person reported to failed them. Kansas has an adjudicated record of new members being urinated on, spat on and struck after coming forward to university officials.
Shame-based identity damage — not low mood, but a rewritten sense of who one is.

Academic derailment, which is a financial injury

Servitude and sleep deprivation wreck semesters. A dropped semester, a lost scholarship, a changed major, a delayed or abandoned degree — these translate into lifetime earnings, and there is an established, accepted method for calculating that loss. Families routinely do not think to mention it. It is often one of the largest components of a claim.

Signs that matter

Trouble sleeping · nightmares or flashbacks · panic · avoiding places, people, or campus · numbness or feeling far away from oneself · anger that arrives from nowhere · drinking or using to sleep or to stop thinking · withdrawing from people who love them · talking about being a burden · giving things away · sudden calm after a long low period.

Those last three are warning signs for suicide. If you see them, ask directly and stay. Call or text 988. Asking someone plainly whether they are thinking about killing themselves does not plant the idea. It is one of the most protective things one person can do for another.

It can get better, and that is not a platitude

Trauma treatment works. There are specific, well-studied therapies for exactly this. People who could not walk across their own campus have gone back, finished, graduated, and built lives. Not by getting over it — by getting real treatment from someone who knows this territory.

When looking for a therapist, the words to ask for are “trauma-informed” or “trauma-focused.” That single phrase will change the quality of care received.

One practical caution. A campus counseling center may be free and close — and it is also part of the institution that may bear responsibility for what happened. Ask two questions before you talk: “Is what I say here confidential?” and “Are you a mandatory reporter?” Counselors are usually confidential; RAs, coaches, advisors and many staff are not, and telling them can start a formal process before you are ready. Both answers are fine — you simply deserve to know which room you are in.

Kansas line: none of this is reached by the Kansas criminal hazing statute, at any severity. The statute covers bodily harm. That is a fact about a two-sentence 1986 law that was drafted to cover psychological harm and was vetoed — it is not a statement about whether these injuries are real or compensable. They are among the best-documented and most disabling harms in this entire field.

What it does to the family, and to the ones who watched

If you are a parent, a sibling, a partner, or a friend — you are also hurt. That is allowed, and it is not a distraction from the person you are trying to help.

The people who were there

Witnessing hazing — especially a death or a catastrophic injury — produces its own trauma, and it lands hardest on the people who tried to intervene and were overruled, or who did not intervene and have to live with it. Bystanders and coerced participants develop the same conditions as direct victims, and they get the least support of anyone, because nobody thinks of them as injured.

If you are that person: what you are feeling is a recognized injury, and the same treatment works.

Families after a death

Grief after a preventable death caused by other people is not ordinary grief. It carries rage, and a specific torment made of the details — the timeline, the delay, the hour when someone could have called and did not. Prolonged grief disorder is a recognized condition with real treatment. Needing that treatment is not a failure to grieve properly.

The Compassionate Friends — 877-969-0010 — is a national peer-support organization for families after the death of a child of any age, from any cause, with chapters in every state.

What a wrongful-death claim actually accounts for

We include this because families ask, and because being told nothing makes it worse. A wrongful-death claim is not one number. It is built from distinct components:

Medical and end-of-life expenses, including everything spent in the attempt to save them.
Funeral and burial costs.
The financial contribution the person would have made over a working life — calculated from education, trajectory and established economic method, not guessed at.
The loss itself — companionship, guidance, the relationship. Kansas limits what can be awarded for this category of loss, and a lawyer looking at your facts should tell you exactly how, early.
Conscious pain and suffering before death, where the evidence supports it.
Punitive damages, where conduct supports them — available against private organizations, and never available against a Kansas governmental entity.

Wrongful-death claims have their own deadlines, and they are not always the same as an injury claim’s. Read the clock section.

If you are the parent reading this at 3 a.m.

You are going to want to fix it, and you are going to be told to give them space. Both are right and they are hard to hold at once. Two things we have seen help:

Believe them out loud, more than once. Not “why didn’t you tell me.” The version that helps is closer to “I believe you, this was done to you, and you are not in trouble with me.”
Take over the logistics, not the decisions. Records, appointments, forms, phone calls, the timeline — those are things you can carry. Everything in the next section is something you can do for them without asking them to relive anything.

And get your own support. You cannot run this on empty for a year, and it is often a year.

What to do now

You do not need a lawyer to start. You need a record.

Evidence in these cases disappears fast — not usually by conspiracy, though that happens too, but because group chats auto-delete, bruises fade, phones get wiped, and memories blur. What you capture in the first days frequently cannot be recreated later, and in hazing cases it is often the whole thing.

Everything in this section is free, and a parent or a friend can do most of it without the injured person having to relive anything.

The first forty-eight hours

Get medical care, and say what actually happened. The medical record is the single most important document that will ever exist about this. Vague history produces a vague record. Say that the drinking was required. Say who set the amount. Say the injuries came from being struck, not from “working out.” This is not a small point — it decides how the event is classified in the chart, and the chart is what everyone reads later.
Photograph everything, with dates. Injuries daily as they change — bruises often look worse on days two through four, so do not stop after the first day. Also photograph the location, the objects, the clothing, and anything still on the floor.
Save the phone. Delete nothing. Screenshot GroupMe, Discord, Snapchat, Instagram, WhatsApp and text threads — including group chats you are still in. Then back the phone up. Most platforms will export your full account data on request, and every one of the major ones publishes instructions for doing it.
Write it down while it is fresh. Times, places, who was present, who said what, who else was hurt, who tried to stop it. Date every entry and keep adding as things come back. Memory after sleep deprivation returns in fragments and out of order — that is normal and expected, and it is a reason to write things down as they surface rather than waiting until you can tell it cleanly.
Keep every communication from the school or the organization — emails, letters, portal notices, voicemails. Note the date of every phone call and the name of everyone you spoke to. Institutional responses become evidence about what the institution knew and when.
Write down witnesses — names, numbers, and who saw which part. Include the people who were coerced into participating. They are frequently the best witnesses in the case, because they have been carrying it.
Keep every receipt and bill. Medical, travel, parking, prescriptions, lost work, lost tuition.

One more, and it costs nothing: write down how it was demanded. Who gave the instruction. What happened to people who tried to stop. Whether anyone was told they could leave. In Kansas, compulsion is the fact that separates a case that survives from a case that does not. Nobody will think to ask you for those details for months, and by then they are gone.

Records you can demand, and how

These are rights, not favors. You do not need a lawyer to exercise any of them.

Your own medical records

Federal law gives every patient the right to inspect and obtain a copy of their own medical records, with a defined response deadline and limits on what a provider may charge. Ask the hospital’s medical records or health information management department, in writing.

An adult child requests their own. A parent can be given access by having their adult child sign a written authorization naming them — and there are separate federal provisions covering personal representatives, including the executor of an estate. If a provider refuses, delays past the deadline, or overcharges, there is a federal complaint portal for exactly that.

Student conduct records

Federal student-privacy law gives a student the right to inspect and review their own education records — which includes student conduct files — with a hard deadline for the school to comply. Ask the registrar or the dean of students, in writing. The U.S. Department of Education publishes a plain-language guide written specifically for college students about these rights, and operates a complaint process if a school refuses.

Kansas Open Records Act — useful, with a documented limitation

At a public Kansas institution — the six Regents universities, Washburn, and the community and technical colleges — campus police reports and many institutional records may be obtainable through a Kansas Open Records Act request. That includes prior complaints about the same organization, which is often the most valuable thing a family can get.

But know this before you spend a month on it. Kansas open-records responses on hazing are routinely and heavily redacted, and the field most often removed is the description of the behavior that led to the discipline — which is the field you actually want. The federally required transparency report is the better instrument, because it is required to describe the violation.

Run both. Just do not let the open-records request be the thing you wait on.

If the school is private

Open-records law does not reach private colleges. The federal transparency report obligation does, for any institution receiving federal student aid — which is nearly all of them.

How to look up what your school already admitted

This is the single most useful free thing on this page, and almost no family knows it exists.

Since the Stop Campus Hazing Act, colleges receiving federal student aid must publish a Campus Hazing Transparency Report on a public website, listing organizations found responsible for hazing, updated at least twice a year. This is a document families used to need a lawsuit to obtain. Now it is a web page.

How to find it

Search the school’s site for “campus hazing transparency report.”
If that fails, check the student conduct office, the dean of students, and — this is the one people miss — the president’s or compliance office. Fort Hays State publishes its report under the Office of the President’s Compliance Office.
Also check the school’s Annual Security and Fire Safety Report. It is federally required, published every October 1, and every school must give a copy to anyone who asks. We recovered the verbatim text of the Kansas hazing statute out of one of these.
At KU, both reports are public and linked from the Office of Student Conduct & Community Standards. We have reproduced KU’s current entries in full on this page.

What the report must tell you

A compliant report gives you, for each organization found responsible:

The name of the student organization.
Whether alcohol or drugs were involved.
The date the incident occurred.
The date the investigation was initiated.
The date the investigation ended with a finding.
The date the organization was notified.
A description of the violation and the institution’s findings or rationale.
The sanctions imposed.

Read the dates as carefully as you read the conduct. In one KU entry, the gap between the conduct and the finding is thirteen months, six of which passed before anyone reported it at all. Those intervals tell you how long a process takes, which is information you need in order to plan around a deadline that is running the entire time.

Two limits, stated plainly

Reports do not include matters under investigation, or reports that did not result in a finding of responsibility. A blank report is not proof of a quiet campus.
Hazing statistics in the Annual Security Report begin with the reports published October 1, 2026. Before that date, the statistical picture simply does not exist. That date is why this page carries an as-of stamp.

The deadline, and why it is shorter against a public university

There is a clock, and nobody will remind you it is running.

What follows is the general shape of Kansas law, taken directly from the Kansas statutes. It is not advice about your case — how these provisions apply to specific facts is exactly the kind of question that needs a lawyer looking at your situation, and getting it wrong forfeits the claim regardless of how strong it was.

Two years is the general rule

Kansas gives two years for an action for injury to the rights of another not arising on contract, and two years for a wrongful death action. (K.S.A. 60-513(a)(4) and (a)(5).)

When the clock starts — and the ten-year wall

Kansas does not always start the clock on the day it happened. The statute provides that these causes of action do not accrue “until the act giving rise to the cause of action first causes substantial injury, or, if the fact of injury is not reasonably ascertainable until some time after the initial act, then the period of limitation shall not commence until the fact of injury becomes reasonably ascertainable to the injured party.”

That matters enormously in hazing, where psychological injury is frequently not identified for a long time and where survivors often do not connect what is happening to them with what was done to them.

But there is a hard outer wall. The same statute says that “in no event shall an action be commenced more than 10 years beyond the time of the act giving rise to the cause of action.” (K.S.A. 60-513(b).) Ten years is the end of the road, whatever the discovery date.

If the person hazed was under eighteen

This is the provision families most need and least often hear about, and it matters because both documented Kansas hazing deaths happened at high schools.

If the person entitled to bring the action was under eighteen when the cause of action accrued, Kansas allows the action to be brought within one year after the disability is removed — that is, roughly one year after turning eighteen — except that no such action may be commenced more than eight years after the act. (K.S.A. 60-515(a).)

So a fifteen-year-old hazed on a high school team does not lose the claim at seventeen. But the eight-year wall still applies, and it can arrive before the one-year window would.

Against a public institution, assume the time is much shorter

Claims against Kansas governmental entities — which includes every public university, community college and technical college in the state — run under the Kansas Tort Claims Act. Claims against governmental entities in Kansas commonly carry a formal written notice requirement that must be satisfied long before any lawsuit is filed, with its own separate and much shorter deadline and its own content requirements.

Miss the notice and the claim can be gone even though the two years has not run.

If a public school, a public college, or any government body is anywhere near your facts, treat the time as short and get advice immediately — from anyone, including a free legal aid line. Not necessarily us. This is the single most common way a good Kansas claim is lost.

One more Kansas number families should know before anyone quotes them a figure

Kansas law caps a specific category of wrongful-death damages. In any wrongful death action, damages “other than pecuniary loss sustained by an heir at law, cannot exceed in the aggregate the sum of $250,000 and costs.” (K.S.A. 60-1903(a).)

That is the cap on the non-economic side — the loss of the relationship itself. Economic losses are handled separately, and the verdict must be itemized by the jury to separate them. (K.S.A. 60-1903(c).)

And a detail worth knowing because it explains headlines that otherwise make no sense: the jury is not told about the cap. The statute directs that the court “shall not instruct the jury on the monetary limitation,” and if the verdict exceeds it, the court enters judgment at $250,000 for that category afterward. (K.S.A. 60-1903(b).) A family can hear a number in a courtroom that is not the number they receive.

This $250,000 cap is a different thing from the $500,000 Kansas Tort Claims Act cap. The Tort Claims Act cap is about who you are suing — a governmental entity. This one is about what kind of case it is — a wrongful death, against anyone. In a wrongful-death case against a public university, both apply.

Before you speak to any attorney — including us

We would rather you hire the right lawyer than hire us. Some of what follows works against our own interest, and we are including it anyway.

Ask these questions, of anyone

“Have you handled a hazing case before? Which ones? What happened?” Hazing is not a generic personal injury case. In Kansas it turns on entity structure, corporate records, and a specific set of decisions about coercion — and a lawyer who has never dealt with an unincorporated association will learn that on your time.
“Are you licensed in Kansas? If not, who is handling it with you, and what is their role?” Ask it plainly. Any honest firm will answer it plainly. Ours is answered below.
“What is your fee, exactly — and what happens to case expenses if we lose?” Contingency percentages vary, and expenses are a separate question from the fee. Get both in writing.
“Who will actually work on this — you, or somebody I have not met?”
“Will you tell me if you think I do not have a case?”

Two things not to do

Do not give a recorded statement to an insurer or an organization’s representative before you have talked to a lawyer. You are not obligated to, and it is not a neutral conversation.
Do not sign anything — a release, a settlement, a “resolution agreement,” a confidentiality clause — without having someone independent read it first. This includes documents from the university.

Where to get help that is not a law firm

A state bar lawyer referral service — regulator-run, neutral, and the alternative to advertising-driven lead generation. The Kansas Bar Association operates one.
VictimConnect — 1-855-4VICTIM (855-484-2846), phone and text, confidential, and it can route you to local legal and financial resources.
Crime victim compensation. Every state runs a program that reimburses crime-related expenses directly, independent of any lawsuit. It is under-used because almost nobody knows it exists.

What federal law gives you

The most useful thing to happen in this area in a generation happened quietly, and it happened in the last two years.

The Stop Campus Hazing Act

Signed December 23, 2024. It amended the Clery Act, and it changed what families are able to find out.

Colleges and universities receiving federal student aid must now:

Collect hazing data — which began July 1, 2025.
Publish a Campus Hazing Transparency Report on a public website, listing organizations found responsible, updated at least twice a year. How to find yours.
Include hazing statistics in the Annual Security Report — first appearing in the reports published October 1, 2026.
Run hazing prevention programming for students and employees.

The federal definition, and why it is so much broader than Kansas law

Federal law defines hazing as an intentional, knowing, or reckless act committed against another person “regardless of the willingness of such other person or persons to participate,” in the course of initiation into, affiliation with, or maintenance of membership in a student organization, that causes or creates a risk — above the risk ordinarily encountered in that activity — of physical or psychological injury.

Read against the Kansas criminal statute, four differences matter:

Consent. Federal law says expressly that willingness is irrelevant. Kansas says nothing at all.
Psychological injury. Federal law covers it. Kansas does not, at any severity.
Which organizations. Federal law reaches any student organization — athletic teams, bands, performance groups, residence hall communities, student-employee groups. Kansas reaches “social or fraternal organizations.”
What triggers it. Federal law reaches conduct that creates a risk of injury above the ordinary. Kansas requires a risk of great bodily harm, disfigurement or death.

This is why an organization can be found responsible for hazing on a federally required public report and face no criminal exposure in Kansas whatsoever. It is not a loophole anyone is exploiting. It is what happens when a 2024 federal standard sits on top of a 1986 state statute — one that Kansas came a single veto away from writing the modern way, thirty-eight years early.

And your school’s own policy is probably broader still

Do not stop at the statute. Institutional policy is frequently the strongest instrument available to you, because it is the one the school actually enforces:

KU reaches any organization operating under university sanction; presumes hazing is forced regardless of apparent willingness; and makes bystander apathy itself a violation.
Emporia State adopts the federal definition nearly verbatim and makes failing to report hazing an independent violation.
Fort Hays State carries the full federal definition including psychological harm, and publishes three separate reporting routes.

All three institutional policies reach conduct that Kansas criminal law does not. If you are deciding where to report, that difference is the practical reason the campus conduct process is often the faster and more productive route. It is also, in Kansas, essentially the only route that has ever produced a consequence.

Why this matters to you, personally

There is now a public, free, official record of hazing findings at most institutions in the country. You can look up what a school already knew, and when.

Notice what that does to the most common defense in these cases — that the institution had no idea. When a chapter has a published finding from a previous year, and a national organization disbanded it once before for the same conduct, and it is all on public web pages, “we had no way of knowing” becomes a much harder sentence to say.

That is a document families used to need litigation to obtain. Now it is a web page, and it is free, and it is yours.

Who we are

We put this last on purpose. If you got what you needed from everything above and you close this page now, that is a good outcome and we meant it when we said so at the top.

But you are entitled to know exactly who wrote this, what we do, where we are licensed, and what we have actually done — stated the same way we have stated everything else on this page.

The firm

The Manginello Law Firm, PLLC, which practices as Attorney911.
1177 West Loop South, Suite 1600, Houston, Texas 77027.
713-528-9070.
A small firm. We handle personal injury and wrongful death, and hazing is a defined part of our practice rather than a page we added.
Hazing cases are handled on a contingency fee — no fee unless there is a recovery — and the consultation costs nothing. Ask us the fee questions we told you to ask everyone. Ask about expenses separately from the fee.

The lawyers

Ralph P. Manginello — founding attorney. Licensed in Texas since November 6, 1998 (Bar No. 24007597), and also admitted in New York. Admitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. Juris Doctor, South Texas College of Law, Houston. Registered practice areas include personal injury litigation. Speaks Spanish.
Lupe E. Peña — licensed in Texas since 2012 (Bar No. 24084332). Signing attorney on the firm’s filed hazing petitions.

Our Kansas posture, stated plainly

We are a Texas firm. Neither of our attorneys is licensed in Kansas. We work with the top hazing lawyers in Kansas, and any Kansas matter is handled with Kansas counsel.

We are telling you that in the plainest sentence we can write, in a box, on our own page, because we told you three sections ago to ask every lawyer that exact question. It would be a strange page that gave you the question and then dodged the answer.

What that means practically: if you contact us about a Kansas matter, you are not being handed off to a stranger and forgotten. You are getting a firm that litigates hazing cases working alongside lawyers admitted in Kansas who know the Douglas County bench, the Kansas Tort Claims Act notice practice, and the judges. Ask us for the specifics of that arrangement before you sign anything. You should ask that of anyone.

And if the right answer for you is a Kansas firm with no involvement from us, we will tell you that. The Kansas Bar Association operates a lawyer referral service, and it is the neutral, regulator-run option.

What we have actually done

Every page like this claims experience. Here is ours, with the filings identified so you can check it. Every one of these is a Texas matter. We are not going to imply a Kansas track record we do not have.

These are our own pleadings. The allegations in them are allegations — unproven, untested, and not admitted by anyone. We have applied the same rule to our own cases that we applied to everyone else’s on this page.

Bermudez v. Pi Kappa Phi Fraternity, Inc.

Filed November 2025, Harris County, Texas.
Lead defendant Pi Kappa Phi Fraternity, Inc. — the national organization — and its Beta Nu Chapter at the University of Houston. Thirteen defendants.
Damages sought in excess of $10 million.
Independently reported across ten news outlets.

Note for Kansas readers: Pi Kappa Phi is the same national organization that won dismissal in Kansas in Hawley on a no-control theory, and whose KU chapter KU later removed for “a culture of hazing and illegal drug use.” Different chapter, different state, different case — but the no-control defense is not unfamiliar to us.

Wang v. Omega Phi Gamma

Alan Wang, plaintiff. District Court of Harris County, Texas. Petition file-stamped April 6, 2026.
Three defendants. Relief sought over $10,000,000.
Signed by Lupe Peña, with Ralph P. Manginello as co-counsel.
Independently corroborated by the University of Houston’s own Campus Hazing Transparency Report, which records a formal hazing finding against Omega Phi Gamma for Fall 2025, with all six charged violations found “In Violation,” and the chapter suspended through Fall 2030.

Thomson & Camp v. Phi Kappa Sigma

Cause No. 26CVDC-00084, 266th District Court, Erath County, Texas. Filed for record April 16, 2026.
Plaintiffs Charles Thomson and Damian Camp. Three defendants. Relief sought over $10,000,000.
Injuries pleaded as “severe psychological and physical injuries including hospitalization for rhabdomyolysis.” That is the injury we described at length in the injuries section, and it is why we described it at length.
Independently corroborated by Tarleton State University’s own Campus Hazing Transparency Report, which lists “Phi Kappa Sigma, Epsilon Alpha Chapter – Spring 2026” — and records no hazing findings for 2024–2025, making this the only such finding in that reporting window.

Two of those three cases were corroborated by the university’s own federally required transparency report before anything was proven in court. That is not a coincidence, and it is the practical reason we spent a whole section of this page teaching you how to find yours. It is the same instrument, available to you for free, right now.

About our reviews, honestly

The firm has a substantial public review record — several hundred independent reviews across Google, Avvo and other platforms, the large majority of them five-star.

None of them is a hazing case, and none of them is a Kansas case. They are from car wrecks, truck collisions, workplace injuries and the rest of a Houston personal injury practice. We are telling you that because a page that quoted a five-star average at you in a section about your child’s hazing injury would be doing something dishonest with numbers, and we have spent this entire page asking you to hold everyone to the opposite standard.

What we will not tell you

We will not tell you what your case is worth, that you have a case, or what will happen. Nobody who has not read your records can tell you those things, and anyone who does it on a first phone call is selling something.

Past results do not guarantee or predict a similar outcome in any other matter. Every case on this page — ours and everyone else’s — turned on its own facts, its own record, and in Kansas, on one specific fact that most of them did not have.

Questions families actually ask

Is hazing a crime in Kansas?

Yes, but narrowly. K.S.A. 21-5418 makes hazing a class B nonperson misdemeanor — a single grade, with no escalation for injury and no provision for death. It requires conduct that could reasonably be expected to result in great bodily harm, disfigurement or death, and it reaches only “social or fraternal organizations.” Most conduct that Kansas universities have formally adjudicated as hazing would likely not satisfy it.

Is hazing a felony in Kansas if someone dies?

Not under the hazing statute. Kansas has no death tier — a hazing that kills is graded identically to one that injures no one. Deaths and catastrophic injuries in Kansas are prosecuted, if at all, under other statutes: homicide, aggravated battery, involuntary manslaughter. For comparison, the same death in Michigan is a fifteen-year felony.

Can I sue a fraternity in Kansas?

Yes — but not as a “hazing” claim, and not always the chapter. Kansas recognizes no civil cause of action for hazing; these cases are brought as ordinary torts — negligence, intentional tort, assault and battery, premises liability, wrongful death. And an unincorporated chapter generally cannot be sued at all in Kansas. The question is which incorporated entity exists — house corporation, alumni corporation, national organization — and who the individuals are. Both plaintiffs who filed in Douglas County in 2026 did exactly that.

Can I sue the university?

A public one, yes — but behind a $500,000 aggregate cap per occurrence, with punitive damages unavailable. A private college has no such cap. Notably, in three Kansas fraternity actions across twenty-four years, no plaintiff pursued the public university — one sued KU and the Board of Regents and then dismissed them himself.

How long do I have?

Generally two years in Kansas for injury and for wrongful death, with a discovery rule that can delay the start and a ten-year outer limit. If the person was under eighteen, there is a separate provision — roughly one year after turning eighteen, capped at eight years from the act. And if a public institution is involved, assume much less time, because a formal written notice requirement runs long before any lawsuit and missing it can end the claim. Get advice early — from anyone.

No. Federal law says hazing counts “regardless of the willingness” to participate. KU’s own policy presumes hazing is forced regardless of apparent willingness. But be precise about what matters in Kansas: the only Kansas hazing decision turned on the absence of coercion. So the details of how it was demanded — who set the amount, what happened to people who refused, whether anyone was told they could stop — are the most important facts in the case. Write them down tonight.

Nobody was arrested. Does that mean nothing happened?

No. We could not locate a single criminal hazing prosecution under the Kansas statute anywhere in the state — ever. Not for any of the eleven substantiated findings. In Kansas, accountability runs through campus conduct systems, national organizations, and civil courts — not through criminal courts. The absence of an arrest is close to meaningless here.

The school found the chapter responsible. Does that mean we win?

No — but it is powerful. A university finding is adjudicated, made by the institution, published in a federally required document, and it establishes what the institution knew and when. It is not a court judgment and it does not decide a civil case. We keep findings and allegations in separate categories throughout this page for exactly that reason.

How do I find out whether this chapter has done this before?

Start with the Campus Hazing Transparency Report — free, public, and required to describe the violation. Then the school’s organizational conduct record if it publishes one (in Kansas, only KU, K-State and Wichita State do). Then the national organization’s own announcements, which in Kansas have repeatedly acted independently of universities. Then the county court docket, which is the only net that finds cases the press never covered.

What if it happened at a private college?

The Kansas Tort Claims Act cap does not apply — no $500,000 ceiling, no punitive-damages bar. Kansas open-records law does not reach them, but the federal transparency report obligation does, for any school receiving federal student aid.

What if the chapter is not recognized by the university?

This is a live issue in Kansas. A group of KU fraternities disaffiliated from the Interfraternity Council in 2023 and operate under their own council, outside university recognition, in houses represented by a landlords’ league. A disaffiliated chapter is still a legal entity or set of individuals, and still suable on the same analysis. What changes is how much the university adjudicates and discloses. Ask before your child pledges anywhere.

What if my child was under eighteen — a high school team or club?

Kansas’s criminal hazing statute reaches “social or fraternal organizations,” and on its face it does not obviously reach a high school athletic team. But the civil claim is a separate question, the limitations provision for minors is different and more generous, and both documented Kansas hazing deaths happened at high schools. Do not assume this is smaller because the victim was younger.

What if it was sexual?

Then it is not primarily a hazing case. Sexual assault is separately and far more seriously criminal in Kansas than hazing is, there are time-sensitive medical steps in the first hours, and the Tort Claims Act cap does not apply to claims of childhood sexual abuse. RAINN, 800-656-HOPE, 24/7, will connect you to a local provider without requiring you to decide anything else.

What happens if we report to the school?

An investigation opens, and it can take months — one KU matter ran thirteen months from conduct to finding. Your legal deadline is running that entire time, and a school process does not pause it. Report if you want to, and it is often the most productive route in Kansas — but do not treat it as a substitute for getting advice about the clock.

What if they retaliate?

Retaliation against people who report is the single most documented pattern in the Kansas record. The identical conduct — being urinated on, spat on and struck for reporting — recurred at the same KU chapter eight years apart, after a complete membership turnover and a re-chartering. It is a separate wrong, it is pleaded as its own count in the litigation currently pending in Douglas County, and it should be documented the moment it starts.

What does it cost to talk to a lawyer?

Hazing cases are typically handled on contingency — a percentage of any recovery, no fee if there is none. Case expenses are a separate question from the fee, and you should ask specifically what happens to them if the case is lost. Get both in writing. The full list of questions to ask any firm is here.

My child does not want to do anything. Should I push?

No — but preserve everything anyway. Photographs, screenshots, records, a written timeline, receipts. None of that commits anyone to anything, and it is the part that becomes impossible later. People change their minds about pursuing this, often more than a year out. The evidence does not wait for them. And take over the logistics rather than the decisions — that is the version of help that works.

Has anyone actually died from hazing at a Kansas university?

One documented case appears in the national hazing-deaths database: Jason Wren, nineteen, University of Kansas, 2009, blood alcohol .362, fewer than two weeks living in the fraternity house. The wrongful-death complaint alleged coerced “man up” drinking challenges. The case settled confidentially and was never adjudicated as hazing. Two further Kansas hazing deaths are recorded, both at high schools, in 1902 and 1957. A 2026 death at a K-State fraternity house was affirmatively determined by police not to be hazing, and must not be counted as one.

The necessary disclaimer, in plain language

This page is information, not legal advice and not medical advice. Reading it does not create an attorney-client relationship with us, and sending us a message does not either — that relationship begins only when we and you both sign a written agreement.

Laws change, university records are updated, and every situation turns on its own facts. Nothing here is a promise or a prediction about any case, including yours. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome.

If someone is in danger right now, stop reading and call 911. Back to the top.