According to the Richmond Times-Dispatch the College of William & Mary has given up its fight to keep its yellow and green feathers:“William and Mary will drop the feathers from its athetics [sic] logo to comply with the NCAA’s request, the school announced Tuesday. The phase-out process will begin during the 2007-08 school year. The NCAA in 2004 identified W&M, whose nickname is the ‘Tribe,’ as a school with a logo or nickname that could be viewed as ‘hostile and abusive’ in relation to Native Americans.”
While I applaud the NCAA’s supposed desire to do right by Native Americans, I think it’s a bad joke to think taking a couple of feathers away from a college logo really has anything to do with that goal. When a school has a sports nickname that is causing it problems, public relations-wise, that school will mend its ways or pay the price by being shunned.
On top of that, for the NCAA, of all money-grubbing entities, to pose as if it is truly interested in the moral high ground of any social issue is a crock. Click here to read the entire statement of Gene R. Nichol, the president of the College of William & Mary.
“...I am compelled to say, at the outset, how powerfully ironic it is for the College of William & Mary to face sanction for athletic transgression at the hands of the NCAA. The Association has applied its mascot standards in ways so patently inconsistent and arbitrary as to demean the entire undertaking. Beyond this, William & Mary is widely acknowledged to be a principal exemplar of the NCAA’s purported, if unrealized, ideals.”
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