Dartmouth Head Voices Discontent With Students’ Use of Indian Logo
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

BOSTON — The president of Dartmouth College, James Wright, called on students to show respect to American Indians after the Native American Council took out an ad in the student run newspaper saying the school was allowing racism to persist.
In letter posted on the college’s Web site, Mr. Wright said he was particularly upset that some students continue to use the Indian logo that was the school’s mascot until it was eliminated in the 1970s. He was also upset by racial taunts and name-calling that have been reported to his office.
“Free speech includes the right to say and to do foolish and mean-spirited things,” Mr. Wright wrote. “But free speech is not a right exclusively maintained for the use of the mean and the foolish — it is not unless we allow it to be, and then the free part has been minimized.”
Dartmouth, in Hanover, N.H., the smallest of the eight Ivy League schools, was founded in part to educate Indians. It has been troubled lately by incidents the school’s Native American Council says are racist.
According to the council, some fraternity members disrupted a ritual on Columbus Day; another fraternity sold T-shirts showing a football opponent’s mascot performing oral sex on an Indian; and the school’s development office sent out fund-raising piece showing alumni posing with the Indian logo.
“People who choose to say and do nothing in the face of acts that they know to be racist are, by their silence, complicit with racism,” said the ad, signed members of the council, including professor Colin Calloway and assistant volleyball coach Nanabah Allison-Brewer.
A school spokeswoman, Genevieve Haas, said the letter prompted Mr. Wright’s response.
Dartmouth was founded in 1769 to educate Indians living in what was then the colony of New Hampshire alongside English youngsters, and one of its first students, Samson Occom, a Mohegan Indian, was instrumental in raising money for the fledgling college, according to the school’s Web site. The school drifted away from its mission and by the early 20th century had adopted the Indian as its mascot.
In the early 1970s, according to Mr. Wright’s letter, the school became one of the first in America to eliminate its Indian mascot. Dartmouth is now known as the Big Green, although the independent student publication the Dartmouth Review still uses the Indian logo.
The Review hosts an online store where Indian logo caps, jerseys, and T-shirts are sold. In the 1990s, the Conservative Union at Dartmouth attempted to bring back the Indian logo.