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Sparky not an Artichoke Thu Mar 14, 2013 7:30 PM I, for one, don’t understand all the hubbub over the new Sparky. The complainers should be happy that their beloved mascot is a Sun Devil — not an Artichoke. The Scottsdale Community College people actually have something to complain about. — Alan Todd, Phoenix
A year or so after Scottsdale Community College was created they told the students to pick a mascot for the new college. They told the students that American was a democracy and we could have an election to pick the college's new mascot. We put several choice on the ballot which included the artichokes, rutabagas and marijuanas. The administrators also put their suggested mascot on the ballot which was a silly cowboy which I think may have been the gauchos??? I thought the cowboy was a really stupid idea for a mascot, because after all Scottsdale Community College despite being a Maricopa County Community college is on the Salt River Indian Reservation and for at least a century the America cowboy has been an aggressor and abuser of the American Indians. I voted for the marijuanas as the college mascot, because I thought it would be cool for the college to the the first college on the planet to have an illegal drug for a mascot. Of course the administration didn't like it when the artichoke won the election and Scottsdale Community College became the first college on the planet to have a vegetable for it's mascot. Since we didn't pick the "right" mascot the tyrants that run Scottsdale Community College told us to do the election over again, I guess hoping that the 2nd time around we would pick the "right" mascot, i.e. the gouchos or whatever that silly cowboy's name was. Personally I thought the artichoke sucked as a mascot and I would have preferred having an illegal drug was our mascot, but because the administration told us we could have an artichoke for a mascot, I voted for the artichoke in the second election. Most people felt like me and in the second election the artichoke won by a landslide. Of course that even ticked off the tyrants in the Scottsdale Community College Administration more and pretty much started a war between the administrators and the students. The administrators shut down the student government and ordered the silly goucho or cowboy to be the college official mascot. Roger Brooks who was then the president of the Scottsdale Community College student government continue his war against the administration at SCC and eventually got elected to the Maricopa County Community College Board of Directors where he was successful in canning that silly cowboy mascot and replacing it with the artichoke which we voted for years ago as the mascot. Recently I went back to SCC and read the "official" version of the history of the Artichoke mascot. It looked like it was written by the propaganda office of a communist dictatorship and only vaguely came close to saying what actually happened and painted the SCC Administrators as good guys rather then the tyrants they were. One way to verify this would be to go back and read all the newspaper articles that were published in the Phoenix Gazette, the Arizona Republic, the Scottsdale Progress (now the East Valley Tribune) and of course the Scottsdale Community College student newspaper. |