in its 2011 Best 368 Colleges.
=== Athletics ===
The Knox College mascot is the Prairie Fire, a name it adopted in 1993 due to sensitivity about its previous nickname, the Old Siwash. The word Siwash is a corruption of the French term "sauvage." This was a derogatory term used by European traders to refer to indigenous people.
The term Old Siwash was popularized by George Helgesen Fitch (Knox Class of 1897) in his Saturday Evening Post articles and a book At Good Old Siwash. The term was widely used to denote small midwestern liberal arts colleges because of the popularity of Fitch's writings.
The Prairie Fire refers to the annual spring burning of the prairie lands at Green Oaks. First conducted in the 1950s by Knox professor Paul Shepard, the burn protects prairie grasses from intrusions of woodland scrub and competition with other species.
Knox is a member of the Midwest Conference of the NCAA at the Division III level. The school offers 21 men's and women's varsity sports, as well as 11 club sports, including …
