If Georgia Tech’s fight song changes to acknowledge women, it’ll definitely be the country’s best

Georgia Tech’s fight song is very good. It has a century-plus of history and a weird rhythm most people miss the first time while clapping along. Its lyrics concern gambling, an ocean of rum and the school rival being damned to suffer in hell, because that is what sports rivals should sing about.

It’s nearly a perfect college fight song. One small part has always been awkward, though:

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.

It is good to dress your children in your sports team’s clothes. I have done this. My daughter is seven years old now, though, and doesn’t care about any of my teams, so I’ve stopped doing this.

But since the lyric refers to the speaker’s daughter going on campus and his (it’s pretty strongly implied the speaker’s a man) son taking after his old man by cursing the Georgia Bulldogs to an afterlife alongside Satan, we’re not really talking about dressing your baby daughter in team colors. We’re talking about the speaker’s eventual grown-up children.

The problem is this removes any agency from the young woman. She’s dressed by her father, sent somewhere by her father and then expected to cheer for men. If you take “cheer” literally, then sure, cheerleaders are hard workers and all that, but being an amateur cheerleader isn’t really a life calling.

Because of all this, and the fact that this song was published in 1908, before women could even enroll at Georgia Tech, the school is proposing one change:

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.

With this change, the woman’s path isn’t to be sent by a man to support other men. It’s to contribute her braveness and boldness to what’s already there, which now presumably includes other women.

We’re still talking about a woman taking after her father, just as the son does. There’s only so much you can artfully change about a song older than your grandparents.

But I think this replaces sexist paternalism with exactly what the song’s meant to conjure: dreams of the future born from college revelry (and getting lit enough to wish your sports rival would boil in a lake of fire for eternity).