THE LEDGER-STAR
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Friday, September 16, 1994 TAG: 9409160712
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B4 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Virginia News
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG, VA. LENGTH: Medium: 60 lines
Virginia Tech officials have decided to remove a school seal insensitive to American Indians that has adorned one of its most public buildings for 26 years.
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 the seal.
University administrators called the seal an aberration that 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.''
This spring a student pointed the seal out to Barbara Pendergrass, assistant to the vice president of student affairs.
``I'd never noticed it before,'' said Ms. 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.''
She 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.
The Donaldson-Brown center was completed in 1968, two years before Virginia Tech's name officially was changed to add ``and State University'' to ``Virginia Polytechnic Institute.''
Former Virginia Tech public relations director Warren Strother said changes in the seal accompanied the name change.
``I thought it followed the state seal,'' he said.
University president Paul 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 Thursday.
``I was up there the other day and somebody mentioned it to me,'' said Lon Savage, a retired president's assistant who worked at Virginia 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. ``I've never really paid much attention to the seals, and I understand there were some variations on the seals.'' by CNB