If You’re Going To Change Your School’s Mascot, At Least Have The Decency To Get Weird

The University of San Francisco is a staid enclave of higher learning, a rectangular hodgepodge of buildings gerrymandered to fill 19 square blocks of prime city real estate. It is a culturally and ethnically diverse educational operation and has been so for decades. Also, it has no football team to interfere with the peace and quiet of the place, and its men’s basketball team has not been of national consequence in 45 years. In other words, it minds its business. So far, so good.

So it came as a bit of a jar when the school decided last Friday to change its mascot from a cartoon Spanish don—his name is Don Francisco, and he has both the requisite outsized biceps and a jaunty pencil-thin mustache of the kind last worn by Ronald Colman seven decades ago—to a wolf, an animal which is not particularly indigenous to any part of the city save maybe the Financial District. Even then they could have just gone with Rapacious Bastards and sold a few more t-shirts when they roll out the new mascot next spring.

It has taken four years to implement this move, which began with a student government proposal to ditch the mascot in 2022. That became a petition signed by approximately 400 students, who correctly viewed the mascot as a representation of the Spanish colonization/brutalization of the indigenous population four centuries ago. All good, there; the student body should be the deciding vote on anything on campus that impacts mostly students. It’s their house, after all.