Students Kissed Her Feet for Good Luck. Now She’s Missing Her Head.

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.