Growing up in Charlottesville, Kristen Morris spent a lot of time on the University of Virginia’s Grounds, attending basketball games and events on the Lawn. Now, she is roughly a month away from graduating from the University with her master’s in public health – a journey her older brother inspired.
Anthony “Heath” Morris died from a fentanyl overdose in 2022, a week after Kristen graduated from James Madison University with her undergraduate degree in health sciences. She had been unsure of which health-related path she wanted to take, but after losing her brother, she chose to channel her grief to help prevent other families from experiencing the same pain.
Anthony “Heath” Morris, center, died in 2022 at the age of 34. (Contributed photo)
“Before I might have said I wanted to be a surgeon, but then I decided I wanted to stop people from needing that clinical care in the first place through outreach and preventative care,” she said.
So, she returned to Charlottesville, where she had graduated from Albemarle High School in 2018, and began her graduate program at UVA with a general interest in reducing substance misuse in the United States.
During an internship session, she learned about UVA’s Gordie Center, which works to end hazing and substance misuse among college and high school students across the country. The center is named for Lynn Gordon Bailey Jr., an 18-year-old freshman who died in an alcohol-fueled fraternity hazing event at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
“From the moment Susie Bruce, the center’s director, started speaking, I knew it was my place,” she said. “I felt really connected by Gordie’s story and that his tragedy and ours were connected.”
As she started to work for the Gordie Center, she began to see the link between issues of substance misuse and hazing. During the education around hazing and substance misuse she received as a new member of Gordie’s staff, she realized she was hazed as a freshman.
“It wasn’t until I started watching the educational films and doing the research that I realized some of these things happened to me,” Kristen said.
We make sure they know how to say ‘no’ and have the ability to put a stop to stuff like this.
By linking the dual threats of substance misuse and hazing to the lives and health of young people and students, she has used her work with the Gordie Center to address gaps in support and help people navigate these challenges
“Both my family history and experiences I’ve heard about through this position have solidified this area of work as really important to me, and I know it’s work I can bring 100% of my energy to all the time,” she said.
She works as the center’s graduate student assistant, helping run the APPLE Conference and leading national substance misuse prevention and health promotion conferences for student-athletes and athletic department administrators.
Morris has also helped facilitate the Hoos Against Hazing training presented three times a day, twice a week during the summer to more than 3,000 students. All incoming student-athletes, transfer students and first-year students go through her presentation during their orientation.
“Hopefully by the end of it, we’ll have a good idea of students’ baseline opinions about certain things and identify research opportunities,” Morris said. “We make sure they know how to say ‘no’ and have the ability to put a stop to stuff like this.”
She has collected research on students’ opinions before and after these presentations and found that more students strongly disagreed with the statement “participating in a hazing activity is OK” by the end of their orientation.
Other campaigns she has contributed to include “There’s No Honor in Hazing,” a hazing prevention campaign in partnership with the Honor Committee, the University Judiciary Committee, and the Hoos Against Hazing Council launched this semester.
She is also near the end of her graduate research, investigating the history of academic hazing dating back to Plato and mapping its modern occurrences across the country using data from the Hank Nuwer Unofficial Hazing Deaths Database.
