In two days, the University of Illinois will abandon its 81-year-old mascot, Chief Illiniwek. A large population of students supported the Chief: in 2004, according to The New York Times, more than 9,100 students voted in favor of keeping the mascot, while around 4,000 voted against it.
The university decided, however, to respect the wishes of the NCAA, which deemed the dancing Indian an offense to Native Americans.
By the sheer fortuity of this newspaper's whims some 86 years ago, the Blue Devil will likely escape such a demise, and it is interesting to think about why.
When Duke football started again at the close of World War I, as university archivist William King wrote in 1992, the team went alternately by the Trinity Eleven, the Blue and White and the Methodists.
The Chronicle-then known as The Trinity Chronicle-launched a campaign to pick an official name in 1921, asking students to choose from among Blue Titans, Blue Eagles, Polar Bears, Blue Devils, Royal Blazes or Blue Warriors. When no clear favorite emerged, The Chronicle started using Blue Devils, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Mascots are important because they represent the efforts of people in one blip of history attempting to express immutable values. Sports-whom mascots support-and war, too, are closely related. It is significant, then, that of The Chronicle's six options, Blue Devil-the eventual winner-was almost certainly the most politically charged term.
As the class full of veterans would know, "Blue Devil" referred to "les Diables Bleus," the nickname for French alpine troops who would "break the stalemate of trench warfare in their native region of the French Alps," the archivist King wrote.
It is strange to imagine how the "lost" generation felt about honoring a war so many found pointless and devastating.
But it is even stranger to imagine how things would play out were Duke students of such a mind-not quite fully in the throes of relativism, that is-picking our mascot today. The Green Berets? The Delta Force? The Scout Snipers?
But no school would name its team after those patriotic entities today, and it is in large part because we are now reluctant to express any sort of public values at all.
What critics of Chief Illiniwek fail to understand is how important it is for a group of people to avow a set of human values. Although they do not see it that way, those who have forced the University of Illinois to retire their mascot do not object to the fact that he is a Native American-they object to his humanity.
Duke's Blue Devil has survived the fate of Illiniwek by doing what Illinois failed to do: masking its history. If instead of a goateed cartoon devil we had a soldier performing at halftime, I do not believe we would still have our mascot.
Fans of the Wisconsin Badgers see an animal, not the 19th-century lead miners who "lived like badgers" in tunnel hillsides; fans of the Boston Celtics see a timeless leprechaun, not one of the abused Irish immigrants of the same era.
In Chief Illiniwek, however-whose tenure inspired an annual American Indian historical festival at Illinois called Honor the Chief-we may still catch a glimpse of real people who lived and died by real values.
"The tradition of the Chief is a link to our great past, a tangible symbol of an intangible spirit, filled with qualities to which a person of any background can aspire: goodness, strength, bravery, truthfulness, courage, and dignity," explains the website of the Honor the Chief Society.
It is this assertion of human values connected to our present which disconcerts the NCAA. The goal of higher education, at least once, was to teach right from wrong.
Unwilling to make such a judgment today, our colleges aspire to nothing more than safe anthropomorphized "values"-falsely ascribed to soaring eagles, brave wolverines and the like-or virtues of a human past so distant as to be politically harmless, of Minutemen and Trojans. Illinois' crime was nothing more than to break ranks with these moral relativists.
If critics of Native American names truly care about honoring Indian heritage, then they should distinguish between mascots that glorify their past-such as Illiniwek or professional hockey's Chicago Blackhawk-and those which insult it, such as baseball's cartoonish Cleveland Indian.
At Duke, we're perhaps fortunate to have a mascot whose meaning has devolved enough into a general, unthinking cheerleader for a school we love. It is a shame that those universities whose symbols really still stand for something get punished for it.
Andrew Gerst, former managing editor of Towerview, graduated from Duke in 2006 and now lives and works in Washington, D.C. His column runs every other Monday.
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