What's Going on With That Logo?

What is the Selwyn House logo? To this question, most people would undoubtedly reply “the gryphon.” That would make sense. At Selwyn sports games, you will see a large gryphon prancing around, cheering on students wearing jerseys with large gryphons on them. In our school hymn, we recite that we proudly wear the gryphon on our chest when we sing, “et fièrement nous portons l'effigie du gryphon”. The problem with this is that our logo is not really a gryphon. If you look down at your blaser, you will see a lion on our crest, not a gryphon. In the top left corner of the website of this very newspaper, you will see a lion, rather than a gryphon. The gryphon is the logo for our sports teams, but not our school.

Though our crest has gone through many alterations, it has always borne a resemblance to a lion. In the 1980s however, our athletics departments headed by Rob Wearing were dissatisfied by this as one of our rival schools, LCC, infamously uses the lion as their athletics logo. So, he undertook the task of finding an alternative. He says he chose the gryphon “because it had the strength of a lion and the speed of an eagle.” Technically, our athletic logo is not actually a gryphon, rather it is a opinicus as it does not have front talons.

The most baffling part about this story is that no one seems to know that our athletics logo is the gryphon, but our academic crest is a lion holding a veritas banner. Due to this confusion and the fact that our school is so closely connected to the gryphon, I believe we should unify the logos. There should be a push to create a new school logo that replaces the lion with a gryphon. This red bull sipping logo would end all the current confusion while creating a greater school identity and would be well worth it. This initiative has been spearheaded by our own Mr. Trudeau who proposes that we create a new logo for our 125th anniversary.