What’s in a Name?

For a million bucks or so, you can name that school.

By Philip G. Altbach

Although “naming rights” have proliferated in American higher education for the past several decades, the phenomenon has recently expanded to extraordinary lengths. In this area, academe fits right in with the larger culture, which has named everything from AutoZone Park to Gillette Stadium to the children’s wing of your local hospital. Anything to get an extra dollar out of donors is fair game. I know colleges and universities sorely need to raise funds in these times of fiscal constraints, but things have gotten a bit out of hand.

Universities and colleges have long been named after donors—think of Harvard, Yale, Brown, and many others. John Harvard would hardly get a bench named after him today, given the modesty of his gift of books for the library back in the seventeenth century. Now it takes much more to get one’s name on a college. One institution, Rowan University of New Jersey, changed its name (from Glassboro State College) not long ago when a large donation was made. Buildings, too, have been affected. Traditionally, they were named after people such as distinguished scholars or visionary academic leaders; now they’re often named after big donors.

“Old Main” and Bascom Hall are indicative of a bygone age when place and merit were recognized. Now we have the Gloria and Jake Smith Administration Pavilion and the McGinty Family Chemistry Center. Many schools even give donor names to classrooms and seminar rooms. More than one insti­tution of higher education puts names on its chairs—the kind on which one sits, not endowed professorships. Professorships have long been named for donors of endowments, but some chairs named recently have raised eyebrows—for example, the Kenneth L. Lay Chair in Economics at the University of Missouri (currently unoccupied); the Burpee Chair in Plant Genetics at Bucknell University; the Dow Chemical Chair in Sustainable Science, Technology, and Commerce at the University of Michigan; the Bank of America deanship in the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley; and others. Naming a chair can run from a few hundred thousand dollars up to $10 million, with many in the $1 million-plus range.

A disturbing new trend is naming col­leges and schools within universities. We have long had the Wharton School, the nationally known business school of the University of Pennsylvania; Boalt Hall, the law school of the University of California, Berkeley; and the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. These schools have, over time and through significant marketing, achieved an image of their own, separate from the universities at which they are located. They are “name brands.” Now, in addition, we have the Rossier, Steinhart, and Warner schools—that is, the education faculties at the University of Southern California, New York University, and the University of Rochester, respectively. These school names, like hundreds of others, are not recognized outside their universities, and they are unlikely to be in the future. They are not sufficiently eminent. Yet many faculty members and students at these schools call them, for example, the “Rossier School,” without referring to the function of the school or the home institution. This kind of marketing is mistaken in that the schools actually lose stature by being separated from the university in the public eye.

Why is all of this happening now? The main motivation for the naming frenzy is, of course, to raise money. Donors love to see their names, or the names of their parents or other relatives, on buildings, schools, institutions, professorships, and the like. Increasingly, corporations and other businesses also seek to benefit from having their names on educational facilities. Today, no limits seem to exist on what can be named. If something does not have a name, it is up  for grabs—a staircase, a pond, or a parking garage. Once all the major facilities have titles, lesser things go on the naming auction block. Development offices no doubt have long lists of campus assets that can be named for various sums—athletic and recreational facilities are at the top of the list, but they are joined by campus roadways, dining halls, classrooms, and other structures. Colleges and universities, public and private, are all under increased pressure to raise money, and naming brings in cash.

But naming is also about branding and, in the case of corporate naming, about product placement. Corporations believe they will benefit by having their name on an academic building or attached to a prestigious professorship. On campus, academic decision makers think that giving the business school or the college of agriculture a name will enhance its prestige and its visibility: if people see that a donor has given enough to get such a school named, they will assume that the school must be very good. Top students will be attracted, and other generous patrons will be lured.

In the era of “each tub on its own bottom,” when faculties and schools within universities are increasingly responsible for their own budgets, each school tends to operate independently and to create its own identity separate from the university. The Darden School (of business at the University of Virginia) asked for, and received, considerable autonomy from the university in return for being responsible for its own budget. It even found donations to construct a new building that is nicer than the usual state-funded facility. When professional schools have established reputations, wealthy alumni, and entrepre­neurial leadership, it may be possible to build such an identity and reputation separate from the university. For most schools, however, even those at excellent universities, such recognition is unlikely.

It is also unproductive. Separate branding weakens the focus and mission of an institution and perhaps even its broader reputation. It confuses the public, including poten­tial students, and feeds the idea that the twenty-first-century university is simply a confederation of independent entrepreneurial fiefdoms. And although branding may strengthen professional schools, it ignores the core arts and sciences disciplines, where separate identities do not work.

The trends we see now in the United States, and perhaps tomorrow in other countries, will inevitably weaken the concept of the university as an institution that is devoted to the search for truth and the transmission of knowledge. All this naming distracts from the mission of an institution that has almost a millennium of history and cheapens its image. It is a sad symbol indeed of the commercialization, bifurcation, and entrepreneurialism of the contemporary university.

Philip Altbach is Monan Professor of Higher Education and director of the Center for International Higher Education in the Lynch School of Education at Boston College.

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