The C-word effect.

CAMP HILL, Pa. - College presidents spend much of their days concerned with fund-raising, campus crime, and faculty problems, but this semester, L. Jay Lemons, president of Susquehanna University, has been occupied with the C-word.

That's Crusaders, as in those knights in not-so-shining armor who rampaged through Europe and the Middle East from the 11th through the 13th centuries, slaughtering millions of people, mostly Muslims and Jews, in the name of Jesus.

Or is that crusaders, as in people who dedicate themselves to pursuing a noble cause?

Since 1922, Susquehanna, a liberal arts college in Selinsgrove, has fielded athletic teams nicknamed the Crusaders. Questions about the appropriateness of the nickname have been raised for four decades, but the issue came to a head recently and the Susquehanna board of trustees directed Lemons to hear out students, alumni, faculty, and staff, and recommend to the board whether to keep or drop the name.

To that end, Lemons has been holding meetings in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and New York asking two questions: What are the advantages of keeping the name? What are the disadvantages?

At a country club near Harrisburg, Lemons said the controversy has been simmering for so long that he considers it to be Susquehanna's "Groundhog Day, because it refuses to go away."

Conversations have been civil and constructive, he said, but intense. Name-changers say the nickname is offensive to all Muslims and Jews, but especially to the 16 self-identified Muslims and 48 self-identified Jews in the student body. He said name-keepers see the issue as "political correctness run amok," and some alumni have threatened to withdraw their financial support if Susquehanna benches Crusaders.

The issue is muddied by the origin of the nickname. Lemons said that in the 1920s, Susquehanna's football coach, Luther Grossman, set out to clean up intercollegiate athletics. "Colleges would hire professional players and essentially pay for their victories," he said. Lemons said a sportswriter for the Philadelphia Public Ledger called Grossman's campaign a crusade and referred to Susquehanna's athletes as "little crusaders."

The name stuck, and in ensuing years, university iconography often included a mounted knight brandishing a lance. Then, about 1960, Susquehanna football players began wearing helmets with eight-pointed Maltese crosses, which are based on the crosses used in the First Crusade. Sometime in the 1980s, the school began distancing itself from the imagery of the medieval Crusades, but the nickname remained.

Lemons is accompanied at these sessions by Linda McMillin, who teaches medieval history at Susquehanna. She says that while the Crusades had some positive results, including stimulation of trade, "they were essentially religiously sanctioned violence against Muslims, Jews, and heretics."

One of the worst atrocities was the Rhineland massacre of 1096, in which prominent Crusaders took part in the slaughter of Jews. "The incident is considered the beginning of rabid anti-Semitism in Europe," McMillin said, "and the victims are still remembered in memorial prayers recited on Yom Kippur."

She also pointed out that crusader came along almost simultaneously with jihad, which among Muslims can mean a holy war waged against nonbelievers. She added that jihad, like crusader, has many meanings, not all of them bellicose. "It's important to remember in this debate that the word crusade falls on Muslim ears the way jihad falls on western ears," she said.

McMillin said she has taught about the Crusades for 25 years, and each year has raised the issue of the propriety of the school nickname with her students. "Before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, their reaction ranged from support of the name to indifference. But after 9/11, many students became uncomfortable with the name and its impact on their fellow students who were Muslims and Jews. And they realized that it was a word that carried emotional baggage."

Other colleges have recently retired the Crusader nickname. Wheaton College in Illinois dropped it in 2000. College president Duane Litfin said the Crusader symbol was "unrelievedly negative" to many Muslims and Jews. "They view the Crusades as negatively as most of us view the infamous Spanish Inquisition, and they can no more understand choosing a mascot that seems to glorify the Crusades than we could understand a mascot related to the Inquisition."

Citing the "changing international meaning of the term crusader," Point Loma Nazarene University in California changed its teams to Sea Lions in 2003. The University of the Incarnate Word in Texas scrapped the name in 2004, citing the possibility of future lawsuits over discrimination and harassment. Eastern Nazarene College in Massachusetts changed in 2009, saying Crusader did not send a message of Christian love.

About 15 other colleges use the Crusader nickname, the largest being the College of the Holy Cross in Massachusetts. There are no immediate plans to change.

Asked how he felt about the issue, Lemons bent the conversation in another direction: "I think the defenders of the name among our alumni want to emphasize that a crusader is someone who works for a long time to achieve something he or she believes is morally right. The students who want change want a name and symbol for the school that they can embrace and that they don't have to explain."

Lemons plans to turn in his recommendation to the trustees on Sunday.