All undergraduate and graduate students, excluding first-years, must complete a mandatory online hazing prevention training by Feb. 23, or have their registration placed on hold.
On Feb. 5, Jessica Edonick, dean of students, sent out the “StandUp to Hazing!” training to students, and while administrators said it serves as a beneficial measure for campus life, some students expressed disappointment with its design and implementation.
Last semester, Trinity updated their hazing policy in compliance with the Biden administration’s Stop Campus Hazing Act. The 20-minute training originally applied only to first-year students in the fall of 2025. Now, Trinity requires sophomores, juniors, seniors and graduate students to follow suit.
According to Edonick, “StandUp to Hazing!” equips participants with critical knowledge on how to prevent hazing, teaching practical tools to recognize warning signs, take effective action and create positive group cultures on campus.
“The goal of this training is to reinforce or bring to light conversations that students are already having about how to treat each other respectfully and responsibly,” Edonick said.
Yet for students such as JP Palmer, senior earth and environmental geosciences major, the training felt ineffective. Palmer, the fraternity risk management and judicial co-chair for Greek Council, oversees safety within fraternity and sorority life. For Palmer, the hazing training sparked confusion and surprise for members of Greek Council.
It seemed to appear “out of the blue,” he said, as the university did not notify council members in advance. It left them wondering if the training extended to all students, including those on the executive board of Greek Council.
As for his personal experience completing the program, Palmer found the training lacked credibility, citing its use of AI-generated photos.
“I was quite disappointed, not necessarily in the material, but in the way it was presented,” Palmer said. “There is a clearly AI-generated photo of a young man, … which I think severely undermines the entire purpose of any sort of training like this.”
As someone who is anti-generative AI, Palmer found the training to be “blatantly disrespectful and infantilizing” to Trinity students. After completing the program, Palmer said the training did not have a positive impact and felt like a chore to participants.
“There is a chance that a student who is unaware of how nuanced hazing can truly be realizes ‘I might be a victim of hazing and not even realize it,’” Palmer said. “But I foresee, overwhelmingly, that most students would be like, ‘Why the heck am I doing this? Half of this is AI. It is a complete waste of my time.’”
Edonick offered a different perspective. She said that the Stop Campus Hazing Act gave Trinity an opportunity to step back, review policies and expand upon its prior work collaborating with student leaders on hazing prevention. This work, including the training, has allowed Trinity to expand the scope of hazing education to more groups on campus, Edonick said.
Jarvis Clark, director of student engagement and development, is taking charge of initiatives following the hazing training. Clark has worked in risk education for 15 years, leading campus efforts at various universities to intervene in years of unchecked hazing.
The training spreads awareness of power dynamics, active bystanders and unchecked abuses of power that can arise in any organization with hierarchy or structure, Clark said. Hazing education aims to highlight that hazing can exist on a spectrum in which forced alcohol consumption, humiliation and physical abuse take place, Clark said.
“We have to work together as an entire community to be able to shift, change or just make people aware of the type of culture that we want students to experience,” Clark said. “We all have to work together to make sure we can get the students what they need because they are the reason why we are here.”
*This article was updated on Feb. 19, 2026.
