Federal Antihazing Law Takes Shape on Campuses

After families of hazing victims spent years lobbying Congress to pass federal antihazing legislation, the Stop Campus Hazing Act became law last December.

The new law mandates that any institution receiving Title IV funding must include hazing incidents in its annual security reports, which are sent to the federal government. It also requires colleges and universities to implement hazing-prevention programs and to publish online both their hazing policies and a Campus Hazing Transparency Report.

While some aspects of the law, including a requirement to start collecting basic hazing statistics and develop hazing-prevention programming, have already taken effect, the requirement to begin collecting data for the transparency report starts today. From now on, colleges will be required to produce a centralized log of student organizations that have a history of hazing incidents in an effort to raise awareness among those interested in joining.

The transparency report is designed to correct the difficulties parents and students have experienced in identifying scattered or obscured information about an organization’s history of hazing, said S. Daniel Carter, a campus safety consultant and longtime advocate for federal antihazing legislation.

“The federal government is saying that, for the first time, every institution of higher education has to prohibit hazing and do so consistently, and do so with a policy that can be subject to scrutiny by the Department of Education and consumers,” he said. “That is a major turning point.”

Inside Higher Ed spoke with Carter about what changes are ahead for higher education institutions as a result of the law’s implementation this year.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: The law requires institutions to adopt a uniform definition of hazing. What are the requirements?

A: Every institution across the country has to expressly define hazing and prohibit it no later than July 1.

For the first time, institutions have to adopt a uniform definition of hazing for their institution, and they have to apply it to all student organizations. That will ensure consistent antihazing enforcement across the board.

S. Daniel Carter

It’s an inclusive definition that essentially says, if you are attempting to join or maintain your membership in an organization, and you are asked or forced to engage in any activity that’s criminal, induces someone else to do something criminal or involves physiological or psychological harm that goes beyond a reasonable risk, that’s hazing.

For example, if an organization asks an athlete to run a certain distance or a cadet to climb a wall, those are well-established physical criteria. So unless it’s taken to an extreme, that’s not going to be considered hazing, and this gives us that guidance.

Institutions also can’t say that they cover hazing under another prohibition, such as underage drinking, sexual assault, physical harm or harm to another person.

That really is a significant change from how things were before. Institutions have had to go back and make sure that they have that type of policy in place in order to comply with the Campus Hazing Transparency Report requirement.

Q: The law requires colleges to publish data for their Campus Hazing Transparency Report by Dec. 23. What has to be included in the report and how is it expected to help stop hazing?

A: The Campus Hazing Transparency Report will document every incident in which an institution finds a student organization violated their hazing policy. That information has to be published on a prominent location on the institution’s website.

It also adds information about specific organizations that have a history of hazing so that people can make informed decisions. It’s hoped that this will pressure organizations to not engage in hazing, because they will be held accountable by consumers, such as students and their parents.

The report has to be maintained on the website for five years so that if there is a history, a culture in a particular organization that engages in hazing, that can be documented. It will also document if an organization has been derecognized but is still operating on the periphery of campus, so that if someone is considering joining one of those derecognized organizations, there will still be that notification on that website.

However, the Department of Education only looks at these disclosures if there’s an issue.

Q: What information has to be reported directly to the federal government?

A: The only thing that the act requires to be submitted to the federal government is the annual crime statistics. These are single data points. For example, a state university may report that it had a total of seven incidents of hazing in 2025, noting how many were on campus and how many were off campus.

A full year of hazing statistics has to be collected before anything is submitted to the federal government. It is a statutory obligation for the education secretary to make those statistics available to the public. For the last 25 years, the Education Department has done so by posting campus crime statistics [mandated by the Clery Act of 1990, the federal campus safety law that up until this year did not require reporting on hazing] on a public website, where people can pull up crime statistics for any institution that participated in the Title IV student aid programs.

Q: Do you expect any of the sweeping changes the Trump administration is making to the Department of Education to affect the efficacy of this law?

A: I don’t see anything substantively changing the meaning of the law, which is one of the things about the way this law was designed. A lot of the things that would typically be dealt with by the department through regulation or subregulatory guidance were actually built into the law.

In terms of what the law actually does, Congress was very specific about the things that have to occur. They set the definitions, they set the standards for establishing the reporting procedures. There’s not really room for any administration or any departments to really change how the Stop Campus Hazing Act works.

Q: When school starts back in the fall, what types of changes might students, faculty and administrators notice related to the implementation of the federal antihazing law?

A: A large part of that is going to depend upon what level of prevention and awareness programs related to hazing have already been implemented at each institution, because that’s the thing that’s going to reach most of the members of the campus population. An institution may have been doing programming for Greek life or their student athletes. But under the law, there has to be campuswide prevention programs. That’s significant because they have to reach everyone—students, faculty and staff.

They may also start to see timely warnings for hazing, because hazing is now a clear statistic, and it is subject to the timely warning requirement, which [is] triggered when crimes reported to a campus security authority or local law enforcement pose a serious or ongoing threat to the campus. That has not been the case before.

The other thing students will definitely start to see, particularly if they’re a part of a student organization or student organization’s leadership, is a consistent standard of conduct for hazing violations. Institutions that already had a consistent, significant standard of conduct relating to hazing probably won’t see too much of a difference. But for institutions that have had a patchwork of policies or other ways of approaching it, their students are going to see a significant difference because there’s going to be a consistent hazing policy across the board.