Introduction
One cold February day in my sophomore year, I was working on homework when I got the campus announcements email. Normally, I take one look at the notification and ignore it completely. But something caught my eye. There was an announcement for a $2,000 scholarship called the SIASEFI scholarship. Intrigued, I looked at the requirements. The scholarship was open to anyone who applied, and the closest it had to an essay question was “What do you know about SIASEFI?” Being the studious history major that I am, I decided the best course of action was to make an appointment at the UWSP archives and do a bit of research. Little did I know the rabbit hole I was about to fall down.
What Does SIASEFI Mean?
After hours spent in the archives researching SIASEFI, I can confidently tell you that the word SIASEFI means… I actually can’t tell you what it means, and that may be the point. In the 1955 Iris yearbook, SIASEFI made its first appearance as an organization. In that appearance, the student organization made a joke about its name.
(Iris, 1955)
So, can you find the meaning of SIASEFI in the middle of our new library? Is it an inside joke lost to time? Or is it just a word of no meaning made up by a club? I’ll leave that to you to decide.
What Is SIASEFI?
While I can’t tell you what SIASEFI means, I can tell you what it was. SIASEFI was a non-Greek life fraternity that was officially recognized by UWSP in 1955 (Iris, 1955). The Sefis saw themselves as propagators of school spirit and providers of “goodly fellowship” for those who made it past pledge week (The Critique, 1955). Sefis also saw themselves as the “merry pranksters” of UWSP (SIASEFI reunion, 2003). Outside student response to SIASEFI was much less favorable. Throughout the frat’s lifespan, they were known by outsiders for their crude/vulgar humor and a lot of drinking.
The main way SIASEFI displayed their humor (and fundraised) was through their club-made publication, The ‘Disappointer’. The Disappointer was essentially a newsletter for the frat, but the publication was also filled with a lot of insensitive jokes that would punch down on women and minority groups on campus. This led to groups such as the Black Student Coalition and AIRO writing a response to SIASEFI in the Pointer.
(Pointer, 1972)
Along with crude humor, the frat was also seen as a drinking organization from the beginning. In a defense piece made to the 1955 edition of the Critique (a student-run newspaper dedicated to free speech), a SIASEFI member had this to say
(Critique, 1955)
The author tried to turn the PR around for the organization, but this idea would stay with the frat for most of its tenure on campus and would eventually be the reason the frat is no longer on campus today.
Why Is SIASEFI No Longer On Campus?
On the morning of October 18, 1975, David Hoffman was found dead in a downtown Stevens Point apartment. His blood alcohol level was at .421 ,for reference .31 is equal to surgical amnesia (Toledo University). David Hoffman was a senior who was about to graduate in Forestry and Wildlife Management. In the weeks following, more facts came to the forefront. David Hoffman was the only pledge for the SIASEFI organization that semester. The night before his death, David went through the SIASEFI initiation rite known as the death march. The death march was an intense bar crawl. He was last confirmed alive at 3 AM in one of the Sefis apartments.(Pointer, 1975)
The aftermath of Hoffman’s death was swift; the group was given the maximum $200 fine (~ $1400 today) and a few months later, Dreyfus (the chancellor at the time) took an administrative stand and took away Siasefi’s recognition as a student organization for three years. This meant SIASEFI could no longer apply for university money. (Pointer, 1976)
The frat would continue, but nowhere near as big or prolific as it once was. There would be continued support for its then two-year-old scholarship fund, and the frat still showed up to homecoming for school spirit. But with its numbers dwindling, the frat eventually fizzled out around the early 2000’s (UWSP news release, 2003)
(Pointer,1975)
Why It Matters
I didn’t end up getting the scholarship. What I got instead was a fascinating look into a contradictorily troublesome organization that called UWSP home. Siasefi pushed that they wanted to create a “goodly fellowship” where members can enjoy the bond of brotherhood and the joy of school spirit. But they did so often by putting others down or disrupting the public in unexpected and often obscene ways. Often, their pledge week included the pledges doing ridiculous things, such as skating through the halls of the science building. But it has been shown that hazing in this way can build a bond to the group at large and help in the fraternity’s goal of “goodly fellowship” (McCreary and Schutts, 2019). It’s a shame, then, that the hazing would lead to the death of David Hoffman.
UWSP currently has an initiative related to protecting students from these kinds of harmful hazing practices. The story of SIASEFI can be used as a way to show, either intentional or not, that hazing practices are harmful and should not be done.
Primary Sources
Champ , Paul. “Sefis Defended .” The Pointer . February 27, 1976, sec. More Letters .
Hutter , I. R. “Why The Hard Feelings? .” The Critique . 1955.
Iris. Stevens Point Yearbook. Pg. 113. 1955
Jeffie the Sefi. The Disappointer. reunion pamphlet. Stevens Point , WI : SIASEFI , 2003.
Litterski, Pete. “‘Sefis’ Found Guilty of Hazing .” The Pointer . November 7, 1975.
Marie , Dave. “UWSP Not Racist? .” The Pointer . May 5, 1972.
Yerke , Gilbert. “Siasefi Organization Loses Recognition .” The Pointer . February 20, 1976.
Secondary sources
McCreary, Gentry R., and Joshua W. Schutts. “Why Hazing? Measuring the Motivational Mechanisms of Newcomer Induction in College Fraternities.” Journal of Cognition & Culture 19, no. 3/4 (2019): 343–65. https://doi.org/10.1163/15685373-12340063.
“University Counseling Center.” The University of Toledo. Accessed May 12, 2026. https://www.utoledo.edu/studentaffairs/counseling/selfhelp/substanceuse/bac.html.
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