Wanna go from a Nubian-mother-earth-goddess to an unappreciative beeyotch in a nanosecond? Decline a salty street harasser.

“Well, don’t nobody wanna talk to yo’ ol’ ugly ___ anyway, ____.” 10th grade. The first time I saw a guy go from pretend gentleman to flipping out. She declined his advances. This guy shouted at her, followed her for a couple of paces, and then loudly explained to his boys what she wasn’t really worth anyway.

That memory kinda stuck. And while I won’t pretend to be Nia Long, I do breathe, have two eyes and a uterus, so the street harassment possibility is real. The situations unfold differently, but the overarching theme is entitlement.

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HBCUs and organizational hazing can’t seem to shake free of one another. Just when you think that a beating death on the back of a marching band bus would be the turning point for cooler heads and common sense, another tragedy strikes by water – this time, a drowning death of a Virginia State University freshman and the disappearance of another as a result of an initiation ritual gone wrong.

This case has some unusual elements not commonly found in your typical HBCU hazing tragedy. The organization, the Men of Honor, was not and has never been a university-sanctioned organization; just a group of guys on the campus trying to be down… apparently, just for the sake of being down. But there is a familiar element of this case that is all too recognizable in most instances of HBCU hazing, but dramatically underreported and unchecked.

Adults pledging college-aged students.

The two Virginia State men were allegedly being initiated by four others – one of which was a fellow freshman, three others between the ages of 26 and 35. To be clear, this is a problem among men and women; a long-standing problem intertwined among black Greek-lettered organizations, marching bands and social fellowships alike. But for the sake of this discussion, we can safely suggest that grown men hazing college-aged men for an organization few would recognize and most would mock is laughable at best, and innately dangerous at its worst.

But this problem extends beyond the Men of Honor and the irony of how they made headlines; it should raise questions about how so many organizations, designed to uplift community and churn out men and women of the highest professional and personal caliber, produce enough low-lives with enough time on their hands that the integrity and the legal liability of these fraternities and sororities is constantly in jeopardy.

Natural selection requires that a few malcontents, narcissists and self-hating bozos are to be expected in every family, group, organization and community – that much we can deal with. But what we can no longer deal with is campuses and organizations which mean so much to our people and causes being torn asunder by gainfully employed (in some cases) men and women who make it their life’s mission to “pledge hard” because they can’t make relationships work, can’t find professional fulfillment, are dissatisfied with their own self-worth or just plain ain’t right with the Lord.

These men and women work in silence and in shadows, preying upon young men and women who want to belong, who want prestige and elite status, not realizing that the man or woman from whom they take wood or degrading treatment has half of their drive, half of their sense of community, and half of their desire to be better people.

Mostly because the other half of their own dignity was savagely claimed years prior during their own pledging process. And they think they can retrieve it from the broken man or womanhood of a pledging undergraduate.

Students are to blame for a lot of the dumb stuff that takes place on HBCU campuses when it comes to hazing. They are old enough and smart enough to understand that the physical and mental limits of one person usually aren’t known until they are well surpassed. But students get blinded by jackets and step shows.

Adults shouldn’t. They are supposed to be off that kind of stuff, and when they aren’t, their personal failings and resulting rage under the auspices of being dean of a line or curator of organizational pride can make for the kind of legacy that no other adult should be proud to claim as his own.

Historically black colleges and universities have been experts at distancing themselves from painful elements of their cultural past. One of those elements – the brown paper bag admissions test.

Propagated as urban legend but a real practice for some of our most reputable HBCU campuses, light complexion was once an admission qualification for college enrollment, and fraternity and sorority membership. The best candidates were as light as or lighter than the hue of a brown paper bag, ruler or other inanimate object brought to life with the task of adjudicating ethnic acceptance.

Black folks today still suffer great growing pains to free ourselves of complexion-based valuation, but we’ve grown enough to cast it out from admissions standards at the HBCU. The thought of denying black people admission to a black college because of skin color seems beyond forgivable; a direct arrow through the heart of the HBCU mission and cultural legend.

But is it more forgivable for HBCUs to knowingly admit underprepared students without discernible interest in higher education? A look at admission practices for many of today’s HBCUs reveals a woeful abuse of and honor for the black college mission and vision, an uneven exchange of student debt and continuing family hardship for tuition revenues and enrollment numbers.

Paper bags were once a reprehensible screening process of HBCU talent, the beneficiaries of which became the Black American diplomats and barrier breakers in segregated industries and social structures. Now criminal records, poor writing skills and abhorrent text scores lead a new and equally reprehensible culture degrading the HBCU experience and degree.

Safety, attrition, school spirit, financing, alumni giving and community outreach all begin with enrollment management, and no investment in retention, student affairs, academic rigor or athletics can remedy a student or throng of students whose lack of college readiness is only exceeded by a lack of personal maturity or underdeveloped ethics. HBCUs are impacted by a minute percentage of students who, because their demonstrated lack of college potential or readiness wasn’t properly screened, can cause great institutional detriment when they drop out, drink or drug out, or are taken away by the aid of an arresting officer.

As with most sensitive topics in the HBCU landscape, the discussion begins with resources. Many HBCUs don’t have the personnel or technology to adequately screen and review the thousands of applications they receive every year. But what these admissions offices do have is a mission statement, alumni chapters and a charge to bring the best students they can find to an institution. Is it better to invest time and money into recruiting a class of 400-500 students that want the HBCU experience and are personally committed to completion, than 1000-1200 students of which a little more than half are going to finish in more than five years anyway?

The solution doesn’t require an elaborate system of interviewing, one-on-one recruiting or database management. It simply requires recruitment officers to be more selective about high school visits and relationship building with guidance counselors, partnership with alumni associations to cultivate qualifying legacy admits, and intense outreach to the annual handful of local students who show exemplary academic promise beginning in the 8th grade.

We once held a brown paper bag up to students to determine their opportunities. How about now holding them up to higher standards of potential and merit?

Bragging about a record-breaking entering class of freshman in the fall and reporting a graduation rate of 35 percent or lower in the spring is sideways hustling, and robs black communities of time and money that could be dedicated to better preparatory instruction through partnerships between HBCUs and two-year institutions. For too long, HBCUs have hidden high attrition and low-graduation rates behind the problem of affordability. Once upon a time, that was a great move to build the resources that would eventually allow for stronger remediation and social rehabilitation on the black college campus.

Those days have passed by quickly, and if black colleges do not reassess how critical recruitment and admissions are to HBCU capacity and culture, good students will avoid these campuses in larger numbers to avoid increased crime, low performance and empowered stereotypes about the HBCU.

And they’ll wind up at colleges and universities which consciously or otherwise, will judge and ostracize them based on their complexions. No paper bag necessary.

News broke this afternoon about hazing charges at Virginia State University, involving current and former students allegedly pledging for the campus’ Alpha Phi Alpha chapter.

Hazing allegations since the death of Robert Champion in 2011 aren’t rare, but criminal charges are. Allegations against Florida A&M University’s Delta Sigma Theta chapter resulted in suspensions, but no formal charges.

A campus hazing investigation against North Carolina Central’s drum line never materialized into criminal charges, and similar charges against Clark Atlanta’s marching band produced no legal inquiry.

Even in a lawsuit filed last year against Virginia State for hazing allegations, criminal charges in the original investigation were dropped when the defendants committed to volunteering in on-campus anti-hazing programming.

In the aftermath of Champion’s death, national talking points were keenly and falsely focused on the hazing problem at historically black colleges and universities. But given the lack of criminal charges associated with allegations of hazing at several campuses, is hazing really a problem at HBCUs, or have students adjusted to new scrutiny around hazing and are better at covering it up?

If allegations are being made, there’s some smoke surrounding potential fires of hazing and improper pledging among HBCU undergraduates. Maybe the hazing is not rising to levels of extraordinary violence and humiliation as was common just five to 10 years ago, but there’s something there that at least one person wants stopped.

But if that one person is not resolute enough to pursue claims of illegal treatment, is the allure of membership and belonging stronger now than it was before Champion’s death? Or are students so hypersensitive about hazing, that minor pledging rituals that could make some uncomfortable rise to the level of criminal in the minds of others?

We would be foolish to believe the line about any organization being of the non-hazing variety. All organizations haze in some form, and the real pursuit of most campus leaders is to make sure that it doesn’t devolve to the point of violence, degradation and liability for the institution.

An optimistic view is that students will take Champion’s example and will not let hazing turn into a matter of life or death, but without criminal charges stemming from these incidents, it’s hard to tell if optimism should be tied to the waning value of hazing, or a reincarnation of the same.