UNO Bell Tower

Seal
On the walkway beneath the UNO bell tower is the bell tower seal. Composed of custom ceramic tile made by Wilson Custom Tile in Omaha, Nebraska, the seal is centered within a sixteen sided ceramic star polygon. The legend of the seal reads "Henningson Memorial Campanile - 1989", indicating the official name of the tower and the year of its completion. Going around the inside of the seal are nine emblems, each emblem representing one of the nine colleges at the University. At the very center of the seal is the image of a bell, similar in appearance to the forty-seven within the top of the tower.

UNO tradition dictates that students are not to step upon the bell at the center of the seal. Student tour guides endow incoming freshman with this information as a regular part of orientation. However, the origins and reasons behind this practice are left to question. Many students hold that tour guides began telling students not to step on the bell simply as a way of creating a student-based tradition at the University. Others hold that, while student tour guides did start the tradition, they did so only as a means of ensuring that foot traffic, bottled-necked by the tower's arches, would remain orderly. This makes sense because one of the concerns people had with the clock tower construction was that it would clog foot tower traffic.