Is Castleton looking to change the school logo and move away from being the “small school with a big heart?”

Despite a rebranding effort going on here on campus, that is hardly the case.

“We’re not trying to change the logo. The issue with the logo is that there are so many different ones that they get misused a lot of the time,” said Courtney Bates, a student intern for the school’s advancement office.

The idea started as a discussion of how people wanted the school to be perceived.

“Just talking about the Castleton brand and how to brand ourselves better and to do that it needs to have consistent logos so when you look at it you go ‘that’s Castleton,'” said Bates.

Another goal of the initiative is to create an image of the school that symbolizes pride, and not just through the logo.

“You want people to see your image and think your name and what it means,” said Jeff Weld, director of College Relations and Sports Information.

Weld also mentioned how even though the college is a state school, a student in Michigan might compare Castleton to a school like Michigan State and not go here because of the meaning they associate with a state school, though it might be a good fit.

That may be accomplished, they said, by not calling the school CSC or C-State, which all convey a different meaning and image.

Just walking around campus it is hard to miss the multiple types of logos. Bates noted that logos are used on letterheads, Castleton clothing, public safety golf carts and Glenbrook Gym.

And there are even different types of logos. Weld displayed a licensing page showing them all and saying they are broken into subsections like sports, academic, institutional and the school seal.

“One of the things that we’re working on right now is making sure our imagery for the institution as a whole, it doesn’t get changed,” said Weld. “Probably what you’ll see as part of that process down the road is that we come up with a distinct image that speaks to the academic side of things and is less athletic than the actual Spartan, but less word based than the Castleton word mark,”

This is not the first rebranding effort Castleton has gone though over the years.

Tom Conroy, a communication professor, mentioned that before Dave Wolk came, the school tried to move away from the Castleton green color switching over to a blue, though that only lasted a year or two.

This effort won’t be like that, Weld said.

“We’re never gonna be done. It’s an evolutionary process, an ongoing process,” he said.