Dec. 02--He is all bushy mustache and jutting chin below a pair of beady black eyes. His wide, gray hat perches at a tilt and his skin is the color of early peaches.
His name is "Hey Reb!" -- exclamation mark included -- and years ago he was supposed to be the end of a mascot controversy at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. These days he is the beginning of a new one.
UNLV, like many public high schools and universities, is examining its mascot. The shooting deaths of nine congregants at a black church in Charleston, S.C., at the hands of a man who posed online with Confederate flags prompted U.S. Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada to question the appropriateness of Hey Reb!
In response, UNLV President Len Jessup requested that Rainier Spencer, vice provost for Academic Affairs at UNLV and the school's chief diversity officer, analyze the mascot's history, a five-month project that led Spencer to some surprising conclusions.
"I was expecting to find a racist past that we have to apologize for," Spencer said. "I thought I would find traces of the Confederacy or something that had been erased over the years. That's the story in the air over here."
Instead, what Spencer found was this: "We just don't know our own history."
Spencer concluded that Hey Reb! is itself the result of protests against a mascot 30 years ago, a wolf named Beauregard bedecked in a soldier's field jacket and a military cap.
After a group of black athletes told the university president in the 1970s that they would rather not wear the symbol on their jerseys, the name Beauregard was dropped. A year later, the wolf got the boot too, replaced by the image of a colonial-era militiaman. UNLV then went a few years without any mascot until in 1982, when it settled on Hey Reb!.
