Participation Is Not Authorship: F&M’s Mascot Deserves a Real Design Process
The announcement that arrived in my inbox last week left me less interested in which of Franklin & Marshall’s three proposed mascots might win and more concerned about how the College has decided what winning means.
Dog. Friendly Monster. Lightning Bolt.
The F&M community will soon vote among those choices. Only afterward will the winner receive a name, further design development, community feedback, and professional refinement. That gets the creative process backward. A vote has been made responsible for a decision that requires creative judgment.
Community participation matters. Students, alumni, faculty and staff possess lived knowledge of Franklin & Marshall—its stories, traditions, memories, and attachments. More than 200 community members submitted ideas.
But participation and authorship are not synonymous. A liberal arts institution should understand that distinction. F&M teaches that serious work requires inquiry, context, expertise, criticism, revision, synthesis, and judgment. Not every difficult question is resolved by polling the room. Creative work deserves the same respect.
We would not vote for a theatrical set and then write the script. It would misunderstand the work.
Those 200 submissions could have served as remarkable cultural research. What histories resurfaced? What does “Diplomat” mean today? Which ideas could belong only to F&M?
Creative leadership should have found the intelligence inside that abundance, developed the strongest possibilities into fully realized characters, refined them, and then taken responsibility for a choice. Community input should have informed that process throughout.
Instead, more than 200 expressions of how this community imagines F&M have arrived at: Bolt. Monster. Dog. Those are not yet mascots. They are ingredients for mascots. A mascot has a name, personality, story, and relationship to its institution. Those are not decorative details added afterward. They are the decision.
You cannot vote “dog” into emotional significance and workshop affinity later. You cannot reverse-engineer affinity.
If the concepts are unfinished, the provisional images necessarily fill in choices that are supposedly not yet made: expression, attitude, proportions, and personality. The placeholder becomes part of the ballot. It’s almost as if the college realizes how difficult it is to ask us to vote on something that we cannot yet emotionally connect with. Affinity does not emerge from a tally. It develops through encounter, repetition, humor, ritual, argument, and memory.
The Phillie Phanatic and its contemporary, Gritty are instructive. The Phillies and Flyers did not ask the public to choose a category and develop it later. They studied Philadelphia, its fans, and its culture; then created characters specific enough to provoke strong reactions. The danger was not that people might hate them. It was that nobody would care.
The deeper missed opportunity is that F&M already has a distinctive and unique identity in the Diplomats. That identity has never been fully realized as something warm, energetic, ownable, and emotionally legible. Students and alumni have long done some of that work themselves through the affectionate shorthand “Dips,” which many of us carry as a badge of honor.
The creative challenge was to build on that affinity—to ask which concepts could make being a Diplomat feel more alive, specific, and culturally coherent. How a dog, friendly monster or lightning bolt meaningfully advances that identity remains unclear.
A strong mascot should not merely decorate an identity. It should help explain it.
“It’s only a mascot,” some may say. If so, why spend more than a year convening a working group, soliciting 200 ideas and asking the entire F&M community to participate? The College has already decided this matters.
So, when the ballot arrives, I will be thinking about more than whether I prefer a dog, monster or bolt. I will be thinking about whether this is the kind of decision that should be made by ballot at all—and what F&M risks losing when participation is mistaken for authorship.
I hope others will too.
Ryan M. Jones ’06 is an attorney and founder of TheCarmichael, a Philadelphia design studio focused on storytelling, brand identity and placemaking. He was one of more than 200 people who submitted a mascot concept and writes not to relitigate his submission, but as an alumnus with a strong affinity for F&M and an interest in its brand identity and positioning.