Re: xxxxx Univ. --vs.-- The Univ. of xxxxxxxx

On 24/09/24 07:41, lar3ryca wrote:

On 2024-09-23 06:50, Peter Moylan wrote:

On 23/09/24 16:16, Rich Ulrich wrote:
>

Texas Tech alumni were proud of their name and fought
successfullly against the proposed renaming to "Texas State
University";  thus, the odd variation, Texas Tech University.

>
One Melbourne tertiary institution started in 1887 as the Working
Men's College. After a couple of name changes and mergers, it
became the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in 1960. When I
taught there in 1967 (only one subject, as a casual teacher) it
was considered to be the most prestigious technical college in the
state.
>
It is now called RMIT University. On its web site, it is not easy
to discover what RMIT stands for.

>
I had quite a chuckle when an advertisement on TV spoke of an event
happening at the First Nations University here in Regina.
>
It's abbreviated name is "FNUniv", and the guy speaking called it "F
N univ", which sound exactly like 'eff'n univ'.

Back in about 1980 the federal government here forced a lot of mergers
between tertiary institutions [1]. The claim was that larger
institutions were more cost-efficient, when all the evidence showed the
very opposite. It caused a lot of misery and was strongly opposed by the
institutions themselves, but it was pushed through anyway.
For a little while, it seemed that the amalgamated mess in northern NSW
was going to be called the Combined University of the Northern
Tablelands, but somebody noticed in time to change the name.
[1] At the time, I predicted that it would take fifty years to undo the
damage. I was wrong. The fifty years is nearly up, and the changes are
now irreversible. Morale in my own university is terrible; in hindsight,
I'm lucky to be out of it.
--
Peter Moylan       peter@pmoylan.org    http://www.pmoylan.org
Newcastle, NSW