This is a topic that we got into on the Midwest board regarding UW-Madison. Let me bring it up here for national discussion. Names count. Images count. Universities across this land (like private businesses) spend small fortunes coming up with names and logos. the incredible success of one school, the school that started the concept, UCLA, has spread to so many universities in the nation being named the Univ of ___ @ ____. UCLA still manages it best. It is UCLA. Period. Not Cal-LA, not UC Los Angeles. UCLA: four letters that convey it all. But it would appear to me that the naming system hasn't worked all that well for other institutions. In places where it is used, you get, for example: • schools like the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the University of Texas-Austin, and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill who appear to wish to drop their city names. In fact, in athletics, they do drop them and on logos and on websites, the state's name is huge and the city's quite small. UT Austin is more Texas than Austin. • other campuses in the system come across sounding like branches, second class citizens. The University of Nebraska at Omaha is not the "real" University of Nebraska, for example. Universities can be part of the same system and have different names. The University of Iowa and Iowa State University are under one board, just like the UW's are. Yet their names are not the University of Iowa at Iowa City and the University of Iowa at Ames. The Univ. of North Carolina system not only contains UNC-Chapel Hill, but NCSU and East Carolina U, as well. California State University contains schools such as California State University Fresno and San Francisco State University. Which one is better named? SW Missouri State U had to jump hoops and hurdles to get past the University of Missouri's objection to it calling itself Missouri State University. Lots of time and money went into that name change. Names count. At a time when names and images do count the way do today, wouldn't most states be better off in renaming the Univ of ____ @ ___ schools to names that better reflect the schools' individuality. Am I alone in thinking that naming system doesn't do the trick?> |
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