In the rich history of marching band transgressions, this was not Stanford’s halftime routine against Brigham Young that poked fun at polygamy and exalted the bond between a man and a woman and a woman and a woman and a woman. Nor was it Rice’s “IX” formation, for Title IX, to mock a sexual assault investigation at Baylor. It was not even Yale’s pants-dropping incident.

No, the sin that caused the banishment of the Columbia University marching band for the entire 2019 football season was … late paperwork.

It had nothing to do, the Columbia administration explained, with the band’s tradition of bursting into the library, trumpets blaring, on the eve of the organic chemistry final. It wasn’t on account of bawdy routines and occasionally crude chants at football games, or fears of what might be in store when Robert K. Kraft, the New England Patriots owner and a Columbia football benefactor , turned up at a game.

No, the university said, the hammer had to come down because the band had failed to submit its application for funding on time. And if these impressionable young people are not held to account, then a deadline becomes nothing more than a two-syllable word, creating a loose thread that threatens to unravel the social fabric .