USC

Fred Shapiro fred.shapiro at YALE.EDU
Mon Sep 11 13:56:28 UTC 2006


On Mon, 11 Sep 2006, Dave Wilton wrote:

> Here in Berkeley, the university is frequently referred to as "Cal" in all
> contexts, not just sports. (Although "the university" is probably the most
> common local designation.)

After I posted my e-mail about this, it occurred to me that maybe Cal was
not just a sports name, but might be the preferred local designation.

It is interesting that Yale used to be referred to as "New Haven," which
is never used nowadays.  In The Great Gatsby, for example, this is how
Fitzgerald refers to the school.  Princeton went in the opposite
direction, from a former official name of "College of New Jersey" to a
popular colloquial name of "Princeton" because of its location, which was
then adopted as the official name of the university.  Columbia used to be
King's College, I believe.

I believe the names of colleges are highly important to their success.
Princeton, Dartmouth and Amherst have probably been helped prestige-wise
by their ultra-classy-sounding names, whereas I believe that part of the
reason that the University of Chicago, one of the world's great
universities academically, is less successful than the Ivies and Stanford
in attracting top students is its generic, name-of-a-big-city name.  The
University of Pennsylvania and, to a lesser extent, NYU may have similarly
suffered from their names.  One of the reasons Catholic University of
America is such a poor cousin to fellow D.C. Catholic school Georgetown
may be the disparity in names.

Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and     YALE BOOK OF QUOTATIONS
   Access and Lecturer in Legal Research     Yale University Press,
Yale Law School                             forthcoming
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               http://quotationdictionary.com
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