President Dean Bresciani announced in a memorandum Wednesday that he had accepted the recommendations to change the song from the School Song and Alma Mater Committee after they had been unanimously approved by his cabinet.

“The official school song and alma mater of NDSU will now be solely the 1st stanza of ‘The Yellow and the Green,'” Bresciani said.

Bresciani added historical references to the alma mater should include information about its evolution.

The SSAMC was created following a bias report filed in February indicated to Bresciani that the third stanza of “The Yellow and the Green” contained cultural and ethnic terminology “which by contemporary standards are troubling,” Bresciani said in a Listserv email.

The committee was chaired by provost Beth Ingram and vice president for student affairs Timothy Alvarez. The committee also had faculty, staff, student and alumni representation. It met twice to gather information about the song and to discuss possible recommendations for the song.

The committee, in addition to recommending that the first verse of the song serve as NDSU’s school song and alma mater, said that in places where the full song exists such as Wikipedia that there be information about the song and NDSU’s use of it.