Bowing to demands from faculty and students, Dr. Richard Simpson, Dean of Columbia College, announced that Columbia's sports teams would no longer be nicknamed the Lions.
Feminists had denounced the use of Lions as a nickname and mascot. "Lions are serial rapists and baby killers," charged Meghan Jensen, president of The Columbia League of Humorless Feminists. "When a lion takes over a pride he enslaves all the lionesses and then kills all their offspring. Is this what Columbia stands for?"
Alejandro Rubido, a professor of Cultural Awareness, declared that lions were guilty of the worst sort of racial stereotyping. "Lions do not see minorities for what they are. When a lion sees anyone Hispanic, he does see an individual. He sees only lunch. To lions, Hispanics are simply big burritos. The cultural insensitivity of lions is intolerable."
"Are we violent predators?" asked Dr. Jayne Connelly, Associate Dean for Diversity and Dr. Enyinnaya Okechukwu, Assistant Dean for Cultural Empathy in an editorial in the student newspaper. "The Lion mascot glorifies violence, predatation and brutality. Lions are a symbol of aggressive heterosexism, cis-sexism, ableism, genderism, and classism. Not only must Columbia jettison the Lion as a mascot and nickname, the Bronx Zoo must post trigger warnings near their African Plains exhibit."
Simpson announced that Columbia's new nickname would be the "Prey." "This is an appropriate name for a football team that holds the NCAA record for losing 44 consecutive games." Simpson added that the new mascot will be an injured Wildebeest questioning its sexual identity.
In a related statement, Dr. Leonard Smith, President of Columbia University, revealed the university would also change its name. "The name Columbia sanctions Christopher Columbus, a mass murderer and violent racist, who enslaved native peoples, tortured them to exact gold and forced native women to have sex with his men."
Smith declared that University of Diversity Victims (UDV) would be the university's new name. When asked if the name University of Diversity Victims was ungrammatical, Smith replied, "grammar that is Eurocentric, hegemonic and oppressive has no place at a great University."
Sports commentators expect UDV will enjoy more athletic success than did Columbia. "Opponents will throw games," predicted ESPN analyst Kirk Cousins. " Do you think Princeton, Penn and Yale will risk campus riots precipitated by headlines such as:
•TIGERS SLAUGHTER PREY
•QUAKERS BEAT VICTIMS
•BULLDOGS DEFEAT DIVERSITY
However, Columbia athletic director Amy Johnson said that UDV would not compete thuggish, injurious and macho sports like football. Instead UDV plans to host "The Umbrage Games" where teams of victims will compete in events such as receptions of micro-aggressions and intensity of feelings bruised by dead white male authors..
Asked how UDV would be different from Columbia, Smith replied, "It was once said that Columbia was an Episcopal institution where aetheist taught Catholicism to Jews. UDV will be an institution where dialogue between people with different perspectives, values, and backgrounds will foster the unconstrained exploration, scholarly inquiry and civil discourse.
"UDV will value and encourage the expression of differing ideas and beliefs except those of climate change deniers, evolution deniers, or believers in intelligent design, innate gender or racial differences, a 6,000 year old earth and supply side economics.
"There is a difference between diverse opinions and wrong opinions. The later have no place in a tolerant, inclusive, and diverse academic setting. That is why we must also shun physicists who don't pursue string theory, professors who would rather teach than publish, and students who refer to ethnicity, race, religion, age, gender identity, sexual orientation, nationality, socio-economic status, or disabilities without first condemning racism, power, privilege, inequity and injustice."
UDV will be financed by tax exemptions, extractive tuitions and bequests from hedge fund managers to whom they will grant honorary degrees.