Ice says they are good ideas and very relevant to the history of the school and city…so they’re caz.
Here, I sympathize with Ice Bear. If you want to become a history teacher these days, at some point in your Masters program you are encouraged to not only teach history , but to re-write history. While I totally support a school that wants to change their mascot/symbol when they feel it is time, many of the current changes are in the spirit of "rewriting history". This is understandable when there is evidence that Lord Jeff Amherst passed on blankets to native Americans with small pox resulting in Amherst selecting the ever scary Mastodons that roamed Western Massachusetts 11,000 years ago.In the case of the Colonials that actually rebelled and defeated their English oppressors in armed conflict and rejected being "colonized", I ,for one, thank those original Colonials and would have no problem representing them in an athletic contest.
Now, as far as the Dutchmen/Dutchwomen, other than the limited binary choice and the difficulty of the nonbinary students needing to choose a male or female mascot, I think the reference to the rich history of the Dutch in the New York Capital region is totally relevant and appropriate for a regional institution of higher education ( although the mascot versions I've seen on these posts are not very inspiring). I leave it to the Union Community to sort this out, however, somewhere in the Berkshire hills the ghosts of the Dutch will surely feel betrayed and become fans of the Engineers, and put a curse on the Shoes Trophy in favor of the Slide-rulers forever more.
