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‘Our campus and alumni community expressed an affection for Ben Franklin and John Marshall,’ campus spokesperson says
Franklin & Marshall College has decided to keep its namesake mascots, Benjamin Franklin and John Marshall, in response to strong feedback from the campus and alumni, a spokesperson confirmed to The College Fix.
The news comes after the private Pennsylvania college initially had considered replacing the Founding Fathers with a mascot that was “gender-neutral.”
“Our intention is to modernize our mascot traditions rather than discard them. Our campus and alumni community expressed an affection for Ben Franklin and John Marshall, as well as an interest in introducing a separate, versatile spirit mascot,” campus spokesperson Sally Badoud told The Fix via email this week.
Badoud said the third mascot will be a dog named Roland, who also has a history. Roland was the college’s first recorded mascot “who first appeared on F&M’s campus in 1896.”
Currently, F&M is in the process of finalizing designs, and the next step will be creating costumes for all three, she said.
The direction of the new mascot project has shifted since last fall when the college created its Mascot Working Group.
Initially, the goals included creating a “fun, gender-neutral” character for the new mascot, according to an archived version of the group’s webpage from September 2025. That term no longer appears on the working group’s page.
The archived page also did not mention either of the Founding Fathers. The current page does, stating that the college is “developing a dynamic, new mascot that reflects the heart of our community and the founding spirit of Ben Franklin and John Marshall, and the spirit of the Diplomat,” another former mascot.
When asked about the change in direction, Badoud mentioned the feedback the college has received since starting the project, including a campus-wide vote in September.
The working group’s webpage also highlights the feedback: “Students, faculty, staff, and alumni have expressed that we need a mascot that embodies our identity, brings energy to campus events, and builds a sense of pride — and this fall, our Mascot Working Group will take up that challenge.”
However, the news did draw pushback from at least one student. Writing at The College Reporter, a campus newspaper, senior Lily Andrey brought up the two Founding Fathers’ “ties to the institution of slavery.”
The worst of the two, according to her article, is former Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall, who owned 250 slaves and operated a plantation in Virginia.
Franklin was an abolitionist, but he also “profited from runaway slave ads and anti-abolition articles in his newspaper, The Pennsylvania Gazette,” according to the piece.
Andrey cited a “Legacy of Slavery Study Group Report” report commissioned by the college in 2022 that recommended “reconsider[ing] the physical statuary and naming of buildings on campus.”
“There is speculation that this decision was partially influenced by alumni and donors who do not want to see these mascots go. This is an embarrassing lesson to send to students: to succumb to those with financial power even if it goes against the ethics that the college claims to teach us as citizens,” Andrey wrote.
American history scholar and author Mary Grabar also expressed concerns about the situation but for different reasons. She is a frequent critic of efforts to erase historical figures’ names and images from college campuses.
“‘Reimagined’ is a word that is frequently used today to indicate that the real history is being wiped out,” she told The Fix when asked about F&M’s mascot project. “It’s part of an overall assault on our nation’s heritage and Western civilization by wiping out the names and legacies of white men who built them.”
The Lancaster, Pennsylvania college has had several mascots throughout its 200-plus years of existence. After Roland, in the 1990s, the college had the Diplomat, “a colonial-era figure with a large, molded face.”
“In 2007, ‘Ben and John’ debuted as the next iteration of F&M’s mascot tradition, appearing on athletic and other campus events through 2021,” according to the working group webpage.
MORE: Washburn University removes statues of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin
