GWU moving on from nickname
University will drop ‘Colonials’
George Washington University will soon choose a new nickname for its athletic teams, dropping “Colonials” after years of pressure from students who said the name was entangled with violence toward Native Americans and other colonized people.
The campus community, in the heart of the nation’s capital, has narrowed a list of 10 replacement candidates to four finalists: “Ambassadors,” “Blue Fog,” “Revolutionaries,” and “Sentinels.”
The university will hear feedback until April 28 throughout what it is calling “Moniker Madness” and a new nickname will be announced by the end of the semester, said Ellen Moran, the university’s vice president for communications and marketing.
The school’s mascot will remain George 1 — George Washington’s head, which a uniformed student wears.
The change comes amid a reckoning of the fraught history of team names across the American sports landscape. It comes after a push by students and a victory for Native American activists last year when the NFL team in Washington became the Commanders, shedding a name that was a slur against Indigenous people.
“The more we engage and the more we help the community envision what the new moniker options might look like and give the community a chance to try out what the future might look like, we’re getting a lot of positive engagement,” Moran said.
The Colonials name has been part of the university’s identity since 1926, replacing the Hatchetites, Hatchetmen, Axemen, and Crummen (for Henry Crum, a football coach).
Opposition to the Colonials nickname erupted in 2019, when the student body voted to remove it, and the “Anything But Colonials Coalition” was formed, according to a report a university moniker committee released in 2021.
The next year, student organizations delivered a petition to the university president’s office seeking a name change
“Colonials were active purveyors of colonialism and were complicit in militarized and racialized violence, oppression and hierarchy,” the petition read. “Colonialism has been historically and contemporaneously built upon usurping land, labor and autonomy from racialized communities through dehumanizing violence and suppression.”
Some alumni, however, remain attached to the university’s old name, Moran said. Survey respondents with an affinity for the Colonials associate it with revolutionary spirit and fighting tyranny, according to a report.
Proponents, especially older alumni, have argued that it defines Americans during the British colonial era, said Denver Brunsman, an associate professor of history at the university who is a member of a committee that was formed to discuss the name.
Opponents view it as synonymous with violent colonizers, said Brunsman, a George Washington scholar. The term is also historically inaccurate, he said, because the first US president and his contemporaries would not have identified as colonials.
“It was a term that he associated with narrow-mindedness, with a certain provincialism,” Brunsman said.
In 2022, after the committee released its report, the university announced it would discontinue its nearly 100-year-old nickname. “The moniker can no longer serve its purpose as a name that unifies,” the report said.
High schools, colleges, and professional sports franchises have been grappling with racially charged nicknames and mascots for decades.