On deaf ears: an activist's comments to the university's trustees

Abstract

On March 9, 1998, the elected University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC) Senate, the governing body of the campus elected from its faculty and students, voted 97 to 29 in favor of the resolution,The University Administration and Board of Trustees immediately retire Chief Illiniwek and discontinue licensing Native American Indian symbols as representations of the University.At that meeting, the voices of students and faculty were heard, a supporting petition signed by more than 700 faculty was presented to then Chancellor Michael Aiken, and data from 10 other institutions were presented and attested that those colleges and universities did not experience any diminution in gift-giving as a consequence of retiring their Indian mascots. It seemed the retirement of Chief Illiniwek and the end to the use of Native American imagery in the UIUC sports program would be imminent. No one, certainly not me, thought it would take another ten years before the mascotry ended. During that prolonged interim, I requested and was granted permission to speak to the University Board of Trustees during the mandated Open Intake session of their meetings. The following represents the texts of my messages, which by Board policy needed to be confined to 5 minutes, and which by practice were never responded to.

Citation

Kaufman, S.J. (2010), "On deaf ears: an activist's comments to the university's trustees", Denzin, N.K. (Ed.) Studies in Symbolic Interaction (Studies in Symbolic Interaction, Vol. 34), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 183-202. https://doi.org/10.1108/S0163-2396(2010)0000034013