Students at Grand Valley State University in Michigan are up in arms after the school removed a large pendulum statue that they were using to parody Miley Cyrus’s eye-catching “Wrecking Ball” music video.

The school has removed the campus landmark, which students had been swinging on for years, after clips of students, including at least one where the student was nude, started flooding social networking site, reports WZZM.

The music video, which was released September 9, features the pop starlet naked and swinging around on a wrecking ball. Since then countless students have recorded parodies of themselves doing the same using the statue and posted them to Facebook and Twitter, eventually earning the attention of the school’s administration.

On Tuesday, a crew removed the sculpture from its home outside the Seymour and Esther Padnos Hall, the school’s main science facility. The structure, which consisted of a large steel ball attached to a 15-foot-long steel cable, was installed in 1995.

For its part the school said the decision was made solely in the name of safety.

“We’ve been reviewing this over the last couple of weeks, trying to decide whether we really need to look at structural integrity of the installation,” said Tim Thimmesch, the school’s associate vice president of facilities services, told the television station. “We decided to have the ball removed and put into storage for now.”

That explanation did little to assuage students who gathered outside Padnos Hall to protest the move Tuesday night.

“Wrecking ball! Wrecking ball!” they reportedly chanted.

Coincidentally, the pendulum was removed the day before what would have been Leon Foucault’s 194th birthday. Foucault, who was born September 18, 1819, invented Foucault’s Pendelum in 1851, the first device to demonstrate the earth’s rotation. His birthday was commemorated today with a Google Doodle.