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Comment by electricslpnsld | Hacker News Reader

As a Columbia grad I'm not surprised at all... the Columbia Administration is insanely conservative. I have never experienced as entrenched of a bureaucracy as I did at Columbia!

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I attended Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons in the late seventies and early eighties, and two groups who stood out were the Bard Hall Players and Columbia University Marching Band. They were made up of talented, creative and hilariously irreverent students. Come on, has the administration lost the ability to laugh? Who wrote Plato’s Republic? is pure gold just as Who’s buried in Grant’s tomb?

What are the two pieces you reference?

To Columbia alumni, these two are well known and special:

1. Bard Hall Players: https://www.ps.columbia.edu/education/academic-programs/md-p...

2. Columbia University Marching Band: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbia_University_Marching_B...

Edit: After replying, I realized you may have meant the last sentence with the questions. The “Who wrote Plato’s Republic?” is at the end of the New York Times piece. As to the other one, Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb?, here: https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/2016/07/grants-tomb/492647...

The War on Fun rages on as ever.

And yet Fun will never die.

Can you help me understand your comment? I can't tell if your making a connection between conservative and entrenched.

Conservative as in resistant to change, traditional. Not Conservative as in politics. You’d expect a conservative group to be entrenched.

> Conservative as in resistant to change

...but this article is about them making a change to their marching band rather than leaving it be as it has been for years?

Changing something to make it more traditional is a conservative action.

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