USC

[Laurence Horn]

At 9:56 AM -0400 9/11/06, Fred Shapiro wrote:
>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.
>
And the colleges themselves are quite conscious of this issue.  My
undergraduate alma mater, the University of Rochester, first spent
decades zealously correcting anyone who dared misrepresent its brand
as Rochester University (on the assumption that the correct version
put it in the category of the University of Chicago, while the latter
might mislead prospective applicants and their parents into inferring
that it was just another big city school like (perish the thought)
Syracuse University (and would then cause them to wonder why our
tuition was so much higher).  Then, having decided that the
difference between "the U of R" and "R U" wasn't sufficiently robust,
the powers that be began contemplating changing the name completely,
but presumably no sufficiently classy alternative was found, since it
still seems to be the University of Rochester.

LH

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