Stepping on the Seal
Southwestern's storied Seal contains a few more stories than most people realize.
Right in front of the Lois Perkins Chapel, you are faced with a large representation of the Southwestern University seal embedded in the sidewalk. This space is surrounded by bushes that almost encapsulate the seal in this space, making it feel like a sacred space of its own.
Now, if you are a person uninitiated into the culture of Southwestern, then you would just continue walking. But if you are a current student at Southwestern University, you must take a different path, and walk on the sidewalk around the seal.
Southwestern students avoid stepping on the seal because students believe that while you are a student here, you cannot step on the seal, or you will not graduate in 4 years. Students treat the seal as if it has its own affective agency, its own power to make people feel and do things. Students go out of their way to avoid stepping on it, regardless of how much it may alter their path.
This is a practice at many universities and has been one at Southwestern since this seal was built. I have even heard once that someone who stepped on it graduated in 3 years, but who knows? I do not know of anyone who has taken the risk themselves, so I cannot personally verify or decipher truth from myth. I am personally not brave enough to tempt fate and test this theory, nor do I know anyone who will.
The practice is so widespread that many students, including myself, walk around the seal every day without paying much attention to it, just steering clear out of habit.
Interestingly, one of our seemingly timeless student practices only dates back to about 30 years ago and is not questioned by the student body here, or likely at many other universities with a similar practice. But as many memory scholars and geographers have noted, when things are so present to us in our everyday landscapes, they become almost invisible, and we often do not question or even pay much attention to them.
But today that changes, as we stop to take a closer look at the official Southwestern University Seal and its most prominent iteration in the physical seal on the Academic Mall.
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This entry is not just about how a memory object or place becomes forgotten once it is naturalized into the landscape, but about why that matters with this particular memory object. That’s because the Southwestern seal, treated with such reverence by students, actually contains in it references to Southwestern’s historic racist ties to slavery and the Confederacy, and the University has never successfully reconciled itself to these histories or their legacies in the present.
The Space Itself
The Southwestern University seal is located outside of the Lois Perkins Chapel and was built in the early 1990s, as part of the mission to transform the center of campus to the Cullen Academic Mall we know today. The seal itself is made of Texas pink granite, with the official Southwestern University Seal in the center, surrounded by 4 rings. The innermost ring is plain and simply surrounds the seal. The outer 3 layers consist of commemorative plaques for donors. The minimum donation was $150, in honor of
the 150th anniversary of the university in 1990. This amount qualified you to be a member of the Sesquicentennial Club, whose names were carved in the plaques in the farthest ring from the center. Other donor groups commemorated are the President Council, the Rutersville Society, and the University Club. A photo below shows the preliminary plan for the creation of the seal in 1990, which looks very similar to the actual space that we still see today.
History of the Seal’s Creation Itself and the Root Colleges Honored on It
The official Southwestern University seal itself was created in 1872, commemorating the creation of Southwestern University, and the combining of four previous Methodist Universities that were in Texas in the mid-1800s: Rutersville College, Wesleyan College, McKenzie College, and Soule University. These four names are on the seal interlocked in rings, covered by a shield with the institution's new name: South Western University, and the date of its creation, 1872.
Additionally, inside of the shield reads “Non Quis Sed Quid”, which is Latin for “Not who, but what.” This is the official school motto that Southwestern University uses in many of its communications. Historically, the motto represented Southwestern’s commitment to access to the possibilities of higher education by emphasizing that what students did with their educational opportunities was more important than who they were and what family or class they came from.
This is a great democratic ideal, but until Southwestern was integrated in the late 1960s, it did not apply to Black people, belying the fact that Southwestern’s ideals around inclusivity and access have always implicitly excluded certain people.
And that’s not the only racist history embedded in the seal. The four root colleges celebrated in the seal—Rutersville, Soule, Wesleyan, and McKenzie--all have their own racist histories as well. This is something covered more extensively in other Placing Memory entries critiquing how the root colleges and early University leaders such as F.A. Mood are remembered on campus, but here it is worth thinking about this again because most students do not know these histories and simply take the seal’s mention of the root colleges for granted.
Put simply, each root college was entangled with slavery before the Civil War, with the Confederacy during the Civil War, and the White Southern response to Reconstruction after the Civil War. That legacy was carried into Southwestern in its early years, essentially baking it into the DNA of the institution.
The Seal Today
Southwestern still has not properly reckoned with or reconciled with these histories. Even more important, Southwestern has not worked to understand how these histories shape the present, particularly how they relate to recent racist incidents on campus. We still reside in an institution where my classmates feel comfortable writing hateful names on whiteboards and not truly even understanding how it may hurt someone else.
Institutions should acknowledge their racist pasts, and use the process as a way to create understanding around such awful histories, to prevent these types of incidents in the future, thus further contributing to the creation of a space where every student feels safe and welcomed. If a student is confronted with a microaggression and a university is not equipped to handle it, victimized students are left to deal with things in isolation, which can lead to very negative repercussions for the student and their sense of well-being.
The other most prominent tradition concerning the seal is the graduation photos taken on it. Many graduates from Southwestern will pose on the campus seal that they had previously been avoiding the 4 years that they were there, almost as a rite of passage. Stepping on it signals that you are finally done with college, so you no longer have to avoid this spot like other students still going through what you are celebrating completing.
But these graduating students are not stepping on the seal as an act of resistance against the complicated histories it represents. It’s actually just the opposite: stepping on the seal as a graduate does not challenge the histories it naturalizes, but reinforces them.
It is ironic that the same symbol that creates a sense of belonging through shared ritual is also a symbol of exclusion. The only reason it works that way is that most Southwestern students don’t even know the exclusionary histories right under their feet.
