At the end of last year, the UC Office of the President came under fire for an effort to put a new face on the historic logo of the University of California. It did not succeed. Now, the Cal Athletic Department has introduced a coherent and new face for the sports teams on the Berkeley campus.
I sense this effort will be successful not only because of the consistency of the designs, but also because there is enough proximity to tradition that most Cal fans will accept it. By utilizing a selection of former Cal athletes and recognizable names, Nike sought to give the project a sense of legitimate input. Along with the success of a number of current Cal teams, a new football stadium and coach, this new branding effort is part of a larger marketing effort by Cal Athletics.
But what was missing for me was not design but rather something more fundamental — the role of Cal student leaders and those students tied to Cal tradition. Athletics used a major corporate entity to produce this new look. But what role did Cal students who are the day-to-day stewards of Cal tradition play in this process? What role did student leadership on the campus have in the decision-making process?
The Cal athletic program was created by students in the 19th century and managed by them until 1960, taking us to eight Rose Bowls, national championships in crew, baseball, basketball and football. The student government chose our colors, and in 1895 it chose our mascot — the Golden Bear from the image on the state flag as Cal was the only UC campus.
Today, all the trophies won by the ASUC’s athletics program are proudly displayed by the current program in Haas Pavilion, and soon others will be displayed at Memorial Stadium. But unfortunately, at Memorial Stadium, these items are far from the heart of campus where students can see them regularly and far from where students have easy access on gamedays. Perhaps they should be displayed at the renovated student union like the Stanford Axe will be when it returns?
But the great irony of all the success of the athletic program is that it is supposed to be a student program. And the reason that the students were persuaded to turn over the athletic programs at Berkeley and UCLA to the university was to avoid the ills of money and television that were sweeping college athletics in the 1950s.
I would have hoped that before we chose to abandon the historic “C” of the University of California — one whose image was built overlooking the campus by students in a driving rainstorm early in the last century and remains an icon on the hillside, on every uniform of the marching band and on the hats of the baseball team — students would have been consulted. If they had been consulted, Nike would have known that at every major timeout in Cal games where the band is present, they play the “Big C March” whose words honor our historic symbol: “On our rugged eastern foothills, stands our symbol clear and bold, the Big C means to strive and fight, and win for Blue and Gold … ”
But sadly, I doubt few if any in the athletic department know the words. I would have hoped that the historic Bear adopted by the students in 1895 and on logo apparel sold at the Cal Student Store would have been included in the new branding, rather than a new, stylized bear. I would have hoped that a student athletic program would have come to the official representatives of the students and presented its proposals and discussed it with them before making decisions on Cal tradition.
I will assume that student-athletes were consulted, but they only represent themselves and are not the official student representatives of the Berkeley campus. After all, the color and tradition of athletics is all about what general students bring to the stadium in support of student-athletes; just ask Cal coaches Mike Montgomery or Lindsay Gottlieb. Without the student marching band, Rally Committee, the dance team, cheer team, yell leaders and Oski, not to mention student fans, and the music created 100 years ago by student competitions (including the “Big C March”), and all the enthusiasm they generate, Cal Athletics could well be just another corporate entity vying for market share in the Bay Area.
Let’s hope that as the nation watches the increasing flow of money into college athletics and the problems that attend it in what are considered respectable programs, Cal will be more thoughtful about the path it takes. At the Rally Committee banquet I attended recently, athletics could have learned about that Cal spirit and tradition, if anyone from the department had attended.
I will be sponsoring the “Cal Traditions” DeCal class this coming fall. Athletics is welcome to audit. Let’s keep a careful eye open, or before you know it, someone on campus unconnected with Cal tradition will decide that we are no longer the University of California or Cal and will advance a marketing scheme to make us “Berkeley” for the sake of branding (see the “Berkeley Identity” style — identity.berkeley.edu/guidelines). Just another disconnect in an administrative landscape populated by fewer and fewer people connected to “The Spirit of Cal.”
Nadesan Permaul is a former president of the Cal Alumni Association and a former director of the ASUC Auxiliary.
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