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The Regents of the University of Colorado ought to be an urbane and sophisticated body, but last week they appeared to be thinking much the same way as rubes like me out in the backwaters of the Centennial State.
On Monday, the Regents voted to put two facilities --
the Health Sciences Center in Aurora and the campus at
Auraria -- under one name: University of Colorado
Denver.
This caused some complaint from Aurora's boosters, who wanted their city recognized as home of the new medical center on the former grounds of Fitzsimmons Army Hospital, but it does reflect how we think in the boondocks.
To us, when somebody complains that I have to go to
Denver tomorrow,
it could mean anywhere from Palmer
Lake to Horsetooth Reservoir, from Golden to Watkins. We do
not expend much effort differentiating among Aurora,
Arvada, Englewood, Westminster, Thornton, Federal Heights,
Bow Mar, Sheridan, Broomfield, Lakewood, Lakeside,
Littleton, Wheat Ridge and sundry other components of the
metro area. It's all Denver.
.
That may also be true of the nation at large, since
campus Chancellor Roy Wilson said that When people think
of Denver, they don't just think about the city limits.
It's one of the cities people [travel] through on their way
to the East or West Coast or to Aspen.
That's not exactly flattering to Denver, characterizing
it as a place to pass through, rather than a destination on
its own. But as for Aurora, and I mean no disrespect to
Colorado's third-largest city, there is no Aurora
International Airport
and there are no televised games
of the Aurora Broncos.
It's probably simpler for a
professor at a conference to say she's at the Anschutz
Medical Campus of the University of Colorado Denver than to
explain where Aurora is.
This new name came about because the Health Sciences
Center and the University of Colorado at Denver were merged
administratively in 2004, and got the awkward designation
of the University of Colorado at Denver ad Health
Sciences Center.
It appears that the university is not suffering from underfunding these days, because the regents found $40,000 to spend on focus groups, surveys, forums and a branding consultant to devise a new name with better brand appeal.
There was a time when the Denver campus of CU had an
excellent brand. It was called UCLA
(derived from
University of Colorado between Lawrence and
Arapahoe
). My younger daughter, Abby, was graduated
from it with honors in 2001.
Her diploma just says University of Colorado
without going into geographic details, but when she was a
student, she wasn't sure what to call it. CU Denver
was common, but she pointed out that it abbreviates to
CUD,
which spells a cow-college connotation.
UCD
can be confused with the University of
California at Davis, and maybe that's what the regents had
in mind with University of Colorado Denver.
It was important not to put at
or in
in
the title, according to Chancellor Wilson, because such
prepositions are absent from the other campuses, the
University of Colorado Boulder and the University of
Colorado Colorado Springs. (The latter, with its double
Colorado, annoys most computer spell-checkers, but they
probably didn't spend $40,000 coming up with UCCS.)
However, another recent rechristening along the same
lines employs a hyphen. In 2003, the University of Southern
Colorado became Colorado State
University-Pueblo.
Obviously, no branding consultant was involved in that
one. Graduates would fare better if they can say I went
to USC
and have the listener surmise that they mean the
University of Southern California than if they say I
went to CSUP,
which sounds more like a railroad merger
than a university.
At any rate, here's a suggestion for the directors of
higher education in Colorado. When you want to improve
the brand,
try improving the product, rather than
hiring consultants to devise new names. Note that Yale has
not changed its name since 1718, and that Harvard has been
Harvard since 1636.
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