His mother and baby brother quickly tossed themselves into a basement storage room, desperately hoping to elude the band of Cossacks rampaging through their turn-of-the-century Russian-Jewish village.

As bands of the armed horsemen slaughtered the town's inhabitants, a lone Cossack barged into the house and sunk his bayonet into the mattress. At the tender age of 3, Radom already knew he had to keep quiet — even when the blade plunged through his stomach.

Several continents and the better part of a century later, Radom recounted the tale of that day to his grandson, Jonathan Pullan, revealing the scar he bore until his death. So one can imagine Pullan's shock when he walked into the school bookstore on his first day at Sonoma State University and found himself amid dozens of shirts, sweaters, notebooks and seat-covers emblazoned with the school's nickname — the Cossacks.

"My parents were with me, and none of us could believe it. We couldn't believe what we were seeing in big letters right in front of us," said Pullan, now a senior computer science major at Sonoma State. "It's almost like a black person seeing 'KKK' on there, or Nazis. It's no different for me."

Tanya Goldberg, an SSU senior and president of the school's Hillel, is helping to spearhead a charge to depose the mascot.

Students "don't know what a Cossack is," she said. "When you tell them what Cossacks did to Jews and how they went around raping women, all the sudden you get a different response."

Meanwhile, faculty members have begun sending letters protesting the Cossack to Sonoma State President Ruben Arminana and other administrators. So have representatives from a number of outside Jewish organizations, including Jonathan Bernstein, Anti-Defamation League regional director; Judy Penso, Jewish Community Relations Council regional director; and Rabbi George Gittleman of nearby Congregation Shomrei Torah, a Reform synagogue in Santa Rosa.

Despite complaints over the years, the Cossack mascot has survived numerous attempts to unseat it since it was selected in a 1962 student vote. Earlier this year, Sonoma State's alumni association board unanimously voted to retain the Cossack.

But Nov. 2, the Cossack suffered its first real setback when SSU's Academic Senate voted 24-3 in favor of a resolution condemning the mascot via something of a philosophical end-around.

The resolution, written by sociology Professor Peter Phillips and co-signed by four of his colleagues in the department, does not address the Cossack directly but instead "resolves that Sonoma State University choose a university mascot name from other than a human group."

Said Phillips, who has been teaching at SSU for seven years, "I think that stereotypes both positive and negative exist with any group, and what some people think is powerful or exciting, others may not like, which is the case with the Cossack. I think they should be able to choose whatever name they want, as long as it's not a human group."

But the school's alumni, athletes and athletic department clearly favor the Cossack.

In fact, earlier this year, a school committee opted not to replace the mascot but to instead spend $15,000 for a new logo, which SSU athletic director Bill Fusco described in the student newspaper as "a friendly, non-violent Cossack."

In a recent vote, student athletes elected overwhelmingly to retain the mascot, which they identify not with pogroms but with strength and determination.

To name a few, the men's basketball team chose to keep the Cossack by an 8-2 vote, the softball team voted 9-3, the women's volleyball team polled 8-1 and the women's soccer team sounded off with a 13-0 tally. Athletic department staff and coaches also pitched a shutout, voting to retain the mascot, 8-0.

Mitch Cox, SSU's assistant athletic director, offered a rationale for the athletes' fierce loyalty to their mascot.

"Take the name 'Wildcats.' Well, there are 58,000 teams out there called Wildcats; there's nothing unique about it. We are unique — we're the only college in the U.S. to have the name Cossacks," he said.

"Another thing is a feeling of PC backlash. People are tired of every little thing offending someone. You'll never find a name that doesn't offend anyone unless you go with something like a newt."

Indeed, over the past decade, the desire to remain politically correct has induced more than a few universities to alter their longstanding — but culturally insensitive — nicknames. St. John's University changed its name from the Red Men to the Red Storm, Marquette jumped from Warriors to Eagles, and Stanford, ahead of its time, switched from the Indians to the Cardinal back in the early '70s.

Given the climate of political sensitivity, a number of observers are baffled that SSU continues to endorse the Cossack.

"I find the Cossack as a mascot to be very offensive to me personally, and am greatly disappointed that we the Jewish community have to point that out to the University," said Gittleman of Shomrei Torah. "In my naiveté, I thought they'd wake up to the insensitivity of their mascot themselves, but apparently that's not the case. What I hear administrators saying is this is something they'd want to change but they don't feel like they have support yet from stake-holders, the students, alumni, athletic programs and the athletic department.

"But my response is that what is right should supercede what certain stake-holders feel willing to do. From my perspective, you might as well have the Klan as a mascot."

Between the highly polarized views of Gittleman and the athletes and alumni board lies the great gray mass that is the student body. And as precedent after precedent has demonstrated, the students just don't seem to care much about this issue.

In a two-day campus election held in March 1998, retention of the Cossack mascot held on by a 39-36 vote, with four "don't cares" — meaning that out of a student body of more than 7,000 only 79 bothered to vote.

While a 1 percent voter turnout is certainly an ally of the status quo, on-campus opponents of the Cossack claim the student body would vote differently if it were better educated about the sordid history of its mascot.

"A lot of people here think Cossacks are just colorful dancers, like the ones they see in ballets on TV," said Rick Luttman, a math professor at SSU since 1970 and the acting chair of the Academic Senate during Thursday's vote on the resolution. "The senate isn't weighing in on what the logo should be, but merely what it shouldn't be."

In fact, longtime Sonoma State campus historian and history Professor Dan Markwyn says that on the 1962 mascot ballot, the Cossacks were described to the student body as "Russian gentleman-adventurers."

That is a far cry from the brutal encounters of Pullan's grandfather and countless other Jews.

Goldberg and other Hillel members are marshaling student efforts to oust the Cossack. "We're talking to people. The time has come to get out the word that this isn't cool," she said."

Goldberg plans to court leaders of other school clubs, while Hillel members hope to begin circulating a petition shortly. Coupled with the Academic Senate's dissenting vote, a successful petition would place Arminana in a difficult position of facing vocal opposiition from both sides.

"We have a springboard now. Hopefully, the president and others will feel it necessary to change the name," said Penso of the JCRC. "A lot of really good people have worked hard on this for many years. I think a lot of their work has come to fruition."

If SSU does indeed opt to axe the Cossack, it won't come cheap. The $15,000 spent on the redesigned logo will have essentially been wasted, and a new logo would cost at least that much. Fusco, the athletic director, estimates replacing every team's uniforms would run more than $50,000, and the expense of completely restocking every bit of SSU paraphernalia with the name Cossacks on it would add to the tally.

But Cossack opponents really aren't concerned about money.

"My grandfather spent the first 10 years of his life trying to escape from these people, and now everywhere I go I see big letters saying 'Go Cossacks!'" said Pullan. "Other than the mascot, I haven't had any problems at Sonoma State. But this is a very big one."

Other Page One Stories

Lieberman didn't draw many extra Jewish votes

Can Clinton, a lame-duck, pull miracle in Mideast?