Columbia University Marching Band.

Readers need to be aware that for many decades, going back to at least the late 1960s, a number of Ivy League colleges’ bands (including Yale’s as well as Columbia’s) went completely tongue-in-cheek, and instead of delivering half time performances of college fight songs, began competing with one another and themselves to achieve higher levels of outrageous and off-color humor.

In recent years, clearly the Columbia Band carried on its tradition of satire offending the tender sensibilities of the Wokenati. Epataying the bourgeoisie’s old time standards of speech involving obscenity and sexuality used to be looked upon as progressive and cool. But you mess with politically correct taboos connected with Identity Groups and the Politics of Victimization at your peril.

The Columbia Spectator reports that the famous Columbia Marching Band has been obliged to make an apology Japanese-style.

The self-proclaimed “cleverest band in the world” voted to disband the organization on Saturday evening after 116 years of performing music, making controversial jokes, and disputing with both Columbia’s administration and the student body.

In a statement provided to Spectator by band leadership, the club’s leadership, known as the Bored, wrote, “The Band has unanimously and enthusiastically decided to dissolve. The Columbia University Marching Band will not continue to exist in any capacity and will no longer serve as a Columbia spirit group.”

This announcement came after a year of transition for the CUMB. Three days before Columbia football’s 2019 home opener, Columbia Athletics stripped the band of the remainder of its University funding. One year prior, Columbia College and the School of Engineering and Applied Science withdrew their portion of the CUMB’s funding in response to the band storming Butler Library during Orgo Night in December 2017. The athletic department informed the band that in order to maintain the band’s funding from the department, it must become a recognized group. The marching band did not submit its paperwork for recognition and was subsequently financially cut off from the University and prohibited from performing or bringing instruments to any official athletic events.

The marching band protested this decision by holding weekly field shows on Low Steps and starting a GoFundMe, which raised over $25,000 in less than a week. The marching band and the athletic department agreed that the CUMB would play at Homecoming, putting to rest the latest iteration of a decades-long struggle between the band, the University, Columbia Athletics, and the student body.

The internal movement to disband the CUMB began when five former and current members wrote a letter to the remaining members of the Bored. The members called to dissolve the band in all capacities, arguing that alleged traditions of misconduct were too steeped into the band’s culture and reformation could not remove the traces of the harm those practices caused.

In response to those confessions, the Bored released a statement on Sept. 2, writing, “The CUMB has very serious problems when it comes to racism, sexual assault, and alcohol culture.” The statement was followed by multiple Bored member resignations and repeated calls to dissolve the organization.

It remains up in the air whether the marching band will lose its funding through dissolution. Ultimately, the decision of whether or not an official marching band exists is up to the discretion of Columbia Athletics, which has not responded to a request for comment. Without sporting events until at least January, the CUMB cannot play this fall.

“The current Band hopes that the Band’s dissolution will provide relief to the present suffering of the Columbia community and time to heal from the decades of harm caused by this organization. We also hope that the CUMB’s disbandment can create a space that allows for the formation of a new spirit group that will provide a safe and inclusive outlet for students to play music at Columbia,” the Bored wrote in a statement.

RTWT

The Baby Boom generation brought irony to the college marching band tradition.

At Yale, our band quit wearing uniforms, abandoned precision formations, and rather than keeping up the old ways, preferred to mock them with a combination of deliberate chaos and obscene symbolism. That’s the Ivy League for you.

One can argue with the choice, of course, but it was perfectly consonant with the old Prep School tradition of “Cool Sophistication Ãœber Alles”.

So, since my day, decades ago, the band game at certain Ivy League schools became “What can we do this game raunchier and more outrageous than we did last week?”

The Columbia Marching Band apparently has been operating in the same manner as the Yale Precision Marching Band: no precision, plenty of raunchy humor. However, the Zeitgeist has changed. Bacchus, Silenus, and the Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers have been packed off to the retirement home, and grim, censorious Judge Hawthorne (who has no sense of humor at all) is back and witch-hunting enthusiastically again.

NY Post:

They’ve been disbanded!

Columbia University has drummed out of existence its famously irreverent marching band — known for its phallic formations and cheering for the other team during home games.

Administrators at the Manhattan Ivy League institution warned the renegade band last semester that it needed to apply to become a recognized student group if it wanted any more funding, instead of operating under the auspices of the athletic department.

Skeptical band members say the move was payback for them hitting the wrong notes with higher-ups.

“We are not perfect, but we always try our best to speak truth to power, punch up as much as we can, and I just don’t think that’s something Columbia wants to hear,” said the band’s travel coordinator, Isabel Sepulveda, 20, to The Post on Friday — the eve of the school’s first home football game.

The band, for which members don’t have to audition, has been a thorn in the side of administrators for years.

In addition to the off-color formations and cheekily cheering on their school’s rivals, the 45-person unit band played CeeLo Green’s “F–k You’’ tune outside Trump Tower in 2016 and knelt during the national anthem at football games last season.

The bawdy music brigade also famously instituted “Orgo Night,” which involved popping up at the campus library with instruments in hand — on the eve of organic-chemistry finals. Orgo is a nickname for organic chemistry.

When campus higher-ups clamped down on the noisy prank, the band’s website read, “Since then, we have performed directly outside the library to make sure no one misses out – especially the Vice Provost.”

The band defiantly waited till this semester to apply as an independent group, but the school said they were too late. It nixed their already severely reduced budget and banned them from official sporting functions.

Trombone player Quentin Rubel, 20, said, the school’s action strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a college student.

“The band has always been a very outspoken source of counter-culturalism on Columbia’s campus,’’ he said.

But the school is just as defiant. It is tapping outside entertainment to keep fans engaged during games and creating a new spirit organization to be overseen by a faculty director, band members said.

RTWT