T-shirts that read “Keep Peruna Puny”—that’s one of the suggestions thrown out during Tuesday’s Student Senate meeting to let the university know that students aren’t happy with the increased visibility and role of Liberty and Justice, the two mustangs donated to SMU by Madeleine Pickens’ National Wild Horse Foundation.
Many senators feel that Peruna’s role as the official University mascot keeps diminishing.
Student Body President Jake Torres brought up the discussion during a senatorial forum. Torres, a Peruna handler for the past three years, said he’s frustrated by the situation.
Torres, along with athletic officials and university administrators, sat on the committee that worked last year to incorporate the two mustangs into SMU while preserving Peruna as the official mascot. The committee sought to concretely define the mustangs’ roles, and Torres said it finalized a written agreement.
“So far this year athletics has basically ignored almost all of those agreements, and they’ve gone back on everything they said they would originally do,” Torres said.
A bigger issue, Torres said, was that the University was ignoring the wishes of students and the rest of the SMU community.
“I do think that this is a threat to everything that we stand for,” he said. “I think that if the administration gets away with this then it’s a very, very easy thing for them to continue to just ignore what we have to say and just do whatever they want.”
To demonstrate one way in which the written agreement had been broken, Torres said that the mustangs were not supposed to be on the Boulevard, and yet two weeks ago they lead a parade down the Boulevard.
“[This] is completely against what they originally said they were going to do,” Torres said. “It was based off of June Jones’ wishes; he said that he wanted the mustangs to led the parade, and they just did it without asking anyone else.”
Torres spoke to SMU officials about the mustangs’ increased role and how it was violating the written agreement. He told Senate that when he spoke to them, “they had their apologies, but they were just going to continue to do what they were doing.”
According to Torres, Jones has said that the football team has rallied around the mustangs and that their presence gets the football team excited and pumped up for the game. Torres said he doesn’t believe that the team really cares about the mustangs.
Student Senate passed a resolution last year declaring that Peruna was the only official school mascot.
During Tuesday’s meeting, Dedman II senator Alex Ehmke wondered what further action Senate could take.
“I don’t think we could have passed anything more direct,” he said, “so my question is ‘What do you want us to do?'”
Other senators suggested getting student opinions through petitions and polls. Some suggested t-shirts or buttons. Chief of Staff Alex Mace suggested Senate write legislation “condemning” the university for the broken agreements.
Law senator Jason Sharp suggested Senate bring in a representative from the football team to find out how they feel about the mustangs. Mace suggested Senate conduct a poll to find out how students feel because he knows many students don’t really care one way or another about the mustangs.
Lyle Senator Claudia Sandoval suggested Senate use Homecoming to gauge the reactions from the SMU community.
Senate as a whole did not formally decide on a specific course of action. Torres did say that would begin writing the legislation suggested by Mace.
“I think that if we as a body ignore this, and we allow those big horses to continue to become more and more important and Peruna’s role to be diminished,” Torres said, “then that is basically going to help erode a lot of the power and authority that we have because we’ve already said that we don’t necessarily want these horses.”
