Amherst College makes mammoth mascot announcement
After officially dumping their unofficial mascot last year, Amherst College announced the school’s first official mascot Monday. And it turns out that Russian scientists aren’t the only ones who want to bring back woolly giants from the Ice Age.
That’s correct — after more than 9,000 votes from alumni, students, and faculty, Amherst College’s new mascot is the Mammoths.
School officials announced they would be soliciting suggestions for a mascot last October. In January 2016, the college decided to stop referencing their longtime unofficial moniker, Lord Jeff, amid student protests over the eponymous 18th-century British general’s advocacy of using of smallpox as germ warfare against Native Americans.
“Amherst College finds itself in a position where a mascot—which, when you think about it, has only one real job, which is to unify—is driving people apart because of what it symbolizes to many in our community,” Cullen Murphy, the chair of the school’s board of trustees, said at the time.
Following more than 2,000 mascot submissions last fall (including strong pushes for Moose and Hamster, the latter of which is an anagram of Amherst), a select group of alumni and students eventually narrowed it down to five finalists: the Fighting Poets, the Mammoths, Purple and White, the Valley Hawks, and the Wolves.
Over 11 days in late March, the Mammoths won out with 4,356 of 9,295 total votes.
“You thought they were extinct? Think again,” the school said in an announcement video Monday.
In a statement announcing the decision Monday, the school cited submissions that characterized the prehistoric creature as an “impressive,” “stupendous and monumental” and “near mythic” mascot option that would “speak to Amherst as fierce competitors” — but also “highly social, herbivorous animals suggesting gentleness.”
They also noted that Amherst College’s Beneski Museum of Natural History houses a Colombian mammoth skeleton (pictured in the above video) that was discovered by one of the school’s professors.
“Affection for Amherst and belief in what our College represents motivated our committee during this entire process and we welcome the mammoths as the new mascot for Amherst College,” the school’s mascot selection committee wrote in a statement.
According to the school, the new mascot will debut this upcoming fall.
It’ll be quite the matchup if Amherst ever travels out to compete against Indiana University–Purdue University Fort Wayne.
