Illinois makes its second NCAA appeal on behalf of Chief Illiniwek

The University of Illinois on Tuesday chastised the NCAA for being "arbitrary and capricious" when it created a policy requiring that the university drop its Chief Illiniwek mascot and logo before it could be host to future postseason competition.

"This appeal is about the institutional autonomy of NCAA member schools," UI Board of Trustees Chairman Lawrence C. Eppley said in a 15-page appeal to the NCAA's Executive Committee, which adopted the policy. "It is about flawed rules and process."

The appeal, the university's second since the policy was adopted last summer, was received at the NCAA's Indianapolis headquarters Tuesday morning, said spokesman Bob Williams. He declined to comment on its contents, saying he had not yet seen the appeal.

Bradley University in Peoria, which calls its teams "Braves" but uses no Indian images, and the University of North Dakota also have second appeals pending.

The tradition of a student dressing as "Chief Illiniwek" began on UI's flagship Urbana-Champaign campus in 1926. Clad in buckskins and headdress, Chief Illiniwek dances at halftimes of home football, basketball and volleyball games, but he has not appeared at road games or NCAA tournaments for several years.

Illinois, Bradley and UND were among 18 schools deemed by the NCAA executive committee to be using imagery or mascots that were "hostile and abusive" to American Indians. The organization decreed that any school continuing to use the images after today would be barred from hosting postseason competition and could not display the image at any postseason tournament.

Illinois appealed and an NCAA staff review committee in November upheld the "hostile and abusive" classification of Illiniwek, but allowed the school to keep its Illini and Fighting Illini nicknames.

Since the original decision, the Florida State Seminoles, Central Michigan Chippewas and Utah Utes have been allowed to keep their names and imagery because of support from those tribes from which the nicknames were derived. UI's appeal argues that those reversals show the policy was not well reasoned.

"In haphazard fashion, the policy underwent ad hoc revisions to 'exempt' various institutions," the appeal said. "The most famous of these revisions is the approval of a namesake tribe rule to avoid a confrontation with Florida State University," which has the blessing of some Seminole tribes in Florida.

Williams said the staff review committee will look for new information in Illinois' new appeal and, if it is satisfied by the university's arguments, could remove it from the list. If not, the appeal likely would go to the Executive Committee, which meets on April 27, he said.

While lauding the staff review committee for reversing the decision regarding the Illini nicknames, Eppley criticized it for giving "short shrift" to the university's arguments that any decision regarding the use of Chief Illiniwek should be made by the school, not the NCAA.

"The SRC decision consisted largely of boilerplate responses heavy on opinion and anecdotes, but light on facts and argument," the appeal stated.

Illinois also argues the policy violates the NCAA's own bylaws and claimed the staff review committee "trivialized" a 1995 decision by the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights that said Chief Illiniwek's existence did not create a racially hostile environment at UI. None of the other schools subject to the policy have such a finding, the appeal said.

"That unique factor should be weighed carefully by the NCAA, not dismissed out of hand," the appeal said.

The university asked the NCAA to postpone any enforcement, should the appeal be denied, until the end of the current academic year, said UI spokesman Tom Hardy. The NCAA had said earlier that it would postpone any enforcement action regarding Bradley and UND at least until the April executive committee meeting.

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On the Net:

Read the appeal: http://www.uillinois.edu/trustees/NCAA%20Appeal/NCAA%20Appeal%202006 .pdf

NCAA: http://www.ncaa.org