Learning from the logo, and moving on
First published in the Wakefield Daily Item, December 7, 2022.
Wakefield’s logo war continues on (and on). Our intrepid resident culture warrior and esteemed Daily Item columnist gave us an update last week, informing residents that we’ve been made victims of a big, woke scam (“The art of the sham,” 12/1/22). It turns out, he passionately declaims, that all the ruckus, all the debate over respect and sensitivity for indigenous people, the whole thing was a sham so that the School Committee could replace the high school’s old Warrior logo with a generic new one – which, as it turned out, was not so generic but “plagiarized from Ohio State University.”
But was it all a sham? No, it wasn’t. Columnist Sardella’s contention that “the entire three-year process leading up to this point was a sham and a total waste of everyone’s time and effort” overshoots the mark and is simply not true.
The debate over the logo has indeed been difficult, and has seemed interminable, thanks largely to Sardella’s repeated wringing of the issue in these pages. But we also need to acknowledge that ultimately, in the bigger picture, this challenging episode has been valuable, as it represents a larger questioning and self-examination that the whole country has been going through. The forums with Native American panelists were not intended “to shame the community” (though that was the kneejerk reaction and distorted perception of many folks in the pro-logo crowd) but rather to spur and forward an important conversation, happening both locally and nationally, raising people’s awareness and sensitivity about our tragic history of horrible treatment of indigenous people. As I’ve written previously, these forums, as well as many individual conversations, were successful in changing my own view, and I’m not alone.
Now, I agree, as I’m sure many of my fellow residents do, that the process of choosing a new logo has been less than ideal. It took too long and resulted in design options that seemed to me not optimal, both in number and quality.
But I also sympathize with School Committee members, whose job it is to respond to issues, find a workable way forward, and to come to closure. There is no question that the issue of the logo caused a huge, painful rift in Wakefield, dividing friends and neighbors and rousing fierce passion on both sides. So, some closure on this would be good for the town.
Sardella apparently feels the opposite. For him, closure is bad. In fact, his main goal, in this and his other logo-focused columns, seems to be to provoke division and aggravate people’s anger and resentment, targeting Superintendent Doug Lyons and the elected members of the School Committee as the hated enemy in an us-versus-them battle.
It's easy to be a critic, constantly whining and complaining about change and railing against people who are trying to make progress, and whose responsibility it is to actually make policy. The latter activity is much harder, and while of course we should be paying attention to our leaders and evaluating their performance, we should also be mindful of both the toughness of the job and the best interests of the town in trying to move ahead.
A few thoughts about the Ohio State plagiarism issue. It’s unfortunate that we are where we are, but what strikes me is how things could have been different. I’m no intellectual property lawyer, but I work in publishing and issues of branding and copyright infringement are part of the everyday landscape.
I can see the aesthetic appeal of the Ohio State University logo. It’s a clean, simple, elegant design. I don’t know who created the Warrior design, but in emulating OSU’s logo so closely, the question of possible copyright or trademark infringement should have come up. This doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t have a logo that emulates Ohio State’s; but it does mean that the new logo needs to be different enough that it doesn’t constitute infringement. Or alternatively, it could resemble OSU’s logo more closely, but perhaps there could be some agreeable form of attribution (i.e. acknowledging publicly somewhere, somehow that the logo is modeled after Ohio State’s logo). Smart branding people know that in either case, it’s a subtle form of brand-building for Ohio State: the Wakefield logo gently, even if subliminally, reminds people of OSU.
This is why the “brand dilution” response from OSU doesn’t make much sense to me. It seems silly to suggest that a small-town high school in Massachusetts using an OSU-like logo will somehow dilute OSU’s brand. Certainly if it were a college or university’s similar logo, that might be the case, but a high school? And why wouldn’t OSU want promising, young high school students to have a positive association with their brand?
In any case, we need a new logo. Turning to the professional artists in the high school’s art department seems like a practical, reasonable idea, drawing on WMHS skills, experience, and resources to create a workable solution and to move forward.
© Jeff Kehoe