The University of Amherst mascot isn't the lamest, but students are still asking for Lord Jeffery Amherst to leave even more than TU students with Captain 'Cane, and for good reason. "Lord Jeff," as he's colloquially known, was a pre-Revolutionary War British commander who advocated the use of smallpox blankets to kill off Native Americans. Germ warfare is a large part of what contributed to the widespread death of most Native American tribes–obviously having a proto-white-supremacist "Lord Jeff" as a mascot is a touchy subject for many students of minorities.
But the mascot is, ironically, only the representative of the real problem at the school: a wide acceptance and toleration of racism. In response to "Black Lives Matter" protests, anti-protests of the thinly veiled racist slogan "All Lives Matter" and the disgustingly petulant/ironic "Free Speech" sprang up.
Those complaining about how dismissing "Lord Jeff" would be a crime against free speech are missing the point: students who love Amherst and want to continually make it a better place wish to distance themselves from an awful figure of history, not sanitize that figure. In fact, leaving Lord Jeffery Amherst as the mascot would do more to sanitize his image than taking him down. I am sure that if this conversation were about historical figures more widely recognized as unsavory, it would be a much shorter conversation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/us/with-diversity-comes-intensity-in-amherst-free-speech-debate.html?_r=0
–Kyle Doud
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