University of Arizona Suspends All Fraternity Activities Amid Hazing and Assault Investigations

TUCSON, Ariz. — The University of Arizona didn’t suspend one fraternity, or five. It suspended all of them. In a sweeping move announced this week, the school placed every one of its 21 Interfraternity Council chapters on interim activities suspension — barring all fraternities from hosting or attending social events — after opening investigations into nearly half of the chapters on campus.

The scale is what makes this different from the usual single-chapter suspension. Nine fraternities are either under active investigation or facing sanctions, according to the Arizona Republic — nearly half of the 21 chapters in the Interfraternity Council, the governing body for fraternities at UA. Five face active investigations: Delta Chi, Delta Kappa Epsilon, Sigma Tau Gamma, Zeta Beta Tau and Zeta Psi. The allegations include physical assault, drug and alcohol use, hazing and creating an unsafe environment. Some have been referred for criminal investigation.

Dean of Students Chrissy Lieberman laid out the reasoning in an Oct. 5 letter to the fraternity and sorority community, calling the number and severity of the investigations “egregious.” “The Dean of Students is at capacity for the number of organizational cases our staff can reasonably investigate at one time,” she wrote, adding that each investigation involves a fraternity. The investigations were all launched within the last eight days, and all five chapters under investigation were already under some level of interim suspension as of Oct. 5.

The freeze itself is total: no hosting, no attending, no social events of any kind. Chapters are limited strictly to business meetings. To get back to normal, each chapter’s adviser must attend one of three mandatory meetings with the dean, scheduled from Oct. 6 through Oct. 12. Fraternities that were in good standing beforehand will have the suspension lifted once their adviser attends. The Dean of Students Office is conducting the investigations alongside the University of Arizona Police Department.

The ugliest allegations center on Sigma Tau Gamma. According to a disciplinary letter from university president Suresh Garimella described in local reporting, new members of the chapter were subjected to hazing that included being forced to drink large amounts of alcohol and swallow live goldfish — along with screaming, degradation and threats from active members. The university placed the chapter on activities suspension, which forbids hosting, attending, participating in or sponsoring any organizational activities until the case is resolved. The university said only club business meetings are allowed during the suspension, and it was not immediately clear how long the Sigma Tau Gamma suspension will span.

None of this arrived out of nowhere. On Aug. 27, Garimella met with fraternity council presidents to discuss behavior reported last semester that had already resulted in several fraternities being placed on suspension — telling chapter leaders they would be held accountable for the men in their chapters, according to Lieberman’s letter. And earlier this year, five chapters faced sanctions that included fines and four probations running through May 2027.

Students interviewed by FOX 10 were split on the freeze. One described it as a sensible precaution — noting the timing, right after family weekend — while the university sorts through the investigations over the next couple of weeks. Another said it should have happened long ago, pointing to a long string of reports of Greek life being dangerous, especially toward women. Others called it disappointing but predictable — “it’s kind of expected with fraternities and just the news nowadays,” one student said — and described Greek life as having grown dangerous and unruly, no longer aligned with the university’s values. But several also defended the idea underneath it all: the networking, the connections, the community for students arriving from out of state — arguing that the current form of Greek life needs to be reevaluated and reconstructed, not simply shut down.

The freeze lands in the middle of a national reckoning over fraternity hazing that has been building for years — high-profile cases, criminal charges and campus crackdowns that have put the entire Greek-life model under scrutiny. Arizona’s move is among the broadest: not a single chapter punished, but an entire system paused until the investigations catch up.

What happens next is procedural but telling: the adviser meetings run Oct. 6 through Oct. 12, and chapters in good standing should start coming off the suspension as their advisers check in. The harder questions — the criminal referrals, the fate of the five chapters under active investigation — will take longer. For now, the message from Tucson is unmistakable: the university has decided it can’t police this chapter by chapter anymore. In other Arizona news, the state attorney general is suing Express Scripts and Optum over the opioid crisis.