Student Deaths Spark Debate Over Hazing at Portugal’s Universities
By RAPHAEL MINDER, March 18, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/19/world/europe/student-deaths-spark-debate-over-hazing-at-portugals-universities.html?hpw&rref=education&_r=2
Until two decades ago, “hazing in Lisbon simply didn’t exist,” said José Miguel Caldas de Almeida, a professor of psychiatry and former dean of the medicine faculty of Nova University, a state establishment. “Many of our universities, especially private ones, are of bad quality, so people are desperately trying to recreate the feeling that studying there is something special,” he said.
What he witnessed as a university dean, he added, was “more violent than the hazing that I saw in the army in Africa,” while serving there as a military doctor during Portugal’s colonial wars.

Diana Antunes, who is studying music in Lisbon after attending university in the city of Aveiro, said the drownings at Meco Beach “brought to the surface a real problem, which is that newer universities pretend they can be like Coimbra and use praxes to create an identity rather than focus on raising education.”

While studying in Aveiro, Ms. Antunes said, she experienced the pressure herself when she refused to join a hazing ritual that required simulating sexual intercourse, as well as licking yogurt from a boy’s lap. Her mother complained to the university, but no action was taken.
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“We want to find out the truth, but not eliminate the praxes, because they’ve also made many students happy, including our son Pedro,” his mother, Maria Fátima Negrão, said.