The Little Orange

Cleveland State’s institutional mascot — I would assume that’s its role, anyway, as we have the newly unveiled Peering Viking for sports — is a green dot with a mortarboard:

I hate it. It’s vague, slapdash tripe that really should’ve served as a placeholder on the drawing board and not the actual drawing itself. They took the school’s color, put it on a smiley face, and sat a mortarboard atop its head, as if to say, “With Green, You’re Graduatin’!” Like we attend a convenience store.

I’ve always been thankful that the green dot is usually hidden away within the folds of CSU’s paraphernalia, on webpages only current students would ever have reason to access. Maybe administrators also understand him to be the awkward cousin not ready for society. Maybe he just appears in CampusNet, and is therefore mascot only of my bill-paying and enrollment.

Well, today I logged in to CampusNet to find this:

Class. Happy MLK Day!