Jay, I’m starting to think this might just be a lousy year for the Wolverines.

It could be a good one for Columbia’s Lions, though experienced fans have learned to be cautious about losing their hearts too quickly. A true Lions fan is someone who, when you say “Columbia” and “1968,” thinks of basketball, because that’s the last time they won the conference championship. And that might actually be a good omen because, just as in 1968, student protests are reaching a fever pitch this year at Columbia.

Of course, you could have said the same thing about any other year in the last half-century, though the pretexts for student demonstrations vary greatly with the times. However you feel about Vietnam, it was unquestionably a major issue in 1968, but here’s an example of what they’re getting ticked off about nowadays (showing, among other things, that law students are not the only ones at Columbia University who are easily shaken up):

Earlier this semester, the Columbia University Marching Band published a series of recruitment posters. One of them transposed a photo of Nicki Minaj’s album cover for Anaconda where she is crouched on the ground with her butt exposed in a thong. In its original form, the album cover is a statement about sex positivity and one woman’s control over the depiction of her body.
As an advertisement for CUMB, the image became a gross representation of white supremacy. The poster featured the enlarged photo of Nicki Minaj with a frog photoshopped over her face, along with two white men in black shorts hitting her butt cheeks on each side with a gong mallet. In one image, CUMB managed to completely disregard the history of slavery and the history of black women not having control over their own bodies (most frequently at the hands of white slavemasters). They also disregarded how black women would feel seeing this image around campus, as CUMB essentially told them (just like American history has told them) that their bodies are not theirs.

The original album cover is risqué enough (sorry, I mean sex-positive enough) to make it non-Corner-postable, but you can easily find it online. The article’s authors don’t explain how the frog fits into the white-supremacy thing; perhaps that’s obvious to everyone except me. I couldn’t find a copy of that poster, but here are some other recent examples of CUMB’s graphic humor.

The point of this article was to encourage students to boycott “Orgo Night,” a twice-yearly event in which the band goes to Butler Library to play music and read a supposedly humorous script on the night before Columbia’s organic-chemistry exam. This tradition began in the 1970s with the band invading the library at midnight and playing a few songs, mainly to annoy the pre-meds. Around 1982 the band, of which I was a member, figured out that they could leverage this capability by reciting a few lame jokes in between, and in the decades since, the event has become mystifyingly popular — the closest thing Columbia has to a time-honored tradition, except for student protests, of course.

The anti-CUMB campaign has been going on for several years, because “every semester after Orgo Night, some students leave Butler feeling miserable and triggered and have to turn to one another for consolation while our peers celebrate.” Showing uncharacteristic backbone, the Columbia administration has refused to ban the event, and it went off this week as usual. But don’t worry: The protesters who wrote the article above have devised an ingenious solution for those who get the heebie-jeebies over the sort of undergraduate humor on display at Orgo Night: “Don’t go. Don’t go. Don’t go.” Imagine if other would-be suppressors of free speech adopted this logic . . .