Orgo Night and the Art of Mischief

Inside the rise and fall of one of Columbia’s most comedic and controversial traditions

Jonathan Perry/Columbia Sundial

For nearly five decades, on the night before the Columbia organic chemistry final, a hallowed ritual overtook Butler Library. Just before midnight, the heavy hush of Butler 209 was broken by a riotous procession: tubas, trumpets, and saxophones, all stampeding into Butler Room 209 with a vengeance—the Columbia University Marching Band had arrived. The evening was named both aptly and ironically: Orgo Night.

Since December 1975, the Columbia University Marching Band (CUMB) had disrupted the silent sanctity of finals season with a chaotic performance to alleviate test anxiety and “lower the curve of the Orgo exam.” The event was equal parts roast, rally, and rebellion. This was a tradition that sat somewhere between protest and parody: a meticulously planned and rehearsed student-led vent.

Orgo Night 1975 (New York Times)

Orgo Night, named for its yearly position on the eve of every organic chemistry exam, was legendary. And then it was gone.

In 2020, in a reckoning over misconduct and internal culture, CUMB was disbanded. Orgo Night, already exiled from Butler in 2016 due to concerns over disruption, was eviscerated alongside it. What was once one of Columbia’s most vibrant cultural fixtures disappeared, not with a bang, but a sigh.

To grasp Orgo Night’s impact, its origins must be understood. “The idea was to disrupt. That was the point. And everybody wants to be disrupted,” Dan Carlinsky CC ’65, J ‘66 historian of the Columbia University Band Alumni Association, told Sundial. As he explained, “when you’re in the middle of studying for an exam, you desperately appreciate being disrupted—unless there’s something wrong with you.”

From the start, Orgo Night was more than a prank. Conceived as “good trouble,” it began with a simple, absurd plan: a group of musicians sneaking instruments past Butler Library security and, at 11:59 pm, erupting into “Roar, Lion, Roar” in the reading room of the College Library. It was loud, chaotic, and, as countless alumni have recalled, exactly what the campus needed.

“Everybody tends to think of the generations before them as being very straight-laced, and [that] they walked around in coats and ties.” “But that doesn’t mean that behind it all, there wasn’t another story,” said Carlinsky. Orgo Night, though it belongs to another era, captures a spirit of campus mischief and collective chaos that feels rare at Columbia in 2025. Indeed, Columbia students are all too familiar with building occupations and disruptions. While recent interruptions are often political in nature, Orgo Night channeled rebelliousness into satire and song. Indeed, Orgo Night encouraged students to ponder the following: What if mischief itself could be an act of unity?

“We basically took the biggest balloon on campus and tried to poke a hole in it,” Ken Weissman CC ‘79 told Sundial. Weissman, who self-described as a “trombonist with a flask in [his] hip pocket,” recounts Orgo Night as a landmark of his time at Columbia and in the marching band. As he put it, Orgo Night “showed the creativity of the Columbia student,” and in many ways occupied a space in the undergraduate psyche that no longer exists.

But Orgo Night wasn’t just a musical flash mob. By the early 2000s, it had evolved into something larger than its creators could have ever imagined. While the songs remained the heart of the spectacle, an entire theatrical performance was added that blossomed into a miniature Varsity Show. The scripts, many archived by Bwog, were packed with razor-sharp references to obscure campus lore, passive-aggressive digs at student groups, and snarky one-liners aimed at administrators. The jokes were bold, raunchy, and usually completely unintelligible to anyone who wasn’t a Columbia student at the exact moment of any given year’s performance. However, there was one constant across the years: the opening that preceded every performance. It went as follows:

Speaker 1: SEAS students, please turn off your Android devices.

Speaker 2: GS students, please turn up your hearing aids.

Speaker 1: CC students, please set your cell phones to vibrate

Speaker 2: And Barnard students, please set your vibrators to phone. Let’s start the show!

This excerpt alone encapsulates the spirit of Orgo Night more than any lengthy description ever could. It was truly comedic, and existed only to give stressed and over-caffeinated undergraduates a few laughs before diving back into studying. But as the 2010s wore on, the campus climate that conceived Orgo Night—one without safetyism and cancel culture—had radically shifted, and so did the student body’s perception of the tradition.

Part of this slow death is rooted in the band’s internal culture. A far cry from the University-affiliated CU Pep Band that exists today, CUMB of days past was proudly unprofessional, acting more as a self-governing fraternal collective than an actual band. As its former poet laureate put it: “The band is a place where the toilet seat player matters as much as the jazz trombonist,” a nod to the member who literally played a toilet seat. One look at the group’s self-mocking constitution reveals their ethos clearly: One bylaw jokingly stipulates that “at least 30% of the Band must be drinking on any Band trip or the bus must immediately turn around and go home,” and another describes the role of the Spirit Manager as “Responsible for maintaining the Oral Tradition (and we mean oral) at Band events. Literacy not required.”

Such culture bled out into Orgo Night performances. Orgo Night 2004 was met with campus-wide backlash following a joke that compared Barnard women who enjoyed the band’s jokes to a “battered woman who keeps coming back for more,” and an apology was issued by the scriptwriter. Nevertheless, the administration did not impose a speech code for Orgo Night, and the Band’s only recourse was a promise that vague “safeguards” would be implemented to ensure a better script.

In the years that followed, complaints about the Band’s scripts grew louder, reflecting rising tensions over what counted as acceptable humor on campus. The turning point came in December 2015, when a Spectator op-ed labeled Orgo Night an “unsafe space” and urged students to boycott the event altogether. Days later, The New York Times picked up the story, drawing national attention to Columbia’s increasingly fraught relationship with its own traditions. The coverage alarmed administrators, including President Bollinger, who were eager to distance the University from controversy.

This all culminated in the fall of 2016, when the Band was summoned to meet with Columbia’s Provost and Head Librarian less than one week before the Organic Chemistry final to discuss “the band’s usage of Butler library.” In the meeting, Columbia’s administration informed the Band that Orgo Night could not continue to take place in Butler, citing “a disruption of a crucial study space during an already stressful time of year,” despite the event going on its 41st consecutive year. The Band relented, maintaining that Orgo Night held anywhere but Butler 209 was “simply not Orgo Night,” yet negotiations were unsuccessful.

Orgo Night 2016 was a shift, not only in tone but also location. Instead of being held inside the library, members and attendees huddled outside Butler in 21°F weather. Their opening monologue was a scalding critique of the administration’s decision in typical Band fashion:

“This week, yes folks, the week of Orgo Night, we in the Band learned we would not be allowed into Butler. We assumed it was because of our rampant stacks hookups, but in fact, it was because Vice Provost Ann ‘thorn in our ass’ Thornton thinks Orgo night is ‘disruptive’ and ‘loud’, which is like calling Spec ‘self-important’ and ‘bureaucratic!’”

But the band wouldn’t go down without a fight. In 2017, the Band defied the administration and returned to Butler 209. They mounted a covert operation, with members entering the building in waves, concealing their instruments in backpacks. The largest instruments, such as drums and tubas, were secretly stored in the library early in the morning of the performance, and members took shifts to monitor them throughout the day. The event was a resounding success, but it was the last of its kind.

After 2017, the Band relented and came to terms with an outdoor Orgo Night in order to avoid provoking the administration. All was relatively well until the fall of 2019, when, three days before the football team’s home opener, the Band was informed that because they were not recognized by Undergraduate Student Life or a governing board, they would be losing all additional funding and would be prohibited from performing at Columbia Athletics events. Athletics had booked outside entertainment for the remaining events of the school year, and the Band was barred from playing or disrupting any activities. In essence, the Band appeared dead.

But the show went on. While the Fall 2019 Orgo Night was cancelled out of respect and mourning for the murder of Barnard student Tessa Majors, it returned in the Spring with a vengeance. This edition lampooned the Mueller report, Bacchanal, the Varsity Blues scandal, and the Catholic Church all in one fell swoop. It does, consequently, contain my favorite quip of any Orgo Night script:

“A carbonyl group consists of a carbon double-bonded to an oxygen. A carb-loving group consists of students who think JJ’s 3 times a day is ‘self-care.’”

While the jokes kept flying, Orgo Night was quietly approaching its final act.

Orgo Night’s fate would ultimately be sealed not by administrative mandate, but internal collapse. The Band was dismantled in September of 2020 after mass leadership resignations were prompted by confessions of sexual misconduct, hazing, and outright racism. The group released a somber statement acknowledging that they felt it was “impossible to reform an organization so grounded in prejudiced culture and traditions.” The announcement was a reckoning, not just with the Band’s present, but with its past. In a twist of irony, the group that once made a tradition out of mocking institutions finally turned that scrutiny inward and couldn’t survive it.

The fall of the Band, and Orgo Night with it, left a void not just in Columbia’s spirit, but in its character. For decades, Orgo Night—in all its glory and infamy—gave students permission to laugh, disrupt, and poke fun at the place that often overwhelmed them. But in its absence, one question remains: What now?

The overarching question I’ve pondered while researching this tradition is simple: Could Orgo Night exist today?

After speaking with alumni who experienced the tradition at all different points in its storied history, I’m not sure if such a question is answerable. Orgo Night was what it was: a time capsule of Columbia at its most chaotic, raw, contradictory, and clever. It was satirical and sincere, and eventually became too loud and offensive for Butler Library. In an attempt to silence what was messy and unpredictable, Columbia may have also silenced something essential: our ability to laugh at ourselves, together.

Columbia today is a different place. Needless to say, we are more online, fragmented, and aware than ever before. Some of Orgo Night’s jokes wouldn’t land, and others wouldn’t be allowed to. And yet, the hunger for something akin to it lives on.

Columbia has a new band, one that is now directly controlled by Columbia Athletics. The Pep Band holds serious rehearsals—something that the old CUMB would never dare to do. To be fair, the “Cleverest Band in the World” did rehearse; it just never let rehearsal get in the way of mischief. The new band markets itself as providing a “fun, engaging, inclusive, and family-friendly atmosphere,” far from the chaotic, occasionally nude irreverence of its predecessor. There are no flasks tucked into instrument cases, and certainly no midnight marches into Butler Library. And maybe that’s exactly what it’s missing.

The uniqueness of Orgo Night wasn’t in its polish; it was in its chaos. The Varsity Show may have been consistently funnier, tighter, and more rehearsed, but Orgo Night never tried to be perfect. It was trying to be alive. The fact that a drum set had to be smuggled past the Butler security desk made it feel more real than any stage performance ever could. It reminded an ever-stressed student body on the eve of the most terrifying exam that maybe we don’t need to take everything so seriously.

Even years later, its spirit traveled far beyond campus, most literally with Orgo, a rooftop bar in Singapore founded by a Columbia alum and named after the tradition. It’s proof that Orgo Night’s blend of mischief and meaning still resonates. Orgo Night wasn’t just comedy, rebellion, or tradition. It was permission to laugh, gather, and be absurd. It was a cultural exhale at a school that rarely seems to let its students truly breathe. And while its songs may have faded and its scripts have certainly aged, the feeling it created lives on. It’s just waiting for someone to break the silence.

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Mr. Maretzki is a sophomore at Columbia College studying data science. He is a senior editor for Sundial.