Union College has settled on its new nickname and mascot, trading the Dutchmen for the Garnet Chargers. The change announced Thursday follows months of development. The private college in Schenectady says the name was chosen from a list of more than 400. Garnet has been Union’s official color for more than 150 years, while “Chargers” refers to Schenectady’s history in the development of electric power.
Mark Land, Union’s Vice President for Communications and Marketing, spoke with WAMC's Ian Pickus.
So ultimately, how was Garnet Chargers decided on?
We started this process last fall and in February, after a lot of internal debate, we made a decision to publicly share the news that we were going to explore whether it might be time to move on from the previous nickname. And so, we sent word out to our community asking them to offer us suggestions and they responded like we knew they would, with a lot of passion and we ended up at one time we had 2,200 different ideas. Then when you boil that all down, we ended up with 400 or so unique ideas. Then from there we had an internal team working on this. We went through the names, a lot of discussion, a lot of debate and we narrowed it down to two dozen or so that we then put through an evaluation criterion that we had set up for this purpose. That got us to four names that we presented to the community in May and asked folks to rate their choices. And so, the community came out, essentially the same way that our internal discussions did. Garnet Chargers was the clear favorite among the four finalists. And so, we really feel like being able to lean into the color garnet, which has been our school color for 150 years and this notion of charger both as to honor Schenectady, but also this the sense of momentum and energy that really are good metaphors for our college community, it just felt like kind of a natural combination for us.
And just for the record, what were the other three finalists?
The other three finalists were Garnet Hawks, Garnet Griffins, and Garnet Storm.
I imagine it's kind of a tricky time to make a change like this. There's a lot of focus on the importance of names and history and that kind of thing. Why was it time to move on from Dutchmen?
You know, it's a good question. You're right, there's been a lot of talk these days and you see these situations coming up in a lot of different venues. For us, the timing was really good because we were last fall, we were about to embark on our broader branding update anyway, and few things speak more to a colleges brand and marketing than the nickname and then an accompanying mascot and a lot of cases. And so, we knew from our experience that there was a sense that while Dutchmen and Dutchwomen was popular among some of our alums, it may not have been resonating quite as much with our current students and we really haven't had a mascot to use for a decade or more. So, we decided that if we were going to look to refresh the union brand, we should look at everything. And so, this wasn't done out of any sense of political correctness. We don't find anything offensive with a Dutchman/Dutchwoman name, we were just looking to see whether or not there are alternatives out there, it would do a better job of speaking to our community now and in the future and give us a couple of more marketing and branding tools as we move forward.
So the “U,” the famous Union College “U,” has a lightning bolt in it now?
It does and the block “U” that everybody especially associates with our athletics programs, it's not going away. We did create this additional mark to go with a new nickname. So, you'll see them both in use, but we wanted to have something when we unveiled to help people kind of get excited, to get a sense of the potential of using the name and the various marks that go with it.
When does this take effect?
We are as of right now the Garnet Chargers.
I imagine there's a lot to be done to move the new name and logo in, right? I mean, you've got uniforms, signage, that kind of thing?
That's correct. The athletic uniforms and things will be a little further down the road because those decisions and orders are made well in advance. We're already for example, on our online athletics merchandising site, you can already get Garnet Chargers gear that went live today. We're going to be working on signage around campus. We’ll be looking for ways to work the name and the word mark and a logo in as many places as possible over the coming weeks and months and then later in the fall, one thing we didn't do today is we didn't announce, we didn't unveil a mascot but we plan to do that. And so, that'll be coming later in the fall. So, that will give us another opportunity to get people excited about the name and another chance that can provide us another rallying point, if you will.
Well, I didn't go to Union College but when you announced the initiative back in February, I suggested the Union College Chesters in honor of Chester Alan Arthur, the president who attended. Now you gave us the top four, how close was that to being in the top five?
I’ve got to tell you; I'm trying to think off the top of my head. I'm not sure that the Chesters made the top 25 to be honest with you, I'm sorry to say.
I'll try again next time.
