School pride is low at Sonoma State University, and the student president blames the Cossack.
“The mascot sucks. A student government survey three years ago found that 75 percent of incoming freshmen don’t even know what the mascot is,” said Remy Heng, a senior who admits that, three years ago, he had “no freaking clue” what a Cossack was.
“I want a mascot people can really rally behind. The main thing on my agenda is changing the mascot.”
A still-extant Eurasian tribe, Cossacks are best known for their colorful dances, horsemanship, fierce loyalty to the czars and — unfortunately — sharp intolerance of non-Christians. Cossack-led pogroms in Russia and Eastern Europe throughout the last several centuries killed hundreds of thousands of Jews.
SSU’s Cossack mascot has irked campus Jews, feminists and other groups since its adoption in 1962, but repeated moves to depose it have all fizzled. However, that trend may have changed last November, when the school’s academic senate voted 24-3 in support of a resolution resolving that SSU should “choose a university mascot name from other than a human group.”
For the first time, the school formed a mascot selection committee — which Heng now heads — to provide SSU President Ruben Arminana with alternative names. While the committee was originally supposed to make its suggestions in April, Heng said market surveys of possible replacement mascots will delay the group’s presentation of its top three choices until sometime this week.
“I think the sentiment was, there wasn’t time to make the change for this year, so we really have until early in the 2002 calendar year to make plans for an effective transition to a new mascot for the 2002-2003 academic year,” said Rand Link, SSU’s vice president for student affairs. “We’re making progress.”
After searching for suggestions via the school newspaper and alumni bulletin, the committee has narrowed the field to nine possible mascots. The committee includes Link and Heng, as well as representatives of SSU’s student body, athletic teams, coaches, alumni, faculty and athletic department.
Their list includes the Blazers, Blue Herons, Lasers, Sea Lions, Sharks, Seals, Sea Wolves, Stallions and the Fog Dogs. Link isn’t sure what sports equipment Web site fogdog.com would have to say about the latter, and while he and others like the alliteration of Sonoma State Stallions, he predicts objections to a gender-linked nickname. As far as Sea Wolves, a nod to Jack London, it is also the nickname for both the University of Alaska-Anchorage and State University of New York at Binghamton.
The committee also sent surveys to students, faculty, staff and alumni. Student athletes and residential hall dwellers filled out surveys in October. In all, Heng estimated 3,000 surveys were distributed. On them, Cossack was “not an option because it would be counterproductive to the committee’s charge to suggest alternatives.”
If Arminana does choose to ditch the Cossack, replacing team uniforms, designing a new school logo and creating all-new SSU paraphernalia could run as high as $150,000.
“I have a lot of faith [Arminana] will change it,” said Heng. “If you go around the school, you don’t see Cossack emblems everywhere. We just got a new gym floor and it says ‘SSU,’ not ‘Cossacks.’ It’s a perfect time to change it — I think SSU is going through a lot of transitions and I’m reading articles about mascots being changed all over the country. We have a Jewish community at our school, and, bottom line, if it’s five people or 200, it doesn’t matter. It’s offensive to a certain group and there needs to be some kind of action.”
In addition to not being derived from a human group, all nickname suggestions must be somehow relevant to Sonoma’s history and/or geography and should be gender-neutral and unique, under committee guidelines.
Dan Markwyn, a history professor at SSU since 1970 and campus historian, pointed out that Sonoma County has historical claims to fame other than Russian heritage, but not all of them translate into good school nicknames.
“Some allusions might be made to the Rancho Period. There were several Mexican ranchos up here; we were right at the edge of the Mexican Republic. And there certainly was a pronounced Indian presence — but so much of the history is dismal in terms of disease and removal. Happy images don’t spring to mind in great numbers,” he said.
“Luther Burbank, of course, did horticultural work up here. Great Shasta Daisies — that wouldn’t work. It was an agrarian area for so long and still is with respect to wine.”
While the name Crushers — as in wine crushers — did come up, Link said the university does not want to make a connection between alcohol and athletics. Besides, the name is already taken by the nearby Solano County Crushers, a minor-league baseball team.
“Several utopian communities popped up here and even continued during the ’60s. That’s rather harmless in offending people, except some literary critics, of course,” Markwyn added. “I still like Utopians. It wouldn’t stand a chance, but it does resonate. It is a rather hopeful one, I suppose, though some may call it naive.”