A little civility . . .

People have been attacking Tom Duffy, Yale Precision Marching Band Director, a lot these days. Ever since he ordered the Yale band to stop playing "The Stripper"--the cue for Saybrugians to doff their clothes at football games, and a key ingredient in any Saybrook Strip--people have thoroughly reviled him. From the Rumpus cover to an editorial in the Yale Daily News, people have criticized Duffy for trying to crush school spirit at Yale.

It sounds strange that people would think that the band director tries to harm school spirit. After all, his job is to fire people up about Yale sports. People who don't like school traditions generally don't become band directors. Since his intention was probably not to crush a beloved school event, he must have stopped playing "The Stripper" for a good reason. I do believe him when he says that he stopped playing the song because people were throwing crud at the band whenever they played it. I'd stop doing something, too, if it made people throw stuff at me.

If Yalies want to have "The Stripper" return to football games, the solution seems simple: be nice to the band. Stop attacking the band director at every available opportunity. Yale lost "The Stripper" because of these attacks.

Clearly, we want to have the song back in the YPMB repertoire. After all, this issue may seem like old news, but I still hear people reminisce regularly about the song (and no, I'm not in Saybrook). In fact, I suspect that Mr. Duffy underestimated how much Yale likes the song. He hardly could have predicted the spectacle at the Yale Symphony's Halloween show, where some band members played "The Stripper" to a full house of cheering students, complete with plenty of stripping Saybrugians.

Nonetheless, Duffy will never let us have the song back if we continue to express our enthusiasm for the "The Stripper" by denouncing the band director. By now, Duffy certainly knows that he made a mistake when he tried to protect the band by cutting "The Stripper" from its program. These mistakes happen all the time. Ordinarily, when people make these kinds of errors, somebody solves the problem and the issue disappears. However, students have somehow turned this otherwise benign issue into a hostile situation. Publicly asking Yale to fire Mr. Duffy for this whole mess will not solve the problem.

Fortunately, this whole situation has an easy solution, one that Mr. Duffy can implement if students calmed down and gave the band a chance to assess the situation in peace and not with hostility: the band could move, allowing them to play "The Stripper" in peace.

After all, people don't purposely throw things at the band during the Saybrook Strip. They throw things at the strippers. Standing behind Saybrook at a game, you can't even see the band when the die-hards stand on their seats and take off their clothes. Nobody tries to lob stuff over the Saybrook cheering section to hit the band members. Instead, the gook hits members of the band because many Yalies have terrible aim.

Being nice to the band director will make for a much better afternoon at the Yale-Harvard game. As it stands right now, somebody will probably make sure that Harvard's band plays "The Stripper," unless some Yale band members somehow find a way to silence the opposing team's band also. Saybrook will rise to strip, and people will hurl stuff at Saybrook. If the band simply moved in peace, the YPMB could rouse the crowd as usual without having to dodge flying objects.

After all, we like Mr. Duffy and everything else he's done for the band. It's a shame to ruin the YPMB and the Saybrook Strip just because people act angrily before considering the consequences.