Ten Worst College Songs Ever
There exists a special circle of auditory hell reserved for college alma mater songs, those funereal dirges that transform thousands of otherwise rational young adults into sobbing wrecks clutching their mortarboards. These are not the peppy fight songs that accompany athletic violence, but rather the slow, soul-extracting hymns that sound like they were composed by a depressed Victorian ghost who got really into minor keys.
Cornell University’s alma mater begins “Far above Cayuga’s waters,” which is technically accurate but also sounds like the opening to a documentary about geological erosion. The melody moves with all the urgency of continental drift. Graduates do not sing this song so much as they emit it, like a collective sigh made of regret and student loan debt.
The University of Chicago offers “The Autumn Wind,” which opens with imagery about dying leaves and closes with references to “hallowed halls.” One would think a school famous for economics and physics could calculate that nobody wants to associate their degree with decomposing foliage and literal death metaphors.
MIT’s “Arise, All Ye of MIT” sounds less like a school anthem and more like a summons to a very boring apocalypse. The song appears to have been written by someone who thought “arise” was the most exciting verb available in the English language and decided to construct an entire composition around this flawed premise.
Yale’s “Bright College Years” achieves the impossible feat of being simultaneously pretentious and maudlin, like a duchess weeping into her caviar. The song references “fellowship’s holy spell,” which raises questions about whether Yale students are graduating or joining a mystical order of wizard accountants.
Perhaps most baffling is Dartmouth’s “Men of Dartmouth,” which the college continues to sing despite the institution having admitted women since 1972. The song persists like a zombie that refuses to acknowledge its own death, shambling forward through decades of obvious inappropriateness.
Princeton’s “Old Nassau” sounds like it was specifically engineered to make people feel guilty about things they have not even done yet. The tune plods along with the enthusiasm of a funeral march for a beloved but extremely tedious relative. It references “the hills that gave thee birth,” as though the university emerged fully formed from geological processes rather than colonial land grants and questionable funding sources.
The University of Pennsylvania inflicts “The Red and Blue” upon its graduates, a song that asks “Come all ye loyal classmen now” as though education were a feudal obligation. The melody suggests that someone once heard a church hymn and thought, “What if we made this significantly worse and also about Philadelphia?”
Northwestern’s “Purple Pride Forever” commits the cardinal sin of rhyming “forever” with “endeavor” while simultaneously sounding like elevator music for a particularly melancholic department store. The song achieves a rare feat: it makes people nostalgic for silence.
Duke University offers “Dear Old Duke,” which repeats the phrase “dear old Duke” with the insistence of someone trying to convince themselves they actually enjoyed their time there. The song has all the emotional depth of a corporate training video and the musical complexity of a doorbell.
Notre Dame’s alma mater “Notre Dame, Our Mother” takes the already strange concept of referring to one’s university as a parent and commits fully to the bit with references that veer uncomfortably close to suggesting the school gave actual birth to its students. The melody sounds like what would happen if someone tried to make Gregorian chant somehow even more depressing, which should have been impossible but Notre Dame found a way.
These musical atrocities share one universal truth: they transform the joy of graduation into an experience resembling a very expensive funeral where you are somehow both the deceased and the mourner, forced to sing your own extremely boring eulogy.
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