Fight song the missing element in UR athletics

We at the UR have serious problems, far more serious than the frats running dry or the burgers tasting like shoe. Even more serious than the long winter which drives roughly 97.32 percent of the campus to drink or become seasonally depressive. We have no school fight song. I did extensive research – on the Internet in my room while I was waiting for my illegal downloads to finish – and I could find nothing about a fight song, save for the factoid on the UR Web site that Jeff Tyzik ’77 wrote the fight song for the Baltimore Ravens.And, in another discovery at least, if not more, disheartening, we don’t have a marching band either – no, the pep band does not count. How could a school which holds itself out as being a prestigious university where students can not only get a high quality liberal arts education, but also learn many valuable life lessons along the way – such as that you can’t purchase Powerade or decks of cards on declining – have such huge and obvious shortcomings? I didn’t even have to do Internet research to figure this one out – it all stems from the fantastic amounts of apathy at this school. I can just picture the founding fathers of this school sitting around, and after writing “The Genesee” – which, by the way is the alma mater and not the fight song, if you were going to try and call me stupid – decided “Well heck, we’re smart, we know we’re supposed to win football games, we don’t need a song to remind us. Plus, we’ve been here all day figuring out how to confuse students with their meal plans, I really don’t feel like writing a fight song right now.” However, based on last year’s third quarter of the Meliora Weekend football game, which is more commonly known as “The Worst Quarter of Football In Collegiate History,” we actually do need that occasional reminder to keep playing until the game actually ends.Does the lack of fight song – and subsequently lack of marching band to play it – lead to apathy, or is it the other way around? I haven’t graduated yet, so I’m not fully mentally developed, but I think we owe it to ourselves as a research university to perform an experiment. In theory there is enough talent at Eastman to write a song in the style of “We Are The World” that would actually bring peace to the Middle East, so I’m making an appeal to the students downtown – you guys write the music, I’ll write the words, and someday, when the Division III National Champion Rochester Yellowjackets have completed their third consecutive undefeated season, we can look back and remember how great it was, that year when we decided to start caring.Voigt can be reached at svoigt@campustimes.org.