College Of The Holy Cross Will Keep ‘Crusaders’ Name And Mascot
The College of the Holy Cross’ board of trustees voted to keep its controversial team name and mascot, the Crusaders, the Telegram reported. The debate over whether to rename came out of a 2016 report that recommended changing the name of a campus building dedicated to a slaveholder.
Holy Cross President Rev. Philip L. Boroughs and board chairman John J. Mahoney announced the decision in an email to students and faculty.
“While we acknowledge that the Crusades were among the darkest periods in Church history, we choose to associate ourselves with the modern definition of the work crusader, one which is representative of our Catholic, Jesuit identity and our mission and values as an institution and community,” they wrote. “We are not simply crusaders, we are Holy Cross Crusaders.”
The board’s decision was announced a day after the campus newspaper changed its name from The Crusader to The Spire. In 2017, 48 faculty members signed a letter to the paper urging it to change its name. The letter sparked a debate in the newspaper’s opinion pages.
“No matter how long ago the Crusades took place, this paper does not wish to be associated with the massacres (i.e., burning synagogues with innocent men, women, and children inside) and conquest that took place therein,” the newspaper said in an editorial Friday.
Contact Ari Feldman at [email protected] or on Twitter @aefeldman
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO