Name-a-Day Calendar, January 23: Eastern Michigan Eagles
Page 78 of 365
Chosen in: 1991
Chosen by: The Board of Regents on suggestion from a committee
What is now Eastern Michigan University was founded in 1849 as the Michigan State Normal School. They began playing football in 1891, their team usually called the Normalites on account of their school name, but sometimes called the “Men from Ypsi” on account of the school’s location in Ypsilanti.
In 1929, the Men’s Union decided they wanted an actual mascot, so they held a schoolwide contest to pick one. A panel of Dr. Clyde Ford, Dr. Elmer Lyman, and Prof. Bert Peet was tasked with poring through the various entries and selecting a winner. On October 31, 1929, they did just that: “Hurons” was the winner, with “Pioneers” coming in second. The winning entry was submitted by two separate students: Gretchen Borst and George Hanner. Hanner was employed by the local Huron Hotel at the time but Borst was ostensibly referring specifically to the Native American tribe. The tribe was what the school used for branding purposes.
In 1959, the college would become a full university, but some school in East Lansing beat them to becoming Michigan State University, so they rebranded as Eastern Michigan University. The rebrand didn’t extend to their athletics, as they would remain the Hurons for the time being.
Then, in 1988, the Michigan Department of Civil Rights published a report highlighting how intrinsically offensive it was for schools to use unsanctioned Native American aesthetics in their athletic branding. They recommended all Michigan schools using such nicknames and imagery get rid of them; this, of course, included Eastern Michigan.
The Eastern Michigan University Board of Regents took this suggestion to heart and formed a committee to think up a new name. The committee gave the Board three options: Eagles, Express, and Green Hornets. On May 22, 1991, the Board officially voted to choose “Eagles”.
That should have been that, really, but the school marching band just couldn’t let it go. In 2012, they debuted a new uniform that featured logos from the school’s two prior athletic branding eras: a Normalites logo and the deprecated Hurons logo. The logos were hidden under a sleeve over the left breast, so you couldn’t actually see them when the band was performing, but the inclusion of the Hurons logo angered…just about everybody, as you could reasonably expect from the reintroduction of a Native American logo well into the 21st century.
Everyone — from the university’s Native American Student Association to the ACLU of Michigan and even the U.S. Department of Justice — got involved in removing that logo. At a June 2015 Board of Regents meeting, members of the Native American community offered university president Susan Martin a seam ripper and told her to use it to rip the logos off the uniforms herself. The next month, Martin would skip town to become the interim president of San José State University, so the issue would be left to Eastern’s own interim president: Kim Schatzel.1 On August 11, 2015, just a month after she assumed office, Schatzel announced that the logo would be removed. Here’s hoping that’s the last of it.
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Schatzel would only serve as Eastern Michigan’s president until January 2016, when she herself left for Towson University. She’s still there today, but only for another week or so: in November 2022, she was announced as the next president of the University of Louisville, a position she’ll assume on February 1.