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On College Football

Columbia Silences Its Marching Band

The university has prohibited its scramble band, often irreverent and sometimes funny, from performing at athletic events, and plans to form a more traditional band after the football season.

The Columbia University marching band was banished for the 2019 football season because of late paperwork.Credit...Sarah Blesener for The New York Times

In the rich history of marching band transgressions, this was not Stanford’s halftime routine against Brigham Young that poked fun at polygamy and exalted the bond between a man and a woman and a woman and a woman and a woman. Nor was it Rice’s “IX” formation, for Title IX, to mock a sexual assault investigation at Baylor. It was not even Yale’s pants-dropping incident.

No, the sin that caused the banishment of the Columbia University marching band for the entire 2019 football season was … late paperwork.

It had nothing to do, the Columbia administration explained, with the band’s tradition of bursting into the library, trumpets blaring, on the eve of the organic chemistry final. It wasn’t on account of bawdy routines and occasionally crude chants at football games, or fears of what might be in store when Robert K. Kraft, the New England Patriots owner and a Columbia football benefactor, turned up at a game.

No, the university said, the hammer had to come down because the band had failed to submit its application for funding on time. And if these impressionable young people are not held to account, then a deadline becomes nothing more than a two-syllable word, creating a loose thread that threatens to unravel the social fabric.

“They were reminded repeatedly of deadlines during the 2019 spring semester for applying for recognition,” the university said in a statement. “Nevertheless, CUMB failed to meet the application deadlines of our student governing boards, bringing us to the current situation.”

And here was the situation on Saturday at Robert K. Kraft Field at Lawrence A. Wien Stadium at Baker Athletics Complex at the northern tip of Manhattan: Columbia band members in the stands, instrument-less, for the home opener, while their replacement, a high school band from Staten Island, dutifully played “Roar, Lion, Roar.”

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A Staten Island high school marching band at Columbia football’s home opener. Credit...Sarah Blesener for The New York Times

Sam Losee, a sophomore English major, said it was sad and held up a sign that read, “Ask me where my trombone is?” (This was a metaphor; she plays the xylophone.)

“It’s like being Roar-ee without a costume,” she said, referring to the team mascot.

The band was notified last Wednesday by Peter Pilling, the athletic director, that it would be prohibited from performing this season and that any member who tried to play an instrument at a game or to disrupt activities would be subject to discipline.

This was no joke. One student had a flute confiscated upon entering the stadium, and another had drumsticks taken away. Security did allow a cardboard trombone.

“This is part of a broader move at Columbia to make the band more sanitized, more corporate,” Samantha Rowan, the president of the Columbia University Band Alumni Association, said of the ban, which had been in the works for months. “They want something that’s pretty on a brochure.”

In 2016, when Columbia came under fire for its handling of sexual assault claims — students dumped mattresses on the front lawn of the university president, Lee Bollinger, in protest — there was little patience when the band made the issue a part of a skit at Butler Library during final exams.

(A university spokesman declined to make Bollinger, a First Amendment legal scholar, available for an interview.)

The event, known as Orgo Night, began in 1975 as a way to laugh at (and with) students cramming for the organic chemistry exam. It grew into an anticipated event, with students lining up to get into Butler by 11:59 p.m. But about three years ago, after complaints from the head librarian, the band was told it had to perform outside.

Then, in December 2017, the band sneaked instruments into the library and performed, which was followed last October by Columbia College and Columbia Engineering cutting $15,000 in funding to the band for the 2019-20 academic year, about 60 percent of its budget. (The athletic department contributed about 25 percent, with the rest made up by the band’s alumni association.)

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The home opener for Columbia University.Credit...Sarah Blesener for The New York Times

The band, considered an extracurricular club, was told it could apply to be recognized as a student group, which would allow it to be funded like other student groups but also require increased oversight.

“The band doesn’t fit with the 2019 image of the administration,” said Matthew Coulson, the band’s spirit manager, whose rugby jersey was adorned with buttons that read “Beat Bama,” and “How do I get to Bogotá from here?” “It thinks of Columbia as an esteemed and serious institution that has no time for irreverence.”

The band manager, Cameron Danesh-Pajou, a senior chemical engineering student, acknowledged the missed March 9 deadline, but said it was never presented as an ultimatum. The application was eventually submitted, near the end of the semester, but he never heard back from officials when he asked to discuss the matter.

In the meantime, the alumni group helped meet the budget, which is mostly for transportation costs to football games and men’s basketball games. The band held an open house this semester, practiced, and met two Sundays ago to go over the script for Saturday’s game against Georgetown.

Then Danesh-Pajou and Max Bohn, the drum major, met last week with Pilling; an associate athletic director, Bob Steitz; and the executive director for student engagement, Josh Lucas. The students thought they would be reviewing the script; they found out they were being barred.

“They were told repeatedly, ‘You need to do this,’” said Pilling, who apologized to the students for the late notice. “Why they ignored all the requests, why they thought they would ultimately be able to perform without having to do this, I can’t tell you.”

Danesh-Pajou sent an email to Pilling on May 8, acknowledging that the band was “in a state of limbo,” and asked for a meeting. He said he never got a response.

Pilling declined to say why no effort was made to speak with the band. He said band members were prohibited from bringing their own instruments to the game because of N.C.A.A. rules against noisemakers, though the rule is designed to prevent interference with an opponent’s snap counts.

The plan, Pilling said, is to form a new band, perhaps soon after football season ends in late November, with a music director who would conduct tryouts.

“Our ultimate goal is to put the best possible band on the field,” Pilling said.

To do so, though, would be neutering the band’s identity.

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The university has prohibited its scramble band from performing at football games.Credit...Sarah Blesener for The New York Times

Columbia had its first marching band in 1904, and in the 1960s it transformed into a scramble band — a seat-of-the-pants ensemble that welcomes anyone. (All Ivy League bands, except Cornell’s, are scramble bands.) As a result, the Columbia band not only has tubas and trumpets, but also “miscies,” short for miscellaneous — someone who might play a didgeridoo, a glockenspiel, a toilet seat or a “Restroom Closed for Cleaning” sign.

“It was a reflection to me that I’d landed at a university where it was O.K. to be yourself,” said Liz Pleshette, who played the spoons as a freshman in 1985, an act cataloged in the student newspaper by a freshman reporter named Neil Gorsuch, now on the Supreme Court.

Joe Schwartz, a 1992 graduate and former lawyer, said of his band experience, which began by playing a blowtorch, “It’s probably not a coincidence that I’m in the chair asking the dean for one more chance and then I’m the one in front of the judge asking for one more chance.”

The current band is hoping for the same. It convened Thursday to plot its next move. On Saturday morning, about 30 band members congregated on the steps of Butler, in the center of campus, to perform the routine they had planned for halftime.

As Isabel Sepulveda, the band’s poet laureate (a.k.a. lead scriptwriter), introduced the Columbia Show Must Go On Band, it scrambled into formation and began a skit that did its best to mock Georgetown for its participation in the admissions scandal (“Bribe your way into school the old-fashioned way — donate a building”).

When the show ended, the students put away their instruments and boarded a bus uptown. As it rumbled through Washington Heights, Coulson led call-and-response songs ridiculing Cornell. Eventually seated behind the Columbia bench, the band chanted and held signs — some with the university president’s phone number — and cheered the team.

When Georgetown sealed a 24-10 victory with a late touchdown, Coulson got his compatriots to summon the energy for one final shout across the field: “Hey, Georgetown, who wrote Plato’s ‘Republic’?” After a silent pause the band yelled, “They don’t know!”

It was a small victory.

And a sign that some people had done their homework. A tenet of Plato’s tome is that a just man is a happy man, so as the band members gathered their signs and walked toward the exit, they carried something else with them — even if it was not their instruments.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 7 of the New York edition with the headline: Columbia Fires Irreverent Band. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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