After the death of a peer, members of the fraternity Tau Kappa Epsilon say it’s time to talk about the university’s party culture — but they aren’t optimistic of change

By Alissa Barthel and Alex Wittenberg

Many people in the Greek community already suspected 20-year-old Mitchell Hoenig’s death in February was due to drugs and alcohol, a fact that was confirmed this week in the Minnesota Daily.

But members of the fraternity Tau Kappa Epsilon (TKE) have been concerned for weeks that Hoenig’s death after a night of routine partying was largely dismissed as a “one-off” and a single case of recklessness instead of what they say it actually is: an example of what can too-easily happen to even the brightest student amid a culture of alcohol use on campus.

What should have happened — and typically doesn’t, they say — is a real conversation about that culture so others can understand the risks.

“I think that was a very easy incident to view as a one-off incident when it’s not,” said Nathan Henderson, a senior in TKE, who spoke to AccessU: Addiction with several of his fraternity members in a group session several days before the news broke about the cause of death. Henderson and others were also contacted after that news to see if they wanted to offer further comment. Henderson declined.

The Daily reported Hoenig, a junior, died on Sunday, Feb. 25, of complications from alcohol poisoning after a night of partying that began the previous Thursday evening with official sorority events and ended early the next morning in a Dinkytown apartment where an ambulance transported him to Hennepin County Medical Center.

The danger of seeing such an incident as a “one-off” is that it becomes disconnected from the experience of other students, making them feel as if that couldn’t happen to them, Jake Schaper, a TKE sophomore, said.

“There’s a sense and an attitude … of invincibility: ‘It’s never going to happen to me,’ you know,” he said. “I don’t know that any accident will ever change that entirely.”

Changing that may not happen, but members agreed talking about such incidents can help people process their feelings about a tragedy that occurs within their midst. It can also raise awareness and possibly prevent another tragedy.

Yet while members of TKE said they met as a fraternity to share their thoughts and feelings after Hoenig’s death, they did not see a unified response to the incident across the Greek community — despite many rumors about what had happened to him. Individual fraternities held meetings to discuss the incident, but the subject was quickly dropped after that, they said.

After his death, a memorial was held at the university for Hoenig, who made the Dean’s List in the College of Biological Sciences and was a member of the Phi Gamma Delta (FIJI) fraternity. But the students saw no further comments about the death as a warning about the dangers of binge drinking.

Instead, university officials expressed only disappointment this week that the Minnesota Daily decided to publish the article about the cause of Hoenig’s death.

“That’s not the coolest thing,” Logan Lanphere, a TKE junior, said of the university’s opposition to the Daily publishing the news.

Lanphere said the strong acceptance of binge drinking at the university might be reinforced by how rarely students die from it, even though alcohol-related student deaths have occurred in 2015 and 2014. But death doesn’t have to be the wakeup call for students at risk from alcohol use, he said.

“We also need to recognize that this is similar to when you wake up and you don’t know what happened that night,” Lanphere said. “We need to not separate those two things just because the end result is different and you ended up safe.”

Lio Beaini, a sophomore in TKE, agreed. “Just because death isn’t the end result doesn’t mean the action itself is not bad,” he said.

But Beaini said changing larger cultural attitudes toward alcohol at the university is too ambitious a goal, requiring “everybody to buy in as a community and throw some enormous amount of support for it,” he said. “An enormous climate change is not realistic in my opinion.”