Professors Protest University Of Wyoming Slogan Praising Cowboys. Then This Happens.
“The world needs more cowboys.”
In the summer of 2018, roughly two dozen professors at the University of Wyoming (UW) railed against the school’s new slogan, “The world needs more cowboys,” making claims that the term “cowboy” had racist, sexist, homophobic and genocidal undertones. But instead of backing down, the university’s Board of Trustees stood unwavering, voting unanimously to keep the slogan, and that decision paid off. As The Wall Street Journal reported:
The university bookstore sold out of “the world needs more cowboys” T-shirts the first week they hit the shelves. Responding to demand, the University of Wyoming put the slogan on other products and sold roughly 5,000 items in the first six months. Between July and December 2018, royalties were up $38,000 over the same period in 2017 as the school licensed 143 different products with the tagline to third-party vendors … A campaign ad video had half a million views online—nearly the equivalent of Wyoming’s state population. … Enrollment numbers won’t be in until later this year, but “it’s pretty clear there’s been an increase in interest,” spokesman Chad Baldwin says.
Campus Reform noted that at the time of the professors’ protest, associate professor of kinesiology and health Christine Porter ranted, “I am not the only person for whom the word ‘cowboy’ invokes a white, macho, male, able-bodied, heterosexual, U.S.-born person. The history of cowboys, of course, is much more diverse than that racially, and presumably also for sexual orientation. But the image — what the word ‘cowboy’ means off the top of almost everybody’s head in the U.S. — is the white, heterosexual male.”
The Journal reported that UW’s Committee on Women & People of Color had reacted to the marketing campaign by saying it “risks casting UW as a place where only people who identify with white, male, and able-bodied connotations of ‘cowboy’ belong.”
UW student Jessie Lea, who writes for Campus Reform, told Fox & Friends, “I was born and raised in Wyoming … and I’ve never once related the words cowboy with ‘genocide,’ ‘xenophobia,’ or anything like that … The first is that these professors are completely missing the facts and the fact is when they claim that this slogan is sexist and it’s xenophobic, cowboys exist all over the world. But beyond that, my second reaction is they’re completely missing the point. The point of the slogan is to say the world needs more people with the cowboy spirit and that’s the spirit of hard work, determination, self-reliance, and integrity.”
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