By DAVID KARP, Times Staff Writer
Published August 12, 2005
[University of Hartford]
"Whether they mean it as a tribute or not," Walter Harrison said, "historically, white people have misinterpreted Indian culture."
Each day, Walter Harrison scans 100 or more e-mails from Florida State University fans. They call him all kinds of names.
Harrison, the chairman of the NCAA Executive Committee that passed a policy last week penalizing FSU for its "hostile and abusive" American Indian mascot, has felt this kind of fury before.
At the University of Michigan more than a decade ago, Harrison mediated a battle between American Indian students and a prestigious secret society on campus, called Michigamua. The society adopted warrior rituals such as beating on drums.
American Indian students considered the practices insulting. They wanted them stopped and the club's name changed. Club members, whose alumni included former President Gerald Ford, thought they were honoring Indian culture.
The biggest challenge was handling the passion on both sides of the issue, Harrison said. That's the same challenge he faces in the FSU controversy.
"Certainly what is similar is there is a lot of heat on the subject," he said. "And what we need is a lot of light."
Harrison, then the NCAA vice president for university relations, forged a compromise in Michigan: The club could keep its name, based on a mythical band of Indians, but it had to stop its customs.
Looking back, Harrison said he learned that "whether they mean it as a tribute or not, historically, white people have misinterpreted Indian culture."
Second, he said, he discovered that Indian symbols have become so ingrained in culture that Americans don't realize their origins.
Harrison's exposure to different cultures began at childhood. He is Jewish, while his town in Pennsylvania was almost entirely Christian. But because of his name, people didn't know it.
"I would hear people say things that were horribly anti-Semitic, not realizing I was Jewish," he said.
In high school, Harrison worked on projects with the NAACP, where his mother, who is white, was president. For two years while he was a teenager, his parents moved to New York so his father could undergo experimental treatment for Parkinson's disease. They left him to be raised by close friends, an African-American couple who were Baptist.
"I thought it helped me understand a lot about how different cultures are from each other, and how much we all have in common," Harrison said.
As an undergraduate at Trinity College in Hartford, Harrison worked to recruit more black students to campus.
After three years as a captain in the U.S. Air Force, he got a master's degree from Michigan and a doctorate in English literature from the University of California at Davis. He became a scholar of American literature and wrote his dissertation on baseball's influence on American culture.
A baseball fanatic, he grew up rooting for the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Brooklyn Dodgers, who were beloved by his adopted black parents because of Jackie Robinson.
Harrison has watched games at all but four major league baseball parks. (Tropicana Field is his least favorite.) He said the mascot of the Cleveland Indians particularly bothers him as an example of a negative stereotype.
In 1998, Harrison became president of the University of Hartford, a private school in Connecticut, whose mascot is the Hawks.
