There’s plenty of good chants and such for Earthworms, seems to me.

On the procedural stuff, I’d just say the following:

a) I agree that you don’t need a selection committee to vet the choices. Just ask the community to submit suggestions and cull the top six or so. Then it’s up to various groups that actually have an opinion to push for their favorite during the nominations. Or offer a really big slate (10-20 choices) that includes some of the funnier/freakier/more abstract ones and see what happens. The idea that the freaky and abstract ones wouldn’t be approved by the Board, or need to be “selected out” by a small committee, is just wrong.

b) I hate to say it, but I would agree with Arthur that the “whoops, we forgot to put ‘no mascot’ on the ballot” thing is pretty suspicious.

That is to say, if I or my friends had been that aware of people sending in votes for Manticore before the election, we probably would have created our own mascot (probably the “Garnet Fox” or “Little Quakers” or something else with a more solid connection to the school’s history) and sent repeated e-mail after e-mail to the committee pushing that idea specifically so that “Manticore” wouldn’t win by virtue of going up against three rather lame and uninspiring choices. We didn’t, so that didn’t happen. But saying that the process of a particular clique of students being more aware of the process and sending lots of e-mails when other students weren’t aware of what was going on is “fair” bugs the hell out of me. This isn’t the first time that I’ve only actually started caring about some sort of selection process when I realized that the committee in charge had started leaning toward a bad choice that a lot of people didn’t like for subjective reasons. (How many votes would “Alice Paul” have gotten as the name for New Dorm if we’d actually polled the campus, instead of having Student Council subjectively filter the process? Especially with Student Council making completely false arguments in its favor, like nothing on campus ever having been named for Alice Paul, or there not being any buildings on campus named after women?)

Honestly, I don’t know who knows whom, and who considers whom the best of friends, and this isn’t the sort of thing it’s easy to do “research” on without being creepy. I do know that there are a dozen people or so on SAAC and that it’s not unreasonable to suppose there’s overlap between them and the band or fans of the band. I still think that the idea that SAAC was filtering choices completely objectively and fairly is thrown into question when “Manticore” is one of the top four choices out of the “fifty or sixty” available options. There are many reasons why, if you *don’t* count student opinion, “Manticore” is a bad choice — there’s no way to buy a Manticore costume, you’d have to make one that would look stupid, most people wouldn’t know what it was, and *it’s a self-indulgent reference to a passing student phenomenon* — and if you *do* count student opinion, there’s a big reason why it’s unfair to put Manticore on the list because it gets a lot of spontaneous e-mails in its favor and others don’t, because it’s a hell of a lot easier to express student opinion in favor than student opinion against. There was no way for me, before the election, to say “I don’t really think Mighty Oaks is all that cool, but I like Mighty Oaks a lot better than Phoenix, Griffin, Gorilla or Manticore, so could you please put Mighty Oaks on the ballot along with those four?” That’s why I have a problem with this process.

Yeah, it may have been disingenuous of me to state the idea of a connection between SAAC and Manticore as strongly as I did, but I thought it came out in the piece that I wrote that I *didn’t* actually know, that the reason I was offended was because it took all of five seconds for me to look at it and come to the assumption that that was what happened, and that’s a bad thing to do if you do it unintentionally. (Hence my saying it was “transparent”, and then saying that if there *was* another reason, I wanted to hear it, and I wanted to know why the committee didn’t try harder to avoid the appearance that it was that way.)

It’s the same reason it would’ve been a goddamn stupid idea to name New Dorm “Kalafus” after James Kalafus, because it would’ve looked like being annoyingly, cliquishly in-jokey about a particular student, even if — *especially* if — the people who did it weren’t actually friends with Kalafus and did it because it was cute, or ironic, or whatever. It would look like the portion of campus that was into this particular band or these particular people were declaring themselves to be more important than everyone else and other people *accepting it* for whatever reason, and that’s obnoxious. If you *do* have to have a filtering process that would be the sort of thing you filter *out*, for the same reason that “Kalafus” was filtered out of the New Dorm naming contest.

I would be the same way if they decided to make the mascot the “Garnet Chu Devils”, or the “Garnet Stobos”, or even the “Garnet Pterodactyls”, because even though SWIL and the Pterodactyl Hunt have been around for about ten times as long and have about ten times the number of people involved as Manticore has, it’d still be really fucking annoying to saddle the whole campus with a mascot derived from one random clique’s random thing that a lot of people probably don’t like. The Phoenix would only be acceptable because it’s been the official school newspaper since the 19th century, and even then it’s pushing it.

P.S.: So what exactly are these basic requirements? Was every other suggestion besides these four really not a tangible thing? (The “Mighty Oaks” was the only one listed in the Phoenix article, and that definitely *is* a tangible object.) How is SAAC deciding what “would” and “wouldn’t” make it through the Board of Managers? Isn’t the point of submitting it to the Board of Managers to let *them* to decide what they “would” pass? Would it be so bad to have completely open approval voting, create a ranked list of mascots, and then let the Board of Managers vet the list?

What bugs the hell out of me most about this is that it seems to me the only good reason to make sure we absolutely have a single mascot choice on the table by the time the Board meets in May is to make absolutely sure that the mascot gets pushed through before the next school year, even if that doesn’t accurately reflect the reaction from the students, alumni, faculty and staff. It’s really irksome that the people in charge of the mascot voting are themselves very obviously biased in favor of a mascot, and in favor of a certain kind of mascot (i.e. they desperately don’t want the new mascot to be abstract or nonrepresentational even if a lot of us like the “Tide” better than we like something that can be represented by a man in a suit doing a stupid dance), and that they’re doing everything they can to make this process rushed and highly choreographed to get the result they want.

And color me an asshole if you want, but I’m suspicious about the whole “computer glitch” thing. Wasn’t there a rumor circulating that the petition had been interpreted as giving them leeway to remove “No Mascot” from the ballot? Certainly they’re all aware of the devastating victory of “No Mascot” in 1996 and have publicly stated they’re doing everything they can to avoid that result this time. I do know, for a fact, that the “computer glitch” was neither corrected nor reported until many people had e-mailed in complaining about the lack of a “No Mascot” option (because my friends made up many of the many people). And I have a hard time imagining what kind of a glitch removes the last voting option from a page, then restores it and gives you the ability to re-vote at the same time. (That was too convenient — it felt a lot like an attempt at a “quiet fix” that they then decided to scrap.)

1. In Arthur’s opinion column, he writes: “Do you want to know why I’m pissed at SAAC? Because it’s transparently obvious that the only reason “Manticore” is on the list is because members of SAAC are friends with members of the student rock band Manticore.” He continues: “If there’s a different rationale behind making the choices what they were, I want to hear it.”

2. The official members of the band Manticore are Ben Saller ’06, Jason Horowitz ’07, James Crall ’07, and just recently filling in for James, who is studying abroad this semester, Joe Kille ’06. No one in the band claims to even know who was on the committee responsible for choosing the mascot, much less be their friends.

3. In the same edition of the Phoenix, the news article about the mascot election explained:
“All four choices — the phoenix, manticore, griffin, and gorilla —were picked from the 50-60 suggestions that were received. According to Heidi Fieselmann ’06, a co-chair of the SAAC, these four possibilities were selected by SAAC and the Garnet Club based on the number of times they were suggested and their appropriateness for Swarthmore.”
While it is entirely untrue that members of SAAC have friendly ties to members of the band Manticore, it is true that “Manticore” was submitted as a suggestion by numerous fans of the band. In compliance with the stated decision process, the “Manticore” was added to the ballot based on outstanding support as well as meeting the other criteria mentioned of “a ‘tangible creature’” and passing “through the Board of Managers or administration.”

4. Ben contacted Arthur by e-mail asking him why he accused Manticore members of unfairly using ties with SAAC to get the Manticore on the ballot when there is absolutely no evidence to support such a claim. Arthur responded that he was not stating this connection as fact, since it was mentioned in an opinions column, and that opinions are neither correct nor incorrect. However, you will note from the citation above, the “because” clause in Arthur’s statement implies that the first part (“it’s transparently obvious that the only reason “Manticore” is on the list”) is opinion, while the second part (“members of SAAC are friends with members of the student rock band Manticore”) is stated as fact upon which the opinion is based. With that supposed fact being completely unfounded, the rationale of the opinion must also be questioned.

Ultimately, the point is this: despite unsubstantiated claims by outraged students who failed to do their background research or submit their own suggestions, the overall selection process for the mascot candidates was held fairly and without any evidence of bias. Students who are upset about the choices apparently ignored calls for mascot ideas, or failed to rally sufficient support for those ideas. Despite the inital online glitch, the “None of the above” option is still avaliable on the ballot and anyone unsatisfied with the four options, or even the idea of a masot at all, is free to make this choice. And while suggestions such as the Manticore may seem like “ridiculously self-indulgent shout-out” that won’t be relevant in three years, the vote is now going to faculty and alumni who may sway in a different direction, possibly towards indifference.

But in the same way that tour guides on campus love to explain why a roll of Scott toilet paper is awarded to the winner of the annual McCabe Mile race, so would they years from now enjoy telling the story of how a three-person rock band won the hearts of fellow students and was immortalized as the Swarthmore mascot… that is, at least until the next election…

But mainly I care that the reason it was suggested in spite of all these factors is that it’s a reference to a STUDENT BAND. A STUDENT BAND COMPOSED OF UPPERCLASSMEN. It’s a self-indulgent, cliquish in-joke that, in a few years, will become a completely meaningless in-joke.

Joey Headset’s is pretty dead-on about what the acceptable, correct and honest way about getting a mascot approved would be. The fact that Swarthmore students seem to have a reflexive belief that the right way to approach any matter, no matter how trivial, is to find a way to exploit bureaucracy and politics into getting the whole community to do it together, rather than simply doing it yourself and attempting to lead by example, is one of the things that really really bothers me about this culture.

By comparison, though, this run at making a mascot is more screwed up and less appealing than the last one, both procedurally and substantively. It’s kind of hard for me not to say that.