When Owens Community College President Larry McDougle presided over his first commencement at the college last spring, he was surprised to discover Owens lacked two time-honored ceremonial symbols — a mace and a presidential medallion.

“I think virtually every college and university has both a mace and a medallion,” Mr. McDougle said. “The mace is a symbolic item that follows every academic procession and the medallion is something a president typically wears at any official functions, for example, commencement, or when a president of another university is being inaugurated.”

At the spring commencement ceremony May 6, Mr. McDougle will be wearing the college’s recently unveiled presidential medallion. The grand marshal — likely the most tenured faculty member — will carry the college’s first-ever mace. It is a bright red and white staff that weighs a hefty 18 to 20 pounds, said Randy Wharton, chairman of design technologies at Owens and its co-interim dean of the School of Technology.

Mr. Wharton along with Reed Knowles, professor of design technologies; Alan Bethea, instructor of design technologies, and Peter Johns, manufacturing technologies lab technician, created the mace and medallion. Sylvania glass artist Mike Wallace made the glass sections of the mace.

While the University of Toledo and Bowling Green State University have regal-looking gold and silver maces, at Owens, the mace is made of glass and aluminum decked out in the school’s colors: red and white.

Mr. McDougle said that’s as it should be.

“It tends to be less formal, but at the same time I think it is indicative of the history and mission of the institution,” he said.

Mr. Wharton said that was exactly what the designers were going for.

“The whole thing is based around the premise that we started out as a technical college,” Mr. Wharton said. “That was our foundation, our roots, and our roots go back even further to the roots of Toledo, where we became the glass capital of the U.S. based on the work that Michael J. Owens did.”

The college, which opened in 1965, was named for Mr. Owens, a pioneer in the glass industry who perfected the automatic glass-blowing machine and invented a number of glass-making processes.

The blown-glass head of the mace is in school colors, red and white. A dark-colored gear that came out of a glass-blowing machine at an Owens-Illinois plant is directly below it. The red-and-white-striped pedestal also is made of glass and has a polished aluminum gear manufactured in the college’s machine shop underneath it. Mr. Wharton said the design brings together the old technology and the new.

Below the polished aluminum gear are five colored discs that represent the five academic schools at Owens followed by a turned aluminum finial, or ornament, engraved with the Owens seal.

In Academic Ceremonies: A Handbook of Traditions and Protocol, author April L. Harris notes that some schools have ancient maces; others have commissioned them to be built, often for a milestone anniversary or presidential inauguration.

Harold Hasselschwert, an assistant professor of art at BGSU, designed that university’s mace for the 1963 inauguration of President William Jerome. UT retired its 1969 mace in 2006 when it merged with the former Medical College of Ohio, and commissioned Jiro Masuda of Monroe to create a mace to represent the combined institutions.

According to Academic Ceremonies, a mace “symbolizes the authority invested in the president by a school’s governing body. When the authority is present, the mace is present. This is why the mace is an integral part of commencement exercises, when students are invested of degrees by the lawful authority of the university, and why the mace plays an important ceremonial role at presidential inaugurations.”

Mr. McDougle, who previously served as president of Northwest State Community College near Archbold, said that institution had a mace, and he felt strongly that Owens should too.

“They’re very traditional,” he said. “In fact, they date back to the times of the medieval universities, the European universities of the 15th and 16th centuries.”

Contact Jennifer Feehan at: jfeehan@theblade.com or 419-724-6129.

First Published April 18, 2011, 4:30 a.m.