A replica of the Athena Giustiniani that greeted students at Wells College for more than 150 years was accidentally decapitated in the scramble to close the institution forever.
A marble statue of the Roman goddess of wisdom that presided over Wells College for 156 years, surviving both a devastating fire in 1888 and an attempted kidnapping in 1975, was embraced by students as a symbol of resilience for generations.
Until Minerva was decapitated by a backhoe.
The statue was accidentally damaged during a hasty move this month after the college, nestled against one of the Finger Lakes in central New York, said financial challenges would make the spring semester its last.
At a college where students have long kissed Minerva’s feet for good luck and referred to “her” as a fellow student, the beheading is an unavoidable metaphor for the angst surrounding the institution’s sudden closure.
Wells was a women’s college for the bulk of its history, and many alumni cherish how the godly representative of wisdom and war, embodied in a woman, looked over the campus on Cayuga Lake for generations.
“I lost my mother a couple years ago,” said Caolan MacMahon, who graduated from Wells in 1985. “This is almost harder.”
Workers moving the statue on June 12 strapped Minerva to a furniture dolly before hanging the statue horizontally from a backhoe’s bucket with moving straps. Too heavy for the supports, her head snapped off.
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Source: Elections - nytimes.com
