I agree with Dan that “Continentals” would be a better team nickname than the current “Colonials” for George Washington University. “Colonials” always suffered from the fact that it looks like “Colonels” at first glance. In fact, I think “the Fog” would be a better team nickname than “Colonials” as well, as a shoutout to the Washington neighborhood of Foggy Bottom, where the school is located. The return of the unofficial 1920s moniker “Hatchetmen” would also be cool, plus it would require the creation of “Hatchetwomen” for the women’s teams.
None of this should be colored by the fact that I am a graduate of GW rival George Mason University. (An excellent subtle put-down of GW, as a relatively prestigious and expensive private institution, but still not considered top-elite: “It’s the Harvard of safety schools.”) GW is one of the only schools where the most famous and controversial extracurricular activity is not athletics, but rather student government (which they pretentiously call “student association”), given that its student body is chock-full of people who think they will one day be president of the United States (so far, none have). It’s also one of the only universities in the country that still, in the month of February in the year of our Lord two-thousand and twenty-three, has an indoor mask mandate.
George Mason, meanwhile, checked out of the name-changing game in 2020, when university president Gregory Washington explained in an op-ed for NBC News:
We can neither run away from the atrocities committed throughout this nation’s history, nor from the fact that the core principles established by founders like Mason — like fairness, equality and liberty —were also the foundational principles employed by the civil rights and other movements.
At George Mason University, by keeping Mason in our name, we keep both lessons of his life active in our own quests to form a more perfect union — and certainly a better university.
Mason’s name will stay, as will his statue on campus. The university added a new memorial to Mason’s slaves when redesigning the plaza at the center of campus where the statue is located. The memorial incorporates student research on Mason’s slaves, and the university also added quotations from Mason to the base of his statue at the same time. As I wrote for our campus paper at the time, the memorial is a beautiful balancing act, and the university ignored calls for more radical measures.
If GW is going to change its team nickname, it should do so because “Colonials” stinks as a name, not because it’s supposedly insensitive. And if it’s looking for a better way to handle this sort of thing, it could look across the Potomac to GMU.