[81alum]

Well, those documents do give me a different perspective.  I'm still digesting.

1) The Administration does not really understand the iconoclastic nature of Band culture.  They talk about "exuberance" as if that is the essence of it, but they are wrong.  The Band has always been exuberant ABOUT the breaking of conventions and symbols, and a lot of those symbols were related to drugs/alcohol and sex. 

2) In an era in which drug/alcohol related sexual violence is a much more widely recognized problem, the iconoclastic behavior of yesteryear is stirring optical problems for the university.  On the one hand, I'm not prepared to say that the Band shouldn't change in some ways--although I would like to know if there are particular people who have actually been harmed by the Band.  That would concern me--have sexual assaults been attributed to the Band?  Have Band members wound up in detox?  Have the Dollies and female band members been harassed or made to feel unwelcome in Band culture?  Have such incidents sprung from organized band activities?  Those are the sorts of questions I would have before I would feel confident in judging whether this is really about safety or whether--as I suspect--it is more about censorship for Stanford's  PR purposes. 

3) That said, some of the language in those letters is very bothersome to me--prohibiting certain words with "sex" in them, censoring a particular dance, requiring the band to produce reports about changing its culture to a "culture of respect."  Really?  For half a century the Band has been about a culture of disrespect--a healthy disrespect for all sacred symbols.  And I could not really identify the kinds of specific problems I just mentioned above when reading those documents, although there may have been veiled references. 

You know, this whole thing reminds me very much of when CBS pulled the plug on the Smothers Brothers in 1969. 

[81alum]

Well, those documents do give me a different perspective.  I'm still digesting.

1) The Administration does not really understand the iconoclastic nature of Band culture.  They talk about "exuberance" as if that is the essence of it, but they are wrong.  The Band has always been exuberant ABOUT the breaking of conventions and symbols, and a lot of those symbols were related to drugs/alcohol and sex. 

2) In an era in which drug/alcohol related sexual violence is a much more widely recognized problem, the iconoclastic behavior of yesteryear is stirring optical problems for the university.  On the one hand, I'm not prepared to say that the Band shouldn't change in some ways--although I would like to know if there are particular people who have actually been harmed by the Band.  That would concern me--have sexual assaults been attributed to the Band?  Have Band members wound up in detox?  Have the Dollies and female band members been harassed or made to feel unwelcome in Band culture?  Have such incidents sprung from organized band activities?  Those are the sorts of questions I would have before I would feel confident in judging whether this is really about safety or whether--as I suspect--it is more about censorship for Stanford's  PR purposes. 

3) That said, some of the language in those letters is very bothersome to me--prohibiting certain words with "sex" in them, censoring a particular dance, requiring the band to produce reports about changing its culture to a "culture of respect."  Really?  For half a century the Band has been about a culture of disrespect--a healthy disrespect for all sacred symbols.  And I could not really identify the kinds of specific problems I just mentioned above when reading those documents, although there may have been veiled references. 

You know, this whole thing reminds me very much of when CBS pulled the plug on the Smothers Brothers in 1969.