Name-a-Day Calendar, March 25: Lehigh Mountain Hawks
Page 139 of 365
Chosen in: 1995
Chosen by: The Student Senate
A school’s mascot should represent its student body. It wouldn’t make any sense if a school in rural Alabama had a Eurasian bird for a mascot, and so that’s why Jacksonville State switched from the Eagle Owls to the Gamecocks.1 When teachers colleges expand to serve a wider variety of disciplines, they often swap out a teacher-based athletics nickname for a more all-encompassing one.2
It’s the same story with Lehigh University. Founded in 1865 by Asa Packer — the president of Lehigh Valley Railroad — as a men-only engineering school, Lehigh would nickname their sports teams the Engineers in Packer’s honor in 1930. But 1930 was a long, long time ago, and a lot can change in a few decades.
In 1971, Lehigh began accepting women, and almost immediately, the school’s focus shifted from primarily engineering to primarily liberal arts. By the mid-1990s, the student body at large no longer agreed that the Engineers nickname and mascot represented them, so the Student Senate and university administration got to work behind the scenes on whipping up something new.
The result was the Mountain Hawk, quietly introduced by the Student Senate in 1995 with the university providing a new set of athletic logos to match. This was not a decisive action. Lehigh did not put out a press release going all in on the Mountain Hawks identity or even make any announcement regarding their new identity. They couldn’t; they had alumni and boosters to appease. But, as with the student body itself, the Engineers were gradually overtaken by the Mountain Hawks in branding materials, press coverage, and cheers from the student section and cheerleaders. By Y2K, it might as well have been official.
The Mountain Hawk gained a name, Clutch, in 2008, selected by students in a schoolwide contest both because of its athletic implications and because it includes the letters “LU” for Lehigh University.
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