What's the name of your university?
Mark Liberman
reports
on the renaming of Peking University as the University of Beijing
(in English), with a shift from the premodifying form "X University" to
the prepositional form "University of X", the reported justification
having been a "rule of English grammar" that "place names used as
adjectives in school names are frequently found only in abbreviated
names in speech; in formal written language, the place name should be
placed after 'college' or 'university' as a noun."
Mark notes that this purported rule of grammar (call it the P Rule) is
easily refuted -- I'll expand on this point -- though he admits that
the statistical preference seems to be for the prepositional form; I'll
expand on that point, too. And then I'll refute the claim that
the premodifying form is found mostly in abbreviated names in
speech. Along the way I'll point out a part of this system of
naming where variant forms, not differing in meaning, are freely
tolerated -- against the pronouncements of many usage advisers, who
take the position that consistency requires choosing a single form in
such cases.
I'll start with the U.S. For good practical reasons -- the
country has such a huge number of universities, most with place names
in their names -- for each U.S. university, only one of the two forms
is acceptable. There is no alternation between the premodifying
and the prepositional forms, no "Pennsylvania University" as an
alternative to "University of Pennsylvania" (even the university press
takes the long form: "University of Pennsylvania Press"), no
"University of New York" as an alternative to "New York University".
In any case, exceptions to the P Rule are easy to find: with state
names, Indiana University and Ohio University; with city names, Auburn
University, Boston University, New York University, Princeton
University, Santa Clara University, Syracuse University. In
Pennsylvania, the second-tier state universities systematically have
premodifying names: Bloomsburg, East Stroudsburg, Kutztown,
Millersville, Shippensburg, etc. University. In two cases,
additional material is needed to avoid ambiguity, but the premodifying
form is preserved: California University of Pennsylvania, Indiana
University of Pennsylvania.
A further wrinkle in the U.S. university system is that many states
have public universities with the word "State" in their names, and
these are almost all premodifying: Arizona, California, Florida,
Illinois, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, etc. State University. The
State University of New York is the really notable exception
here. (Rutgers is officially "Rutgers, The State University of
New Jersey", but nobody refers to it as SUNJ, parallel to SUNY.)
In most of these cases, "X State University" has to be distinguished
from a distinct institution named "X University" (Ohio State University
vs. Ohio University) or, more often, "University of X" (Arizona State
University vs. University of Arizona).
As this were not already complex enough -- foreigners find this
profusion of minimally different names baffling -- very often "X State
University (at) Y", where X is a state name and Y is a city name,
presents itself as "Y State University", giving still more premodifying
names: California State University at San Jose = San Jose State
University. Along the same lines, State University of New York,
Plattsburg = Plattsburg State University. Note how alternative
names have crept into the system. (In some states, some
universities are officially named "Y State University", with no
available longer alternative "X State University (at) Y": Kent State
University, in Ohio, for instance.)
These alternative names are, in a sense, abbreviations, but they are
not particularly informal in style. Informal abbreviations are
often available, however: "X" for "X University", "X State" for "X
State University: Syracuse = Syracuse University, Kutztown = Kutztown
University, Chico State = Chico State University (= California State
University at Chico), Kent State = Kent State University. When no
confusion of names can result, "X State" can sometimes be further
abbreviated to "X": Chico = Chico State. (There are a fair number of
wrinkles in the scheme of abbreviations: for instance, "Boston
University" and "New York University" are never abbreviated to "Boston"
and "New York", but instead are referred to informally by the
initialisms "BU" and "NYU".)
Meanwhile, institution names with the head "College" are almost all
premodifying: Amherst, Boston, Colorado, Connecticut, Haverford,
Ithaca, Middlebury, Santa Clara, Wabash, etc. College. (There are
exceptions: the College of Wooster, in Wooster, Ohio, for instance.)
On to the prepositional forms. The big generalization here is
that almost every U.S. state, from Alabama to Wyoming, has a
"University of X" in it (Indiana, New Jersey, New York, and Ohio are
notable exceptions). And an enormous number of cities have a
"University of X" in them: Akron, Baltimore, Bridgeport, Cincinnati,
Dallas, Dayton, Denver, Evansville, Hartford, Houston, just to pick
some random examples from early in the alphabet. Remember that
Beijing is a city name, so that "University of Beijing" would be a
reasonable choice for a university name. But "Beijing University"
would be entirely well-formed; there is no P Rule.
(As for abbreviations, "University of X" and "University of X (at) Y"
are often informally abbreviated as "X" and "Y", respectively, when no
confusion can result: Alabama = University of Alabama, Akron =
University of Akron, Berkeley = University of California at
Berkeley. Once again, there are a fair number of wrinkles and
anomalies, like Berkeley being referred to informally as "Cal".)
Names change over time. Santa Clara College, founded in 1851, had
a premodifying name, as we'd expect for a name with "College" as its
head. (The College of New Jersey, founded in 1746, took the other
route.) When Santa Clara College presented itself as a
university, in 1912, it changed its name to the University of Santa
Clara, in line with the dominant "University" pattern. (The
College of New Jersey, meanwhile, made the leap to university in 1896,
and shifted to a premodifying name, Princeton University.) By
1985, the University of Santa Clara had wearied of being confused with
that other, much bigger California university USC, the University of
Southern California, and switched back to premodification, as Santa
Clara University.
Keeping universities apart can be tricky. San Francisco has a
branch of the California State University in it: California State
University at San Francisco, which can then be known as San Francisco
State University, or just as San Francisco State. (An initialism,
"SFSU", is also used.) Fine. San Francisco also has a
branch of the University of California in it: the University of
California at San Francisco, which might, parallel to Berkeley, have
been referred to just as "San Francisco", except for the existence of
yet another institution, the University of San Francisco, whose name
would also abbreviate to "San Francisco". So neither of them
abbreviate this way; people use initialisms -- "UCSF" and "USF"
instead. Down south, the San Diego area has both SDSU (a branch
of the California State University), also known as "San Diego State",
and UCSD (a branch of the University of California), known as "La
Jolla", from the town it's located in. Yes, outsiders find all of
this endlessly confusing.
The U.K. has many fewer universities than the U.S., but the explosion
of institutions since World War II has produced some nomenclatural
subtleties, though nothing as severe as in the U.S. There's the
Brighton area, which has the University of Brighton and also the
University of Sussex, Brighton; the latter is actually in Falmer, outside
of Brighton, but nobody calls it "Falmer" -- or, of course, "Brighton",
that would be just too confusing -- so people call it "Sussex".
Here's the thing: in the U.K., the official names of universities
with place names in them are (I think) all of the prepositional form,
"University of X", but almost all of these names can vary freely with
the premodifying "X University". "The University of Sussex" and
"Sussex University" are
SYNONYMS, and the latter is not
notably informal. If you go to the websites for the University of
Cambridge and the University of Oxford, you'll immediately see
premodifying references: "a brief history of Cambridge University",
"information about: Oxford University". And the legal names of
their presses are premodifying: Cambridge University Press, Oxford
University Press.
Some other websites are sticky about the prepositional form -- The
University of Edinburgh (yes, with obligatorily capitalized "The", even
in references to "The University") and The University of Manchester,
for instance -- but outside of printed material subject to university
enforcement of this form, you can find plenty of premodifying variants,
and the university press names are premodifying: Edinburgh University
Press, Manchester University Press.
The alternation between prepositional and premodifying forms is so
natural for the British that they find the rigid American naming
schemes bizarre; surely, "Arizona University" is just another way of
saying "the University of Arizona", they think, and are annoyed to be
told sternly that there is
NO SUCH UNIVERSITY as
Arizona University.
The notable exception in the U.K. is the University of London, possibly
because it's a particularly loose federation of "colleges".
"London University" really doesn't work, and the press's name is "The
University of London Press".
Otherwise, variation is all over the place. People might be
getting slightly different effects by choosing one of the variants over
the other, but I suspect that mostly people choose the premodifying
variant because it's shorter, by two words, the "the" and the "of":
Omit Needless Words! There certainly is no meaning difference.
Now, this is just the sort of situation that most advisers on usage
just hate. Given two very similar forms to choose between,
they'll strive mightily to tease out a subtle semantic difference that
has to be preserved by choosing correctly (
seasonal vs.
seasonable, or
in behalf of vs.
on behalf of, or
on the contrary vs.
to the contrary) or they'll label
one variant as colloquial, informal, conversational and so to be
avoided entirely in formal writing (determiner
a lot of,
lots of), or they'll proscribe one
of the variants entirely (restrictive relative
which and hundreds of other cases),
in the name of consistency. What they don't like is people
choosing one variant in one place and another in another place,
apparently on a whim. Ordinary people, however, like variety;
they like being able to make choices, even if they can't explain why
they make one choice one time and a different one another time.
The British university naming scheme is a triumph of variety over
enforced consistency.
I've looked some at the Canadian system, which looks much like the U.S.
system, though perhaps with an even stronger preference for the
prepositional forms when place names are involved: University of
Alberta, British Columbia, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Ottawa, Prince
Edward Island, Saskatchewan, Sudbury, Toronto, Victoria, Windsor,
Winnipeg, etc. (but: Cape Breton University, and a few others).
No one refers to British Columbia University, Ottawa University, or
Toronto University. (Here, as elsewhere, premodifying names tend to be
very strongly preferred when personal names rather than place names are
involved: McGill University, for instance, and Victoria University for
universities named
AFTER Victoria, as opposed to
U.Vic., which is
IN Victoria.)
The one island of variation I've found so far is the University of
Waterloo, which is sometimes referred to as Waterloo University, and
has a premodfifying press name, Waterloo University Press (compare
University of Toronto Press, UBC Press, etc.).
Australian usage (or, for that matter, New Zealand or South African or
Indian) I don't know enough about to comment on sensibly. The
websites for Australian universities whose names involve place names
seem to be uniformly prepositional, but actual practice might be closer
to the British system than to the North American one.
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at September 2, 2006 02:29 PM