According to the petition, the lines “Oh! If I had a daughter, sir, I’d dress her in White and Gold, And put her on the campus to cheer the brave and bold” is sexist.
“These lyrics,” the petition says, “do not reflect the significant achievements of women at Georgia Tech, who make up a growing fraction of students and faculty alike.”
Instead, write the students behind the petition, the song should say, “Oh! If I had a daughter, sir, I’d dress her in White and Gold, And put her on the campus to join the brave and bold.”
“This initiative,” the petition reads, “has the support of the Deans of the College of Sciences, College of Engineering, College of Architecture, College of Computing, Scheller College of Business, and Ivan Allen College.”
Founder and editor of the Social Memo
Actually, nobody knows who is behind this proposal. The petition fails to identify any sponsor and vaguely speaks to endorsement by some deans. It's on the gatech.edu domain so someone is pushing at a higher level but that is very different than an open discussion about whether the fight song should be changed or not. There's plenty of dissent that isn't being heard. Yet.
ReplyDeleteThere is a tremendous amount of dissent. The counter petition actually has more signatures now, and is growing quickly. Most of us who are engineering alumnae of Georgia Tech are insulted that someone in the academic elite thinks we are so feeble that we need them to find offense where there is none, and protect us from it. In fact, the song says that the girl cheers the brave and bold, yes, but then goes on to say that the BOY does the same thing! She cheers, he yells; no one is so dumb as to think that he can't cheer and she can't yell, right? The sad people who put this together apparently couldn't be bothered to read past the line about putting on white and gold and cheering.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.change.org/p/georgia-institute-of-technology-maintain-the-georgia-tech-fight-song-in-its-traditional-form?recruiter=400957248&utm_source=share_petition&utm_medium=copylink
Sorry, Aurelius, you need to fact check.
ReplyDeleteThe original petition was proposed by a member of the faculty, who managed to hoodwink the administration into believing that some offense actually exists and that a word change will affect gender-equality at Georgia Tech. Since it wasn't proposed by a student, the student government association has created an official survey, where they will take those results and present them as the majority student opinion.
As the other poster indicated, there is a lot of dissent that has yet to be brought to the light of day.
http://polling.gtorg.gatech.edu/index.php/716134?lang=en