One Leader Wants to Move Beyond His University’s Controversial Mascot. Here’s What He Has in Mind.

More than a decade ago, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign gave the boot to its Native American mascot, Chief Illiniwek.

But fans of Illiniwek, many of them alumni, weren’t ready to move on, and the university didn’t introduce a new logo to take its place. The result? The Chief, as the image of the headdress-wearing person is referred to by many in Illinois, is still alive and well in an unofficial capacity.

Seth Perlman/AP Images

But the university’s chancellor, Robert J. Jones, proposed a series of talks to clear some of the miasma that surrounds the mascot. “As a society, we will not find new solutions to our most pressing challenges if we cannot even talk about them,” Jones said in a news release. “That’s what we envision for this series. These conversations are a first step in understanding different perspectives and finding common ground to move us forward and beyond the issues that divide us.”

Jones previously told The Chronicle that Chief Illiniwek would not return to the university in any capacity. “You make sure your readers understand this,” he said. “Put it in bold or italics if you want. Absolutely not: The Chief is not coming back.”

The series will take a novel form: The first talk in the “Chancellor’s Critical Conversation Series on Native Imagery,” which takes place on Tuesday, is closed to the news media. The university will also bar audio and video recording.

Robin Kaler, a university spokeswoman, said the rationale for that decision was to ensure people felt comfortable speaking their minds. Instead of an open-mic format, the event will feature presentations from Kevin Gover, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, and Dan Maloney, the last person to play the Chief when the university retired the mascot, in 2007.

After the two present, the audience will break up into small groups for discussion. The venue accommodates only 200 people, and those seats are already taken. The university also sent individual invitations to activists on both sides of the debate. Polls of students in recent years suggest that most favor bringing back the mascot.

Tuesday’s event follows a contentious year at the university, where protests over the image surged. The sides — most notably, the student government in opposition and a group called Honor the Chief supporting Illiniwek — don’t agree on much, but they do agree the university is at fault.

Anti-Illiniwek activists say that the university hasn’t done enough to rid the community of the Illiniwek image and that a new mascot should be picked to replace him. Supporters of the image say the university didn’t do enough to push back against the NCAA, which in 2005 threatened to bar Illinois from postseason competition if it kept Illiniwek on board. (Two years later, the university shelved Illiniwek.)

The two sides collided in a protest at the homecoming parade in October that saw protesters briefly block the flow of the procession.

Gover, who declined an interview request from The Chronicle, has served as director of the National Museum of the American Indian since 2007. He also served as assistant secretary for Indian affairs in the U.S. Department of the Interior from 1997 to 2000 under President Bill Clinton.

Maloney is an alumnus of the University of Illinois and now works as a financial adviser in Indiana. He told The Chronicle that he is not sure what to expect from the talk and that he is going into the event with “zero expectations.” Maloney, like other supporters of the Chief, said the Illiniwek image was meant to honor Native Americans. As part of the training process, he said he had learned about the tribes that used to live in Illinois.

He told The Chronicle that he thinks university officials had hoped that undergraduates at the time of Illiniwek’s retirement would graduate and that people would move on from the issue. “The reality of it,” Maloney said, “is that when you have one of the largest alumni bases in the world, of which 89 to 90 percent of them are in favor of this tradition, it’s not going to go that gently into the good night.”

Chris Quintana is a breaking-news reporter. Follow him on Twitter @cquintanadc or email him at chris.quintana@chronicle.com.