AMHERST, Mass. — The Amherst homecoming game had all the trappings of a classic day at this prestigious liberal arts college: a home team victory, cheering alumni and the scent of charred burgers in the air as sienna leaves flitted toward the ground.  And then there was the moose.  Or, rather, the student in a floppy-antlered moose costume, whose presence at last weekend’s game was a controversial rebuke to Amherst College’s longtime unofficial mascot, Lord Jeff — or Lord Jeffery Amherst, the 18th-century military commander whom this photogenic college town is named for. In recent years, Lord Jeff has fallen out of favor with some students and faculty members because, in 1763, he endorsed giving smallpox-infected blankets to Native Americans.  “As the student body at Amherst diversifies, we need a mascot that all students can feel comfortable with,” Ben Walker, a senior here, said from inside the costume as he used his hoof to support its heavy head.  The push to replace Lord Jeff with a new mascot — like the moose, a dragon or even a purple squirrel — appears to be gaining momentum, as institutions around the country question their ties to historic figures who owned slaves or led Confederate battalions. But it has left some Amherst graduates and current athletes seething, affronted by what they see as a rejection of a campus tradition.  The debate over Lord Jeff has opened up a complex and, at times, tense discussion about changing campus identity at a college that, over the past 40 years, has transformed from a mostly white, mostly male institution to one that is consistently ranked among the most diverse liberal arts colleges in the nation. In 1976, Amherst was about 86 percent white, and women had begun enrolling only the year before; this year, more than half of its students identified as American minorities or international students, and the gender split is close to even.  “The mascot is kind of stuck in those times, and hasn’t evolved with the student body,” said Virginia Hassell, a senior who is organizing the effort to make a change. “The fact that our mascot isolates people and makes anyone feel unwelcome is just unacceptable.”  Back at homecoming, boos rained down on the moose as it strode by members of the lacrosse team who were at the game. That was something of an improvement over last year, the first time a moose appeared at homecoming, when a couple of spectators punched the costume while Mr. Walker was wearing it.  Across the field, at a table covered in candy and holding a basket of tiny moose statues, more students were trying to make the case for the moose — or anything other than Lord Jeff — to one alum at a time.  “I just don’t think that changing the mascot is going to alter what has been done historically,” Bill Woolverton, a member of the class of 1973, said to the students at the table.  But Micayla Tatum, a senior and the leader of the school’s Native American Students Organization, pointed out that there are Native American students currently enrolled at Amherst, and she urged Mr. Woolverton to consider inclusivity. “We’re supposed to be the elite institution that’s ahead of the curve,” Ms. Tatum said later, “and right now we’re behind it.”  Mr. Woolverton seemed unconvinced as he walked away. “There are lots of bad people in our history,” he said. “Thomas Jefferson owned slaves. Are you going to take him off Mount Rushmore?”  Indeed, some Democratic groups have changed the titles of events that were named after Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, who both owned slaves. Meanwhile, Yale is considering changing the name of the residential college named for John C. Calhoun, who made moral arguments in favor of slavery before the Civil War.  Native American mascots have been under pressure for years. Stanford and Dartmouth changed their mascots from the Indians decades ago — Stanford picked up the Cardinal nickname and Dartmouth the Big Green. Some professional teams, like the National Football League’s Washington Redskins, have retained their names, despite criticism.  Student organizers at Amherst are hoping to hold a campus referendum on the matter by the end of the semester. And the college’s president, Biddy Martin, said in a statement that the board of trustees would take up the question of Lord Jeff no later than January.  Lord Jeffery Amherst was a widely revered British general in colonial America, who wrote this postscript in a letter during a Native American uprising: “You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race.”  Amherst College was founded about 50 years later, in 1821, and named for the town, not Lord Jeffery. According to Mike Kelly, a librarian here, it was not until the first decades of the 1900s that the Lord Jeff character assumed an outsize symbolic presence on campus.  In some ways, the school has already shifted away from Lord Jeff, who has never been an official mascot. There is no longer a Lord Jeff mascot who shows up to games. But many of the school’s athletic teams are called the Jeffs in the school paper or the Lord Jeffs on the field, and the name, if not the visage, appears with the name of the college on some T-shirts and sweatpants around campus, including clothing worn by the lacrosse team.  Unease with Lord Jeff has grown over the past few years, but it was not until an actual moose wandered onto campus in May last year that opponents of the mascot found a new figure to rally around.  That November, the plot thickened: A black moose statue, about the size of a deer, appeared in the main library, just after Thanksgiving. The librarians here (and the pro-moose students) insist they do not know how it got there, but the statue has been in the library ever since, save for an evening when a group of students stole it for a party. It has been accepted into the library’s permanent collection.  Some athletes have flat-out refused to adopt the moose as a moniker; most of the students who want change say they are open to alternatives. The student government here recently published an open letter urging the school to find a new mascot. The Choral Society has already decided to stop singing the song about Lord Jeff, written here in 1905, that is something of an anthem for alumni. And on Monday, students gathered for a forum on campus to talk the matter out.  Some graduates and current students have pointed out that there is no conclusive proof that General Amherst ever ordered that Native Americans be given infected blankets, and have cautioned against judging an 18th-century general by the standards of modern times.  “It’s about, to use a tired cliché, fashionable political correctness, largely uninformed by deep questioning of historical events or context,” said Paul Ruxin, a retired lawyer who graduated from Amherst in 1965.  Some have wondered if the push for change would go further. “Are they going to change the name of the school, the town?” asked Robert Lucido, a 2015 graduate who is now a baseball player in the Toronto Blue Jays organization.  Students here insist that is not the goal. “We don’t as students have the ability to change our school name or our town name to eradicate the injustice that was inflicted by Lord Jeff,” said Gabriela Smith-Rosario, a sophomore.  A version of this article appears in print on November 1, 2015, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: At College That Changed for Diversity, Some Say It’s the Mascot’s Turn. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
The colonial legacy of Lord Jeffery Amherst, the unofficial face of the college, has generated increasing opposition, but traditionalists are resisting calls for a change.