Cossacks Nyet!

My daughter attends Sonoma State University in Northern California where the school mascot is the mysterious and completely mythical "Seawolves". Seawolves? Where wolves? There wolves!(old joke).

While dining at a local Applebee's in Rohnert Park I saw a display touting some championships won by SSU, but they news clippings referred to the "Cossacks". I figured there has to be a story there somewhere about how Cossacks became Seawolves, and I finally found it:

Richard Zimmer, a professor at Sonoma State University for the past 31 years, summed up his feelings in one word: "relief."

The Cossack, the SSU mascot that has irked Zimmer and other Jewish faculty, students and members of the Sonoma community since its adoption in 1962, has finally been unhorsed. The university announced Tuesday that the offensive nickname has been dropped in favor of "Seawolves."

The changing of the mascots is set to officially take place Aug. 28, the first day of the upcoming fall semester.

"I'm glad this is over. We can move on, we don't have to keep fighting this battle," said Zimmer, a professor of anthropology and psychology and the former regional director of the Jewish Community Relations Council.

"For both Jewish faculty and the JCRC, this has been a sore point in an otherwise very good relationship with the university. We do have a Holocaust lecture series on campus and that keeps the university in very close contact with the Jewish community, so this posed a peculiar anomaly. Here we have the Holocaust lecture series and a symbol that's not just anti-Jewish but anti-women and violent to other ethnic groups as well."

My reaction was that, of course, there had to be some political correctness involved. The proponents of the name change did their best to defend against that charge:

"This rather lame argument about political correctness can only last so long. It's a term that really doesn't bear close scrutiny; it's usually something people express to display their resistance to something. But it doesn't really mean anything in the particulars of any argument," he said.

The only arguments left in pro-Cossacks' arsenal, "how change would be politically correct and somehow disloyal to the university, those arguments weren't very weighty anymore. Once the decision was made that the money was available to buy new uniforms and so forth, what's the point? Nothing new was introduced into the arguments for the Cossack, and the arguments against it got better and better."

I don't really care if they call themselves the "Flaming Fairies", I just thought it was interesting at the extent they had to go to in order to justify the change. I'm surprised "Cossacks" lasted as long as it did in California's liberal college system - especially in Northern California.