@ucbalumnus Virginia Tech is very commonly used , so there indeed is a shortened form for the university name. Virginia Tech and VT are used in licensing/branding primarily (not the formal name).
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I just hope Stone Hill university and MIT don’t merge as it would potentially result in a horrible acronym.
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Northwestern.
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RIP The Northwest Territory 
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“Isn’t one of them under the chapel?”
They try to keep that very buried these days.
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And we’re back to Transylvania.
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While this never occurred to me when I was growing up in PA or in college, the college name that doesn’t quite fit came up a few times when I moved to Texas.
When folks asked where I went to school, and I replied “Lehigh”,and a couple of times I heard, “No, where did you go to college?”
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Liberty University: has student conduct rules (e.g. curfew) that are not present at most other universities.
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MIT appears as one of the two private colleges named, along with Hamilton, in Our Town (1938), in which it was referred to as Massachusetts Tech:
— Stage Manager
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Father in law graduated from Carnegie Tech. By the time husband started school , he ended up a CMU grad instead. I kind of like the name Carnegie Tech better!
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In the distant past it was known as Boston Tech.
There are those who simply call it “Tech” as if there are no others worth discussing.
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I like Boston Tech (better than MassTech). My husband is a grad and I have never heard him refer to it as anything other than MIT. Although he talks more about “The Muddy Charles” and running hashes than MIT itself.
This goes to show how regional things can be. And maybe whether or not you follow football! The name Virginia Tech has been around for a very long time. Same with Georgia Tech, etc. I have always lived on the east coast, and sad to say I did not know what Cal was short for until finding this site and seeing posts about it.
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Among schools attended by close family and friends, the ones that seemed to need the most explaining were Wash U (obvious misleading geographic reference) and Penn (misunderstood as a state school). I do know someone who sent kids to the Indiana University in Pennsylvania school mentioned above, which I think is the winner for this thread.
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Interesting how North Carolina squatted on the other directions other than South – i.e. East Carolina University and Western Carolina University.
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I was in Scotland recently and was told by our tour guide that we are pronouncing Carnegie wrong. He said it should be Car - née - gie, with the accent on the second syllable.
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Scripps should be a pharmacy school.
Yes, I know scripts is a completely different word
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North Carolina is an east-west state. Western Carolina is about 400 miles from East Carolina but it’s only 150 miles from the VA border to the SC border. Aside from the silly idea of South North Carolina University it wouldn’t make any sense with the geography of the state.
South Carolina is a vaguely triangular shaped state and is not oriented east-west like NC. They don’t really need to use western and eastern. They say Upland and Low Country.
Heres my contribution to this thread — Wake Forest is not in the town of Wake Forest which is just north of Raleigh, but actually in Winston-Salem which is 100 miles west.
Similarly, but without such a gap in distance Roanoke College is not in Roanoke VA but just west in the adjacent town of Salem.
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Probably why they changed their shortened version to UofSC several years back. It’s also cringy to us North Carolinians when they refer to themselves as “Carolina”.
There’s only one Carolina, as Dabo said,
“They ain’t Alabama. They ain’t LSU. And they’re certainly not Clemson. That’s why Carolina’s in Chapel Hill and USC’s in California and the university in the state has been, and always will be, Clemson.”
Tulane isn’t a street.
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