U of I supporters may withhold donations over abandoning Chief Illiniwek

The University of Illinois' longtime halftime mascot, Chief Illiniwek, will make his final performance on Wednesday during the basketball game against Michigan in Champaign.

There's talk in Illini-land of major donors pulling their financial support of the school, but that'd be a big mistake.

Already, the U of I has been banned from hosting NCAA post-season tournaments in Champaign, and the University of Illinois' athletic director, Ron Guenther, has said there was talk that the NCAA would expand their postseason ban on Illini appearance in the NCAA basketball tournament on college football bowl games.

There was nothing my alma mater could do.

Besides, if you want to pull withhold funds from the U of I, there are a couple of good reasons to do that--if you so choose. Up at the Chicago campus, former Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers is a tenured professor in the education department.

Marxist anti-American radical Robert McChesney was hired at the Champaign campus in 1999 as a Research Associate Professor at the Institute of Communications Research, Graduate School of Library and Information Science.

(Try saying that title is one breath. Of fitting it on a business card.)

Both men are profiled in David Horowitz' 2006 book, The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.

Back to the nickname battles. Now that the University of Illinois yielded to NCAA pressure, the remaining skirmish is up in North Dakota, as the University of North Dakota, aided by the state legislature, pursues the preservation of its nickname "The Fighting Sioux."

The U of I, sans the Indian imagery, gets to keep it's nickname--so says the NCAA.

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