← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Robbie
Thread ID: 6562 | Posts: 8 | Started: 2003-05-08
2003-05-08 19:09 | User Profile
[url=http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-ap-embattled-minuteman,0,5728531.story?coll=sns%2Dap%2Dnation%2Dheadlines]http://www.newsday.com/news/nationworld/na...ion%2Dheadlines[/url]
UMass Considers Dropping Minuteman Mascot
Email this story
By TRUDY TYNAN Associated Press Writer
May 8, 2003, 5:51 AM EDT
AMHERST, Mass. -- In a shot at tradition heard 'round the state, the University of Massachusetts is considering mustering out its Minuteman mascot in favor of a gray wolf.
The central problem, said Ian McCaw, who took over as athletic director last fall, is the Minuteman hasn't been selling many sweat shirts and hats for the cash-strapped school, which eliminated seven varsity teams last year.
"We've verified with focus groups that people don't buy items with Minutemen on them," McCaw said.
The Minuteman is the depiction of the colonial soldiers who faced the British at Lexington and Concord in the opening battle of the Revolution.
There are also, McCaw said, "gender, firearms and ethnicity issues." And Phoenix Design, the firm hired by the university to spruce up its logos, found "it's difficult to illustrate a Minuteman."
Real Minutemen carried guns, although the student who dresses up in homespun uniform and a tri-corner hat at home games was disarmed years ago.
Some alumni are up in arms about the proposed change.
"It stinks," protested Ed Struzziero of Wilbraham, a 1950 graduate whose class raised $100,000 and presented the school with a statue of a Minuteman last fall.
More than 900 of the 1,100 men and women in Struzziero's class were World War II veterans, and he said many felt the Minuteman was an appropriate symbol for the state university in the place where the American Revolution began. "Times change, but some things shouldn't be touched," he said.
Besides, Struzziero said, a gray wolf bears a suspicious resemblance to a husky, the mascot of the rival University of Connecticut.
McCaw and Lombardi said they planned to issue their decision on the Minuteman's future by the end of the month, but there were no items bearing a Minuteman logo in the school bookstore Wednesday.
A decade ago, one of Lombardi's predecessors also considered dumping the Minuteman, which has been the school's mascot since it dropped the Redmen in 1972, but retreated in the face of an outpouring of outrage.
However, since the early 1990s when the school's basketball and football teams were nationally ranked, revenues from souvenir sales have dropped from about $400,000 annually to $100,000, McCaw said.
Some women athletes said they wouldn't mind a more gender-neutral moniker. Others, including junior field hockey player Kristen Hopwood, who was a Minuteman in high school, supported the embattled symbol.
"I feel we don't have enough pride in what we are and where we came from," Hopwood said.
"The Minuteman is our most recognizable state symbol. Look at our quarter," said Pete Trovato, a sophomore hockey player from North Attleboro. The design for the state's quarter features a musket-toting Minuteman.
"If you want something fresh, just take the Minuteman and spice it up a bit," Trovato said. "If you have problems with the gun, put a hockey stick in his hand, or a basketball, or a football." Copyright é 2003, The Associated Press
2003-05-08 20:24 | User Profile
I think they should replace the old boy at a ceremony where he is drawn and quartered, while the Womyn's Studies Dept. faculty spits on him. All this passive-aggressive behavior towards whites and white symbols is starting to piss me off. I wish they'd just come right out and say they hate what they hate and not couch the language in bland niceties.
Oh, and I suggest they replace "minuteman" with Vagina Monologueer.
A vibrator in one hand and a copy of The Feminine Mystique in the other.
2003-05-08 21:09 | User Profile
With the politically correct rewriting of American History and the dumbing down of American Education so that a person with an 85 or lower IQ can get A's with no effort, these students probably don't know what a Minuteman was and if asked on a questionaire would probaly say that it is a man who prematurely ejaculates. ( Crude, for me, but I couldn't resist.)
2003-05-08 21:48 | User Profile
All this passive-aggressive behavior towards whites and white symbols is starting to piss me off. I wish they'd just come right out and say they hate what they hate and not couch the language in bland niceties.
Almost right. As Louie Fara-CON-artist says " they are just dead white men, and have no place in todays America". The truth is that anything which is endemic to American culture is fair game for ridicule, exclusion, or banishment. Yet God forbid the Somali or Mexican illegal immigrant should forsake his own culture and lower himself to learn english....HELL NO...we'll just print every sign, ballot, and food stamp in his native language so he'll feel at home.
Ain't nothing passive about the attack on American Culture and we are losing.
2003-05-08 22:32 | User Profile
Ah, Happy Valley (as we Bay-Staters call the area.) The attempt to kill the Minuteman mascot has been an item for some Jacobians at Zoo-Mass Amherst for several years. It is the usual drivel about no longer celebrating "White Male hegenomy." They've probably got it this year. I heard on the radio this morning a local who observed that grey wolves have not been seen in the Connecticut Valley for at least a hundred years. Perhaps it was chosen to celebrate all those "wild wymyn" who "run with wolves" to express their "inner b*tch." (their phrases, not mine)
One way of dealing with the state government's $3-4B deficit this year becomes obivious upon hearing such stories.
2003-05-08 22:44 | User Profile
What I meant by niceties was something like this:
There are also, McCaw said, "gender, firearms and ethnicity issues."
All of which really means, "We hate and fear the idea of a white man with a gun."
Just come on out and say it. Get it off your chest!
2003-05-09 15:18 | User Profile
**Just come on out and say it. Get it off your chest! **
I agree. Everyone in this fourm is far to circumspect and restrained.
2003-05-15 01:34 | User Profile
"UMass Considers Dropping Minuteman Mascot"
America is almost dead. :(
A "liberal" place like a modern University sould not the Minuteman as it's mascot. Maybe they should use something more representative of modern America like Michael Jackson. Sadly this sissy fag pedophile is more representative of modern America than the Minuteman!