Name-a-Day Calendar, October 8: Valparaiso Beacons
Page 336 of 365
Chosen in: 2021
Chosen by: University administration
The history of Valparaiso University (“Valpo” for short) goes as far back as 1859, but intercollegiate athletics didn’t debut until the men’s basketball team began play in 1917. This and Valpo’s other sports teams originally had no official nickname, though some sportswriters referred to them as the Hilltoppers (because the campus sat atop a hill) or simply by their “Brown and Gold” school colors.
In 1931, the university sought to establish a mascot, soliciting suggestions from the student body. The final student body vote came between three of these suggestions: Dunesmen, Uhlans, and Vandals. The winner of this vote, and Valpo’s first mascot, was “Uhlans”. An uhlan was a European cavalryman. The armed forces of several European countries included horseback regiments known as uhlans, but Valpo, a Lutheran school, christened their mascot as a nod to those from Germany.
Over in Germany itself, almost immediately after this selection, Adolf Hitler rose to power and began doing a bunch of unspeakably bad things you don’t need me to tell you about. One thing led to another, a German invasion of Poland grew into World War II, and Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. The United States declared war on Japan the next day, and Germany, an ally of Japan in the war, consequently declared war on the United States on December 11.
Associating with Germany in any capacity became unacceptable, and this included allowing a tangentially related cavalryman to represent your university as its mascot. Local sportswriters immediately ditched the “Uhlans” nickname and began calling Valpo’s sports teams the Dunes’ Hawks until the university came up with something better. “Dunes’ Hawks”, along with the “Dunesmen” suggestion from the original 1931 vote, was a play on the Indiana Dunes on the south shore of Lake Michigan about 15 miles north of Valparaiso.
The next month, January 1942, Valpo’s athletics department met with university president O. P. Kretzmann and somewhat unceremoniously decided to call their teams the Crusaders. This nickname of course refers to the religious Crusades in medieval Europe; President Kretzmann said as much in his January 22 announcement, noting that the new nickname was “a constant reminder to the public that Valparaiso University is proud of its religious background”.
As an editorial aside, “Crusaders” is a frankly baffling nickname selection to me given that the Crusades were specifically a Catholic affair. Martin Luther was famously not a fan of the Catholic Church and explicitly condemned the Crusades.1
Despite this, Valpo’s teams were known as the Crusaders without much pushback for several decades. Many from outside the Valpo community saw the Crusader as an inappropriate mascot for some time, but the community itself usually met the figure with either fanfare or indifference, so the university never considered changing it.
According to Jillian Downs, writing for student newspaper The Torch in 2021, one of the primary drivers behind community opposition to the mascot was coincidentally the other world-stopping attack on American soil: September 11, 2001.2 Downs points to an opinion piece from Torch writer Dan Noto on November 11, 2001:
“It’s bad enough that the Crusader is a symbol of horrific bloodshed. Even in spite of that, before Sept. 11, I was one of the dozens who didn’t care. But now that our American brothers and sisters are the ones who burned to death, I have a much harder time dealing with people who murder innocents in the name of a so-called holy war. It seems a bit more real once you’ve watched it on the news. And let’s face it—the Crusaders were terrorists of their times. And we’ve got THEM as our mascot? Does this seem like a bad idea to anybody else?”
This piece alone was fairly inconsequential, but it cleanly marks the point when the mascot debate went from “Valpo vs. the world” to “Valpo vs. Valpo”, and the distaste only grew from there. But it wasn’t until February 2021, when the United States was in the midst of a nationwide reckoning against hate symbols of all kinds, that university leadership finally decided to drop the Crusader. In justifying this decision, interim university president Colette Irwin-Knott stated that the Crusader was “not reflective of Valpo’s mission to promote a welcoming and inclusive community”.
This announcement came in the middle of the school year, but a replacement mascot was not named when the Crusader was retired, so Valpo played the last few months of the 2020-21 season with no nickname.
Concurrently, university leadership solicited hundreds of nickname suggestions and sought feedback from the community on what they wanted their new identity to represent. On August 10, 2021, after six months of research, university administration came to their decision. New president José D. Padilla announced that Valparaiso’s teams would be known as the Beacons:
“Our new nickname directly connects to the University’s motto, ‘In Thy Light We See Light’, and represents the Valparaiso University community in many ways. We are beacons of light and hope in our communities. We are beacons of change on campus, in our region and in our country. We are beacons of knowledge for our students’ academic, social and spiritual growth. Above all, we are beacons of God’s light around the world. We light the way for our students, so that once they graduate, they shine their light for others. We are all Beacons at Valparaiso University.”3
The university press release from the same day also made sure to note that Beacon had been the title of Valpo’s yearbook for the past 80 years and that the university’s newest residence hall, opened in 2014, was named Beacon Hall.
It’s hard to find a way to make a beacon work as a mascot, so Valpo didn’t, instead leaning on university history to come up with something much cuter. On August 15, 2022, the university introduced two costumed dog mascots: a Golden Retriever named Beacon and a Chocolate Labrador named Blaze.
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If I’m being generous I can maybe give them a pass because they were kind of under the gun. Still, though.
Downs’ full article is worth a read.
Again with the lack of Oxford commas. Be professional, guys. Geez.