Bespectacled demonstrators from the Columbia Biomedical Engineering Society projected slogans including “Please Have Sex With Us” onto Low Library, simultaneously horrifying and intriguing an audience of prospective students. The rally lasted for several hours and was responsible for multiple noise complaints, late problem sets and a fifty-percent drop in LionShare job search traffic.
The agit-prop demonstration began with a picket-sign march through campus by the club’s radical membership, several Butler group-study tables strong. They chanted phrases such as “Columbia protects dry streaks,” “President Bollinger: Will You Be Our Wingman?” and “We deserve love, too.”
As the Marching Band began its traditional rendition of “Roar Lion, Roar” to the parade of recently accepted high school students, BME members began calling out to the prospects with a mixture of righteous anger and plaintive, lusty hope.
“We’ll take anything,” said BME club president Emily Addison, acknowledging that with her membership “the odds were good but the goods were odd.”
As the protesters wound their way through College Walk, dozens of Spectator and Bwog reporters surreptitiously combat-crawling behind them, several prospects were disturbed by the intensity and disturbing nature of the rally.
The protesters also planned to occupy the office of President Lee Bollinger, who Addison described as “evil but dreamy, in a ‘George Clooney meets sexy Cheshire Cat’-kind of way,” in an attempt to convince him to take “one of us, any of us” as a lover.
She interrupted the interview to punch Graduate Hall Director Grace Smith in the jaw, exclaiming that her attempt to block the projector was “typical bureaucratic cockblockery.”
Members of the Charles Drew Premedical Society, the Chess Club and Beta Theta Pi wore “Big Bang Theory” t-shirts to express their solidarity with the BME Society’s lovelorn cause.
“I would like to credit my lackluster love life to the overwhelming rigor of a hard science curriculum,” said one Beta brother. “The truth is that no amount of Everclear will get someone to look past my hundreds of Alf collectibles.”
The protest was timed to occur at a late-night juncture, when they could achieve the greatest exposure (ideological and physical) to the potential students. Public Safety officers told the demonstrators that their rally “probably” violated the Rules of Conduct, but “honestly we can’t be bothered to do anything about it.”
Despite the repressive political environment, BME members swore their struggle for justice and public notoriety would continue. After all, they said, what kind of independent personal identities had they developed outside of the cause?
“I’m staring down forty years of crushing isotopes,” said graduating senior Yeng Fang. “I was hoping that just once during my college career I could crush some pussy.”
BME members said that their other Saturday nights were typically spent in a frustrated haze, drawing lewd caricatures on computer-aided design systems and pondering a switch to the humanities.
“The only thing more chemically inert than my major is my heart,” said sophomore John Chiu. “I’ve resigned myself to the fact that I’ll probably take after my favorite amoeba and just reproduce asexually.”
