Amid controversy, UNLV student newspaper dumping Rebel Yell name

Las Vegas Sun

Editor's note: Ian Whitaker served as editor of The Rebel Yell as a student at UNLV before joining the staff of the Las Vegas Sun.

An ongoing debate about racist imagery at UNLV has claimed its first casualty: The name of the student newspaper.

In an editorial published Monday, the staff of The Rebel Yell announced it would seek to change the name of the newspaper by next spring, after months of prodding by university administration and student government.

The paper was founded as The Rebel Yell in 1955 when UNLV was still known as Nevada Southern, an outpost of the University of Nevada, Reno.

The name was a homage to a Confederate battle cry during the Civil War and became a way to express widespread belief among Nevada Southern students that the state’s northern lawmakers, in cahoots with UNR, were conspiring to crush the fledgling campus.

Students have changed the name numerous times in the following years, before changing it back to The Rebel Yell in 1992.

“We understand that changing the name now doesn’t repair the history,” wrote Rene McCullough, the paper’s editor-in-chief. “We would be shedding the name with the understanding that it no longer stands for who we are or who we would like to be.”

The staff also called on the university to throw out the university’s embattled mascot, Hey Reb!

The mascot, created in the 1980s by a local cartoonist, was based on 19th-century mountain men who explored western states like Nevada and California. Some students say the mascot more closely resembles a Confederate general.

The university doesn’t support that idea, however.

In a report published last year, UNLV diversity chief Rainier Spencer, who pushed the newspaper staff to change the name, argued the mascot was not racist because it was not based on Confederate imagery. Administrators have also expressed concern that getting rid of the mascot would damage UNLV’s brand.

But McCullough argued that a mascot based on a western mountain man was also offensive, citing the treatment of Native Americans at the hands of early pioneers.

Picking a mascot from “an era in which Manifest Destiny was the prevailing logic and mountaineers were conquering the west, displacing Native Americans from their homelands and pushing the French and Spanish from their territory, isn’t a better alternative, especially for Las Vegas,” she wrote.

Still missing from the debate is whether the university’s student body thinks the mascot needs changing. With the exception of a few meetings with campus staff, the university has made no attempt to gauge popular opinion on the issue.

An online poll organized by a separate campus group was not sanctioned by the university, and the results were not released.