The University of Oregon’s basketball team will play top-ranked Illinois today. If you were looking forward to this event, hoping, perhaps, that the Ducks might paddle the Fighting Illini, then shame on you. Didn’t you know the game is an outrage?

So say student and faculty groups at Ducktown, anyway. According to The Register-Guard in Eugene, the groups have been leaning on university officials recently to pull the plug on the game, and also on a game the university has contracted to play against Illinois next year in Portland. They believe that the university should turn up its nose at schools with offensive mascots, and, they say, Chief Illiniwek is plenty offensive to Native Americans.

Now, there’s nothing really surprising about students and faculty at UO kicking up a fuss about Illinois’ mascot, even though he will be many states away from campus during tomorrow’s game, and even though he’s been banned from next year’s game in Portland. (And by the way, wouldn’t it be enough simply to bar offensive mascots from the university’s campus?) What is somewhat surprising, on the other hand, is the fact that university officials have asked UO’s Intercollegiate Athletics Committee to come up with a policy on scheduling games with schools that cling to their offensive mascots.

The policy probably won’t focus solely on American Indian mascots, Dan Williams, Oregon’s vice president for administration, told the Register-Guard. And that presents something of a problem. Somebody, he said, might object to the Trojans or the Huskies. Why the Huskies? Because the mascot glorifies dog slavery, of course. Figuring out what counts as an ”offensive mascot” might not be easy, after all.

Which brings us to the Beavers. You might think of the mascot as a cute rodent with an overbite, but, hey, the beaver isn’t called nature’s engineer for nothing. The animal cuts down trees, it builds dams, and if left to its own devices it can wreak havoc on sensitive riparian habitat. These are hardly values the University of Oregon should support through athletic competition, are they?