On May 13 of this year, Hanover’s electorate made its way to the polls for the ballot election held in conjunction with the annual town meeting. The most headline-grabbing result was Evan Gerson ’27’s dramatic loss by a 3.5-to-1 margin to the incumbent Selectman Athos John Rassias. Much was also discussed on campus about Article 2, a significant change to Hanover zoning policy which passed narrowly. It will be interesting to see how it affects Hanover’s landscape and housing prices in years to come.
However, Article 4 was another profoundly significant measure on the ballot that day – approval from the town of the College’s proposed “Wayfinding Project.” The College has publicly articulated its desire to carry out the “Wayfinding Project,” erecting signs across campus to assist with navigation and identify buildings, since June 20th nearly a year ago. Since Article 4 passed by an enormous 971-294 margin, the College now enjoys broad discretion over the areas in which it can place public signage without explicit and individual town approval. With this electoral victory for the College in hand, it is likely that Dartmouth will begin the process of building its variety of planned signs soon.
This project responds to a legitimate need and pursues an admirable goal. It is good to improve the ease with which visitors and newly-arrived freshmen can navigate Dartmouth’s campus. Many other American colleges and universities have deployed similar signage to great success. However, those colleges’ signs contain a key element strikingly absent from the proposed designs Dartmouth has put forth: the college shield. Brown’s shield is emblazoned on every one of its signs. Not only do Penn’s wayfinding signs include its shield etched into metal, the shield’s chevron is even cleverly framed by a portion cut out. It stands perfectly to reason that signs which tie a campus together and announce buildings’ respective campus affiliations would bear the insignia of the aforesaid campus.
While this is certainly disappointing, it is decidedly unsurprising. The College has been in the gradual process of phasing out the historic and heraldic shield which used to represent our College on the Hill from the moment the D-Pine was designed in 2018. However, the Administration’s covert efforts to strip the school of the shield that generations of Dartmouth students recognized have ramped up to be increasingly aggressive over the space of just the past year. To make an investment in signage of this size and magnitude with no trace of the shield is indicative of this spirit.
In comments to Valley News and elsewhere, the VP for Communications who helped spearhead the 2018 project which produced the D-Pine claimed that it was developed in part because of the need for a symbol with greater flexibility in various online contexts. As he noted, it is absolutely true that the D-Pine is more legible than the shield when compressed to a small size in applications like social media icons. The VP went on to explicitly claim that the D-Pine “was not replacing the shield,” that “administrators aren’t forbidding the use of the shield now,” and that “[t]he shield has been around since the 1940s and it will continue to be around” in remarks made during those same interviews. It was thus introduced as a supplement to the shield for use in certain specialized applications.
However, in only a few years use of the D-Pine dramatically expanded beyond the limited scope it was given upon its creation, and students exposed to modern College iconography can only conclude that either a major change in graphic design policy took place in the interim which was not disclosed to the public or the promises made in those interviews were always bold-faced lies.
Seemingly everything the College has printed in any kind of official capacity has lacked the shield for years. The D-Pine and the Lone Pine are the only icons one sees on modern business cards and stationery. The shield has been banished from everything from routine dorm room fliers all the way up to the annual Endowment Report. Beyond just web avatars and icons, the shield is completely absent from nearly Dartmouth’s entire online presence save a few archived documents. Student-athletes on teams which once prominently featured the shield on their respective uniforms (e.g. hockey) now receive gear with it absent.
It is bad enough that the school does not seem to produce any new representations of the shield, even in contexts where it is entirely appropriate and preferable. However, the College’s intent to replace the shield altogether is made even more apparent when one reflects on the myriad situations in which Dartmouth has spent financial resources and employees’ time actively removing the shield from places where it previously existed. The individual “Code Blue” emergency telephones across campus once featured a prominent image of the shield. Every last one has been stripped away with a D-Pine put in its exact place. McNutt Hall’s prominent “Undergraduate Admissions” sign which faces the Green was replaced earlier this year, and the only apparent reason was because the previous one bore a shield. Older maintenance vehicles which feature the shield painted on the side have them now partially covered by decals; our beloved and historic shield is thus treated as something obscene which demands being hidden from view. Not only does the website of the Office of Communications not acknowledge the shield’s existence, it even has the audacity to call the D-Pine “the most formal brand mark”: an apparent slight not only to the shield but also to the College’s even older elliptical seal.
Beginning around Spring Term of last year, the Dartmouth Coop ceased receiving new merchandise bearing the shield. To the lamentations of some staff, it began to sell a slate of items (including umbrellas, glassware, sweatshirts, pennants, and more) clearly patterned after those which they previously sold bearing the shield with some replacement (often a stylized Lone Pine) in its place. In everything from hats to mugs, the ’28s exhibited a clear preference for the shield when equipping themselves with Dartmouth gear (this was particularly evident by observing the baseball caps ’28s wore during Orientation). The Coop thus burned quickly through the supply of shield-adorned merchandise it already possessed, which stands all but depleted now. When the ’29s arrive on campus in the fall, the Coop will no longer have anything to offer them with the symbol which was the preeminent icon of Dartmouth for their forebears.
Like the proverbial frog being boiled in slowly-heating water, we are being taught to accept the D-Pine as a replacement for the shield gradually over time. Any one announcement that the shield would be removed would provoke student and alumni backlash, but each of these individual changes individually does not arouse enough blowback to cause significant issues for the College. This is a dishonest and sneaky way to go about changing something as significant as the College’s brand identity, and it betrays a lack of respect for students and (especially) alumni. The fact that these changes have gone largely uncontested likely emboldened the College to accelerate this movement, which would explain the disproportionate number of places where the shield has disappeared this year.
If one may try to venture a guess, the primary source of objection to the shield is likely the presence of the American Indians on it. This is a questionable ground for complaint: the founding of our College partly with the intention of educating American Indians in Christian theology reveals that Eleazar Wheelock, the 2nd Earl of Dartmouth, and others who were themselves Christian recognized even in the 18th Century that American Indians have souls worth fighting to save. It is true that the College did not entirely succeed at enrolling as many American Indians as its founders originally planned. However, after President Kemeny pledged to strengthen the presence of American Indians at Dartmouth, the shield became a more appropriate symbol for the modern College, not less. The shield is evocative of the expansion of Western Civilization across the American continent, which helped to bring about the existence of the uniquely free country in which we are so lucky to live, work, and study today. The shield fits within the context of a long history of the use of Indians in the College’s iconography (after all, the shield itself is patterned after the College’s seal). And a symbol which has already been long established as a symbol of the College and which has united many classes thus far ought to be kept in place for further generations.
Shifting from an idealistic argument to a practical one: First, the shield’s decades of use have already effectively established it as a symbol of Dartmouth. Abolishing it forfeits a great deal of brand recognition unnecessarily. Second, the entire expensive project which produced the D-Pine was entitled “Speaking With One Voice” and it was given the stated aim to unify the College’s branding. While it succeeded in standardizing certain elements of College branding (like typefaces), replacing the shield with the D-Pine runs directly counter to this aim. All the graduate/specialized schools (Guarini, Tuck, Thayer, Geisel) are represented by shields patterned after the Dartmouth shield: their founding dates are present and wavy lines represent the Connecticut River at the bottom. For Dartmouth to abandon its college-wide shield thus wrecks the potent symbolism of these parallels.
For all those reasons, the best way forward for the College’s branding would be to retain the existing shield. However, if most students and alumni still think our historic shield is unacceptable, we can have a campus-wide conversation about how best to proceed. We should not, however, allow it to be whisked away in the night by the Administration. Some legitimately decent proposals have been put forth: Jonathan Good ’94 made a serious proposal for an overhaul of the shield back in 1995, although it never went anywhere. If the American Indians really are the only problem, the least invasive change possible would be to remove their headdresses and make them appear to be generic students. There is room for debate and legitimate conversation about the path forward, but that conversation must be had in good faith.
Any shield at all would be preferable to keeping the un-heraldic D-Pine as the chief symbol of our College on the Hill. It is embarrassing and it reflects badly on Dartmouth as a school when the “Ivy League” is discussed and a grouping of seven historic shields and our D-Pine is shown. It is simply not evocative of a College as historic and prestigious as Dartmouth, and thus it ought to be constrained to the limited uses for which it is best suited.
This issue goes beyond just the D-Pine, however. One of the most significant issues with Dartmouth’s administration is the fact that so many of our administrators spend their time seeking out innocuous parts of student life to turn into problems, then crudely bulldozing those things. Once the source of offense is gone, so is their interest in it; the College is left with no replacement. Those actors believe they are changing campus culture for the better, but the manner in which they go about it just leads to an altogether erosion of culture itself. In this way, we are now the only Ivy League school without an actively-used shield because the D-Pine already exists, it was privately deemed “good enough,” and the Office of Communications does not seem to care enough to design a new shield.
That same spirit is amply evident in the fact that this is the 50th consecutive academic year that we have spent with an interim, placeholder mascot. As soon as the name “Indians” was abolished, the same people who rallied around its removal lost their apparent gusto for school mascots and we have been stranded with “Big Green” ever since. It is hard to claim that this has not had an adverse impact on school spirit – it isn’t as easy to rally people around a color. The primary focal point right at the center of campus is the Baker-Berry Library. At the top of its famous clock tower is an empty spike where prior to 2020 there once was a weathervane before it was removed for “includ[ing] images that do not reflect Dartmouth’s values.” While there were some rumblings about building a replacement right after it was taken down, things have been virtually silent on that front ever since; it appears to be the case that the Administration is willing to tolerate leaving Baker decapitated in perpetuity as a preferable alternative to the old weathervane. Winter Carnival lost the Queen of the Snows competition, the ski jumps, and more: new activities have not adequately replaced them. The same could likely be said of Green Key’s loss of the chariot races and Hums competition. And the Administration (and campus culture) over the past 55 years has banned far more Dartmouth songs than new ones have been written.
For all these reasons, students should push to delay the wayfinding signs until the Office of Communications can settle on an appropriate symbol of the College with which to adorn them. Otherwise, our campus will be stuck with a costly mistake which will last decades. Beyond that, students should be cognizant of (and resistant to) the same sort of malignant progressivism which gave our College those signs’ design in the first place: the sort which bans things first and which forgets to replace them at all.
“malignant progressivism,” an extremely apt phrase!