ST. GEORGE, Utah — At a Utah Tech University Trailblazer game last month, two shirts caught the attention of President Shane Smeed.
A man wore one adorned with the Utah Tech University logo. Next to him sat a woman, wearing a Dixie State College shirt.
Seeing the current and former name of the university side-by-side wasn’t jarring — it was the point. Nearly four years after state lawmakers ordered the school to drop the “Dixie” name over concerns about its ties to slavery and the Confederacy, the debate still simmers in St. George.
To Smeed, the school’s Dixie heritage is something that should be saluted, not shunned.
“It’s not a goal to whitewash that history. It’s not a goal to not allow alumni to support the college that is on their diploma, whether that is Dixie Junior College or Dixie State University,” Smeed told The Tribune in an interview.
To that end, the university has once again started to sell merchandise dubbed the Heritage Line with the old Dixie name at the school’s bookstore, a decision made “to bridge that [divide],” Smeed said.
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