Sour Notes

Last year the Administration barred dates from traveling on the Band bus to away football games, reportedly because a proper Bostonian, feminine variety, was alarmed that her daughter had spend the night traveling with unruly bands-men. Early this fall the Band was warned about its jibes at the Radcliffe House system, apparently because some stuffy Corporation member thought them in poor taste.

In a peripheral but nonetheless distressing incident this fall, the police chased Schneider's Band from the Radcliffe Quad, and the implication was that serenades would be frowned upon in the future. The Dean Watson warned the Band before its trip to Philadelphia that he did not want any trouble, which the Band--rightly, it would seem--interpreted to mean that it was no longer permitted to play impromptu midnight concerts at colleges along the way.

And so it went. Whatever its real intentions may be, the Administration is making it increasingly hard for the Band to remain in existence. It is killing off the last College organization largely dedicated to having fun. With the advent of a ferocious academicism, administrators and even students have forgotten that spoofing authority, raiding girls' colleges, and generally raising hell can be a good and integral part of the undergraduate experience. It would be sad indeed to see the Harvard Band, the last practitioner of the dying art of being in undergraduate, wither away.

The long overnight trip to an away game is grueling in any case. Without dates, it is worse. Without the cherished privilege of marching thought the streets of Princeton or Bryn Mawr at 4 in the morning, it is unthinkable. It is no wodder that only 70 Band members (about half the total) made the trip to Philadelphia; and creeping academicism and confining regulations will continue to cut into the group's numbers.

In its search for a solution, the Band may have gone astray. The Administration has offered financial relief: Dean Watson granted free date tickets for football games and said the Administration might try to finance such things as meals and uniforms. This thinly-disguised bribery seemed to satisfy the Band; it should not have. With financial support comes administrative control, and it is no lack of money that menaces the members of the Band. It is something far more serious--the loss of their precious freedom to act their age.