Most kids don’t even know who Wharton was. Or Bolt or Stern or Joe Schmo. When they use them, they’re just freaking shorthands, save a few words. I wouldn’t read one more bit into it than that. On campus buildings, they’re just identifiers- meet you at Jones. Or, I live in Smith.
And the Foster re-issue of diplomas more likely has implications for fundraising.
I’m pretty sure Amherst was named after the town where it’s located, Amherst, Massachusetts, not a donor. The town was named after Jeffrey Amherst, 1st Baron Amherst of Montreal, a leading British military commander in the French and Indian War (Seven Years’ War) who engineered the capture of strategic forts at Ticonderoga, Niagara, and Quebec, and finally led the British capture of Montreal, ending French rule in North America. Amherst then was named Governor-General of British North America. Amherst College’s sports teams are called the Lord Jeffs. This has become very controversial because Lord Amherst ordered or knowingly approved the provision of smallpox-tainted blankets to indigenous tribes; there’s documentary evidence that Amherst knew of and approved the plan, but it’s disputed among historians whether the plan was actually carried out. Even if it didn’t happen, though, Lord Jeff’s role in the matter was despicable, and what he wrote about the plan and its intended victims clearly displays a white supremacist ideology and genocidal intent.
Lord Amherst died in 1797 at his estate in Kent, England. Amherst College wasn’t founded until 1821, though it was preceded by, and morphed out of, a secondary school called Amherst Academy which was founded in 1814. Both the academy and college were named after the town, and the town in Massachusetts is just one of numerous places in the U.S. and Canada named after Lord Amherst, including Amherstburg, Ontario (just south of Detroit); Amherst Island, Ontario; Amherst Island, Nunavut; Amherst, Nova Scotia, Amherst, Quebec; Fort Amherst on Prince Edward Island; Amherst, CO; Amherst, ME; Amherst, NE; Amherst, NH; Amherst NY (suburb of Buffalo); Amherst, OH; Amherst, SD; Amherst, TX; Amherst, WI; and Amherst County, VA.
My point was not that kids care or even know about the actual person for whom a program was named. It’s just that from reading a lot of CC posts I get the feeling that in general people feel like a school having a given name makes it more special. I went to Wharton sound better than I went to business school at the University of Pennsylvania (which people will mistake for Penn State). A lot of people know Wharton independently but who would know Kelley or Foster or Frost or Bienen or Boalt or Stern or Thornton if people on CC weren’t constantly using them? They don’t add clarity so my guess is that people feel they add “prestigiousity”.
Actually, saying Foster isn’t what should lead us to assume it’s better than some other school. Naming it didn’t change the program, right? Clearly, I couldn’t spell Boalt.
No it shouldn’t but I have thought as long as I’ve been on CC that people like to throw around the names of programs with the idea that they are more special if they have a name.
I think naming or renaming a program sometimes does connote change and an implicit strengthening when it’s coupled with huge infusions of cash. Think of all that Bloomberg money committed to Johns Hopkins.
And it’s not just impressionable kids who might be influenced by a name like that. There are plenty of image-conscious parents who care too and enjoy name dropping.
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This last spring, at the cost of $140,000, they sent all graduates new diplomas with the Foster School name.
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Wow…that seems like a waste of money.
“Time smooths it all out. I don’t know, today, that one can tell any significant prestige difference between institutions named for a donor (Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Cornell, Brown, Duke, Amherst, Williams, Wharton, Kellogg) and those not named for a donor (Princeton, Penn, Columbia, Dartmouth, MIT, Chicago, Northwestern, Swarthmore, Pomona).”
Dartmouth is named for a hoped-for benefactor who didn’t quite benefact. English nobleman Lord Dartmouth was a generous philanthropist who had funded an earlier school in Connecticut. So when Rev. Wheelock founded Dartmouth he named it after Lord Dartmouth in the hope of getting another slice of the pie. Didn’t happen.
“Having a schools named after someone does not make it more prestigious in and of itself, it just means that the school got a large donation or has a historical reason for naming a particular school after someone. For example, Harvard Law School & Harvard Business School seem to be doing just fine!.”
I’d say that the Harvard name pretty much pegs the prestige-o-meter all by itself. Adding a donor’s name won’t help much and may even detract. For years Harvard sort of bragged that the Kennedy School of Government was the only the only School within Harvard University named for anyone other than John Harvard. But in recent years the School of Public Health and the School of Engineering have taken on names - Chan and Paulson, respectively.
Not related to a donor, but a name change that I’ve always regarded as a mistake is the medical school in Oregon. For many decades it was the University of Oregon School of Medicine. Fine. Sounds just like a proper, respectable state medical school. But then along came some dean or president who decided that the name didn’t adequately reflect the fact that other degrees were also awarded there - nursing and pharmacy for example. So he changed it to the Oregon Health Sciences University. Big Mistake IMO. That sounds like some sort of for-profit trade school.
I think there’s some of that, at some schools—Wharton being a prime example. hich it was after the building in wPenn is awfully selective all around these days, but there was a time not so very long ago when it was one of the less selective of the Ivies, and the Ivies as a group were less selective than they are today. But Wharton was more selective than other units at Penn, so there was a certain cachet in saying you went to Wharton rather than that you went to Penn Business School. But after a while it just becomes tradition. Wharton is probably still the more recognizable and prestigious name in some circles.
It’s a little bit similar with Stern, NYU’s business school, which is much more selective than most of NYU’s units—except Tisch, which you also hear a lot.
In other cases it’s more a matter of wannabe’s. Wharton is Wharton, Stern is Stern, Sloan is Sloan, so IU’s business school needs to be Kelley to put it in the same conversation. I think that’s largely a business school thing, though. You don’t hear it so much in other fields—some public policy schools named after famous public figures (Kennedy, Humphrey), some music conservatories or performing arts schools, but no one bothers to identify Columbia’s engineering school by its full name (the Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science). In the case of Boalt Hall, UC Berkeley’s law school, I’m pretty sure it was just named informally after the the building in which it was once housed, and the name stuck, even after it moved to a different building. But I don’t think the school has ever been officially named Boalt or Boalt Hall; that’s just a longstanding nickname.
Berkeley’s law school used to be officially called the “Boalt Hall School of Law.” They changed it to “UC Berkeley School of Law” in 2007.
I’m not impressed when a department or school within a university gets named after someone. It feels like the school is selling out, and the person giving the donation is doing it to satisfy their ego rather than for philanthropic reasons. It also bugs me when when public facilities get named after politicians and bureaucrats.
As an aside, does anyone else think DeVry’s Keller Graduate School of Management was purposely named to sound like Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management?
I wish I had enough money to give someone a building or an entire school whether it was named after me or not, but honestly, I probably would like my name on it so my kids and grandkids could walk by it years down the road. CAdreamin School of Business sounds good, or maybe CAdreamin Performing Arts Center, ya, that’s the ticket.
^ My friend whose family is extremely well known and has buildings and school* ( universities and boarding schools) and other institutions and places with the family name on it, kid refused to go to any school which had their name on anything.
The naming of Tandon came later. When the merger just happened, it was mainly known as NYU-Poly.
I believe it was Stephen Colbert who suggested shopping around for a school that already had a building or program with your last name. Not that you should actually SAY you’re related…but the more unusual your name and the program’s, the better. 
This has been primarily a branding/donation exercise for business schools, emulating the Wharton brand.
Almost every business school (good, bad, indifferent) has a name. Fuqua, Tuck, Kellogg, Kelley, Mendoza, McDonough, McCombs, Stern, etc… It is pretty meaningless since everyone does it. Anyone really care about the Jack Welch School of Business or the Wayne Huzienga School of Business?
At some schools, they even have separate names for their undergrad and grad B-schools. Like McIntyre and Darden at Virginia.
Harvard, Columbia, Stanford get along just fine without separate b-school names.
@Pheebers DS’s first name matches that of a LAC in the Midwest. He may apply if they don’t require many extra essays, on the off chance that they may send him stuff with his name on it. Probably not, since they consider interest, and we won’t be traveling there. When he was a baby, we ordered a couple onesies from their bookstore.