8063: Unbearable Mascots.

From The New York Times…

Controversy Over Mascots at Ole Miss

By Robbie Brown

Colonel Reb, meet your replacement.

On Thursday, the University of Mississippi announced the successor to its former mascot, a white-goateed, cane-toting Southern plantation owner that many have criticized as racist and anachronistic. The new mascot? The Rebel Black Bear.

Supporters of the old mascot were quick to find flaws. For one, an artist’s design shows a brown bear, not a black one. The animal was chosen based on the short story “The Bear” by William Faulkner, himself a former student, in which a bear is killed. Not exactly inspiring on the football field. And how original is a bear mascot?

“There are many, many other schools with bears — U.C.L.A., Maine, Brown,” said Brian Ferguson, a 2007 graduate and the director of the Colonel Reb Foundation, a group that supports bringing back the old mascot, which was retired from sporting event sidelines in 2003. “We might as well be called P.C.U. — Politically Correct University.”

School administrators say they want to balance tolerance with tradition at Ole Miss (itself a nickname for a slave owner’s wife). The school has discouraged Confederate battle flags at football games, discontinued “Dixie” as the unofficial fight song and raised enrollment of black students to 14 percent, from 5.8 percent in 1995 (though Mississippi is nearly 40 percent black).

Fans are divided over whether the university has become more open-minded or just too conscious of its reputation beyond the South. The committee of students that picked the mascot said it hoped to avoid any racial significance in the design. One finalist had gray-colored skin because, said Margaret Ann Morgan, 19, a committee co-chairwoman, “it is a combination of black and white.”

The Rebel Black Bear won an online poll this month, with support from 62 percent of students, alumni, staff and faculty members and season ticket holders. That beat the two other finalists: Hotty Toddy (a muscular man named after the school cheer) and the Land Shark (an allusion to the football team’s “voracious” defense).

As for Colonel Reb, his fans are not surrendering. The Colonel Reb Foundation’s leaders will dress in replicas of his costume and tour the state next week, talking to members of the local news media and trying to reverse the school’s decision. “We’re not giving up,” Mr. Ferguson said. “The Rebel Black Bear is just not the tradition we’re used to at Ole Miss.”