Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, September 16, 1994 TAG: 9409160060
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By ALLISON BLAKE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
As distinguished visitors like former Gov. Gerald Baliles entered the Donaldson-Brown Hotel and Conference Center for a luncheon Thursday, three workmen stood out front. Their job: to figure out how to take down a huge school seal on the building's facade that is insensitive to Native Americans.
Tech administrators are calling the seal an aberration that simply went unnoticed all these years.
In the top left quadrant of the seal is a frontiersman, or perhaps a farmer, with his foot resting on a fallen Indian. The scene apparently is an adaptation of the official school seal that formally was adopted in 1970. That official seal, itself borrowed partially from the state seal, shows the Roman figure Virtus. Her foot rests on the form of Tyranny, a fallen man. Roughly translated, the Latin motto depicted is "virtue over tyranny."
"Some students are concerned, and it's something we need to be sensitive to," school spokesman Larry Hincker said. "We don't know how in the heck it even got there."
The removal of the seal actually started in the spring, when a student pointed it out to Barbara Pendergrass, assistant to the vice president of student affairs.
"I'd never noticed it before," said Pendergrass, who coordinates multicultural affairs. "Once I saw it, I saw it was something that could clearly become an issue.
"It certainly is not a message we want to portray."
Pendergrass said she believed whoever created the seal, of either carved stone or cast cement, was not pulling a prank.
"I think whoever did it felt he was doing the [official university] seal," she said.
School administrators say they know of no other versions of the seal on campus, and from President Paul Torgersen down, the decision quickly was made to remove it.
The Donaldson-Brown center was completed in 1968, two years before Tech's name officially was changed to add "and State University" to "Virginia Polytechnic Institute."
Former Tech PR Director Warren Strother said changes in the seal accompanied the name change.
"I thought it followed the state seal," he said.
Torgersen said he'd walked past the seal at Donaldson-Brown for years and never noticed it - a comment echoed by many of his colleagues on Thursday.
"I was up there the other day and somebody mentioned it to me," said Lon Savage, the retired president's assistant who worked at Tech when the center was built.
"It was the first time in all my time at Tech that I'd ever noticed it," he said.
by CNB