SALT LAKE CITY (AP) — A push to change Dixie State University’s name is stalling in the GOP-dominated Utah Senate, after a new push to drop the term many find offensive sparked a backlash.

“University administration strongly feels this bill deserves to be discussed publicly on the Senate floor, where we are confident the bill has strong support,” administrators said in a statement.

Rep. Kelly Miles, who sponsored the House bill, said he was disappointed it appears dead in the Senate. A spokeswoman for the Utah Senate did not immediately return a message seeking comment.

The proposal has already passed the state House amid a national reexamination of the remnants of the Confederacy and slavery. A study found employers find the name concerning and confusing outside of Utah, where it’s a regional nickname dating back more than a century.

The name has long drawn scrutiny, but a previous 2013 push to change it failed when the school board voted against it. But in the in the wake of the nation’s racial reckoning last summer, institutions throughout St. George have reconsidered the Dixie name.

The university’s board of trustees voted to change it in December, which was also supported by the higher education board.

But many local residents and others want to keep the name, saying it’s tied to state history, not slavery, and they’ve been putting pressure on Republican lawmakers have been to kill the idea.

Dixie State, located about 300 miles (480 kilometers) south of Salt Lake City in St. George, was nicknamed Dixie, a reference to Southern states, when settlers with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, many of them from the South, tried to make it a cotton-growing mecca in the 1800s.

The school has used Confederate imagery in the past. It changed its nickname from the Rebels to Red Storm in 2009 and removed a Confederate soldier statue in 2012.