My Favorite Seal: Seed Sowers and College Closures
"What Possibilities!"
Jean-François Millet. The Sower. ca. 1865, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD.
_____
Disclaimer: I do not advocate for throwing oneself out of a window as a solution for any problem.
______
I was doing a lot of thinking about the visual identities of higher education (based specifically on my interest in senior cords - more on that in a forthcoming piece) and I got really lost in looking at logos and seals for colleges and universities. The only school that I can think of that uses them interchangeably is the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), which really works for them. In my opinion,it’s a gorgeous seal and a perfect logo. This article by Steven Heller is a really nice summary of the purpose of seals and logos and their uses across academic institutions for those that are interested.
(I also happened upon this insanely exhaustive directory of university seals, logos and flags, part of the “Flags of the World” website which is an exhaustive source of university flags, logos and seals, sponsored by CRW Flags, a Glen Burnie, Maryland based flag manufacturer. I’m impressed that this exists and tickled by the dedication. People are wonderful.)
In my experience working with and around higher education, institutions can be particularly protective and specific about the use of their seals. Though an individual organization may rightfully be very selective about how a seal is used, there really isn’t a ton of differentiation between them, and they’re not meant to stand out necessarily. The RISD seal exists as an outlier especially because it is designed by a faculty member who was a calligrapher and therefore is visually dominated by one fluid, lovely single-motion stroke. Most seals for colleges and universities, however, are sort of what one would expect. They’re not necessarily tasked with being interesting or distinct. They’re used for formal purposes, they’re tied to history, and they don’t have to bear the weight of being “versatile” as Heller puts it. The imagery of most seals feature shields, wreaths, lamps/lights/candles (Illuminating! Truth!), etc.
A few do really stand out, mostly because they eschew the typical symbolic imagery in favor of something naturalistic. The Stanford University seal is a centered redwood tree set against a hilly landscape, a focused image that is not unlike the State of California’s iconic bear flag. I rather liked the Dartmouth college seal at first glance as it contains a narrative sort of illustration of individuals emerging from a pine grove towards a building, backed by a tall tree and bathed in rays of light from a book (Illuminating! Of course). Closer inspection of the seal reveals that it contains a representation of two Native Americans and there’s a complicated legacy when it comes to the relationship of the college and this population. Comments on the “assimilationist history” of Dartmouth were recorded in stories of the relatively recent design overhaul of the school by Champions Design. Finally I came across the University of Oklahoma seal, and it stands out as something really interesting, especially today.
The University of Oklahoma seal, is, first of all, so sweet. The simplest way to describe it is a man striding across a field, one hand tossing seeds behind him into the ground. It stands out amongst the pack firstly because it lacks rays of light, flames, eyes, candles, towers, books, or any of the other familiar symbols that appear in most other university seals. The figure in the center isn’t Apollo or Athena, but a humble seed sower placed firmly in a relatively realistic landscape. It’s pastoral and quiet in an unexpected way. It lacks the type of bravado that a large state university with serious athletics might choose for other methods of visual representation.
My first thought on “The Seed Sower” of the University of Oklahoma was that it reminded me of several Realist paintings: “The Gleaners” by Millet, “The Stone Breakers” by Courbet, and my all time favorite of the bunch, “The Floor Scrapers” by Caillebotte. Millet also has a painting called “The Sower” which is essentially the same imagery as the seal. They’re all mid to late 19th century French paintings, reactions to Romanticism, ordinary people in ordinary settings doing ordinary work. They portray the working class as heroic, strong, or at least deserving of depiction, criticize the upper-class, emerged from the French Revolution, and so on and so forth. I wasn’t able to find the exact date that the seal was created, but the University was founded in 1890, so some time shortly after that puts the creation of the seal in the right timeline to have been influenced by these artworks and directly in the time period of American Realism art movements such as that of the Ashcan School.
Unlike “Floor Scrapers” or “Gleaners” or “Stone Breakers”, the figure in “The Seed Sower” seal is meant to be interpreted as one specific person. The tiny mustached face of the figure is based on David Ross Boyd, the first president of the university, who used half of his first year’s salary to buy the first trees for the then-barren university campus. He then planted and watered them himself. According to the stories, he stepped off the train in Oklahoma and greeted by the vast expanse of nothingness exclaimed “What possibilities!” The legend of his generous deed inspired not only the seal but also paintings that hang in the state’s senate and sculptures on the University’s campus.
A wholesome little story about a sweet little mustached figure on a college seal ends there until one starts to think about the nature of leadership in colleges and universities today. I was having dinner with a friend recently who works part-time for a college and we discussed the recent closing of The University of the Arts and all of the chaos that ensued: students reportedly finding out their own schools was closing over an Instagram post before being notified via email, a town hall meeting that never happened, the realization that a 67 million dollar campaign had just completed two years prior, etc. With frankness and a chill she commented that people at the top should be “jumping out of windows,” a reference to mythological stories about suicides committed by those on Wallstreet during the financial crash of 1929 that kicked off the Great Depression. While such stories are still more the stuff of legend than factual history, there is no shortage of actual accounts of individuals who did commit acts of self harm as a result of large scale financial disasters.
Certainly no one should lose their life, nor feel like their life is worth taking, due to poor business decisions, and certainly this comment was hyperbole. However, there is a deserved amount of outrage amongst the students, the parents of students, alumni, faculty, staff, and community members that are subject to the abrupt and violent changes that are brought on by the closure of a college or university, especially when one is sudden, and especially when no one is left to answer for the mistakes that may have been made. My thoughts on this led me to think about the seminal Zoe Leonard piece “I Want a President”. The piece, created in 1992, saw a resurgence of interest during the 2016 presidential election in the United States. It’s interesting to think of not only what it means for the leaders of our country, but also the president of any organization, colleges and universities included. Leonard’s gallery, Hauser and Wirth, quotes her as saying “‘I am interested in the space this text opens up for us to imagine and voice what we want in our leaders, and even beyond that, what we can envision for the future of our society.” While there are surely leaders across academia who remember their own personal hardships and try to help those beneath them in power and status and who are not in fact “clowns”, “liars”, or “thieves”, I’m caught by the tension that exists in the line “Always a boss and never a worker.” We don’t need leaders to throw themselves out of windows when things go awry, but could the collective outrage be mitigated if we saw them as workers (seed sowers, stone breakers, floor scrapers) when the labor is humbling but necessary?
Being at the helm of an institution of higher education is probably the hardest job in America and it’s not always within the power of one individual to right the ship when things are going poorly. There are so many factors that can lead to the financial ruin of any institution and a forthcoming enrollment cliff will certainly mean that many more colleges and universities will close despite the best efforts of many well intended individuals. According to some reports, we’re set to lose one college at the pace of one a week (to put that into perspective, however, that’s 52 a year compared to close to 4,0000 degree granting institutions total in the United States). We’re peppered with stories about university presidents riding around on private jets and vanishing in the midst of a college closing and hiring union-busting lawyers, but it would be valuable to hear about the efforts made, at both successful and unsuccessful institutions, that are “put that person on our next seal” worthy. There surely is labor involved, it’s just not so romantic and dreamy as scattering seeds around a field. While we shouldn’t expect college presidents to necessarily sacrifice half their salary (to pay for trees, or to plant or water them, or for any purpose), and while we shouldn’t expect them to step out into a bleak financial landscape and exclaim “What possibilities!”, I wonder if there is a version of leadership during failure that we can find admirable. We give so much credit to those who have vision and ambition at the start of a thing, even if it is delusional or misguided. The end of something, the upending of lives, the losing of jobs, the disruption of education, is never a good thing. However, great, ambitious ideas either last or they don’t; if we could collectively see the worth in someone guiding a college through a graceful downfall, if we could recognize the value in having a terrific end-of-life doula for our institutions, would we create favorable circumstances for things to end more ethically? I actually don’t know what stance to take on this and don’t want to claim one; highly-compensated leaders in any industry should be held responsible if they make uncompassionate/disconsiderate/selfish decisions that affect people's lives adversely, but also we can’t really expect someone to stick around and help out if they know they’ll get run out of town on a rail due to things going poorly that are out of their control.
The cruelest irony of the leaders we want and the leaders we deserve is that we may not even be able to recognize them once they arrive. The real “Seed Sower” of the University of Oklahoma, David Ross Boyd, has been memorialized and romanticized in heraldry and monument, but the “realism” with which he is depicted stands in stark contrast to how he was received in his own time. By some accounts, the people of Norman, Oklahoma were outraged at the initial actions of the president to plant trees across campus (until they discovered it was at his own expense, of course). Later, a governor of Oklahoma accused him of being an aristocrat; Boyd left Oklahoma for New Mexico. I don’t have robust enough knowledge of Boyd to say what the truth is, but either way the trees weren’t enough to cement his legacy in his own time as an altruistic man of the people.
Throughout history, a seed sower is an iconic image. It’s referenced often in Christianity, in painting, and even in science fiction (I thought about Octavia Butler a lot while writing this, especially because I just referenced her in a previous bit of writing that I did; “God is Change”). The fact that the University of Oklahoma seal takes the form similar to a tiny bit of Realist painting is humorous because it’s much more like a Romantic painting in the end: it’s a glossed over version of reality, it’s imaginative, heroic and subjective. It’s much more like an ancient symbol than anything else, and in that sense it’s the perfect seal, no rays of light cascading from books in the sky required. More than being just the perfect seal, it would be a great logo, if we use Steven Heller’s logic. He mentions that a logo should reflect a school’s tradition while hinting at its future and the symbol of a university leader sewing seeds is not just about cultivating a learning environment from an empty landscape. After all, so that they may be better prepared to plant in the heat of the day, a farmer may burn their field at night.