<p>Recently, I was talking with someone about Sewanee - a highly-rated LAC in Tennessee. Sewanee’s official name is - and has been since the 1850s - the University of the South, but no one calls it that. If an applicant is admitted, s/he’ll say that they got into “Sewanee.”</p>
<p>Now hardly any colleges and universities are referred to by their full, legal names, but their common names are generally abbreviations of the official ones. There are shortened versions (Georgia Tech, Texas A&M), acronyms (UCLA), acronyms which include state abbreviations (UVA, UGA), and nicknames derived from the official (Penn, Midd). But “Sewanee” (which is the name of the town in which the U. of the South is located) is an entirely different word from the name of the school.</p>
<p>I started to wonder if there are other colleges and universities which are commonly known by unofficial names or non-derivatives of their official names. The obvious answer was West Point. Applicants may say that they were admitted to the Naval Academy or the Air Force Academy, but they’d never say that they got into the “Military Academy” - they’d say they got into “West Point.”</p>
<p>If Sewanee and West Point are anomalies, then Ole Miss is half an anomaly. The “Miss” clearly derives from the name of the school while “Ole” is a totally different invention.</p>
<p>So in the higher ed world of common names unrelated to official names, we have Sewanee, West Point, and kinda sorta Ole Miss. Are there any others?</p>
<p>This is not an an answer to what you are asking, but I immediately thought of 2 schools that have changed their names: Beaver College is now Arcadia University, and Western Maryland College is now McDaniel College (those are their true newer names though). If one is willing to back in time by many decades, I recall having come across more name changes.</p>
<p>I had to look up what Rolla was when I first started hanging around CC. Does that count? Especially now that it goes by the name Missouri University of Science and Tech?</p>
<p>I thought of that, though Mizzou derives from “Missouri.” I also thought of UVM for the U. of Vermont, which isn’t exactly an acronym and isn’t a state abbreviation (that’d be UVT), but is the acronym for the Latin translation of “University of Vermont” which appears on the school seal. I see there are going to be some sub-categories of unofficial name categories. :)</p>
<p>Here’s a ground rule - what would a newly-accepted student tell her or his friends when announcing they’d been accepted? We’re looking for schools in which the actual official name would never be the first choice.</p>
<p>I don’t think there are many that will have a completely different name that’s used more regularly than the real name or a derived name.</p>
<p>One interesting nickname is “Swat” for “Swarthmore.” Someone from the college explained that some regional accent is the root of pronouncing its name as “Swathmore” (without the ‘r’), and I guess that’s where “Swat” came from. Always makes me think of swatting flies.</p>
<p>Another one, though not quite fitting your criteria, is Stanford, whose full name is the Leland Stanford Junior University. It’s of course named after Leland Stanford, Jr. but some (i.e. Berkeley students) like to refer to it as the “junior university.” (They don’t realize that we think it’s cute when they do that.)</p>
<p>On that note, some people are confused when UC Berkeley is called “Cal” (deriving from the University of California, and it was of course the first UC, so it has rights to the name).</p>
<p>edit: gadad, I see you’re strengthening the criteria, but oh well (I don’t want to delete all that I just wrote ;)).</p>
<p>How about all the schools that call themselves “Tech”? I can’t tell if they go to Georgia Tech, Texas Tech, or Virginia Tech (officially Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University). Pitt for the University of Pittsburgh. U-Dub (pronounciation only) for University of Washington. Sometime ago a colleague told me the nickname of a small VA urban college was called “Harvard on the Highway”. I don’t think she was complimenting it.</p>
<p>Speaking of Berkeley, it’s interesting that it’s never the U. of California. When academics refer to it, it’s “Berkeley” and when sports fans refer to it, it’s “Cal.” But of course Berkeley and Cal are both parts of the official name.</p>
<p>Where I am, Cambridge is the code for Harvard. MIT, BU, BC folks we know will mention their school’s name. As in, “I went to MIT.”
But, we joke that many Harvard folks try to avoid naming it. Instead, they’ll refer to their experiences “in Cambridge.”</p>
<p>Some of the California State Universities’ official names are of the form:</p>
<p>California State University, Chico
California State University, Sacramento</p>
<p>while others are of the form:</p>
<p>San Diego State University
San Francisco State University
San Jose State University</p>
<p>However, even some of the former are commonly referred to as “Chico State”, “Sacramento State”, etc… But apparently not all of them – I have never heard of people saying “East Bay State”, “Los Angeles State”, or “Long Beach State”.</p>
<p>The two Cal Polys (also part of the California State University system) have slightly different variations of their full name:</p>
<p>California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona</p>
<p>UVM stands for “Universitas Viridis Montis”, which is Latin for “University of the Green Mountains”. This can be connected to the name “University of Vermont”, but only if you can recognize that viridis montis (Latin) = vert mont (French) = Vermont (English).</p>
<p>It’s just an abbreviation, but most people don’t know that the University of Notre Dame is really the University of Notre Dame du Lac (Our Lady of the Lake).</p>
<p>Similarly, most don’t know that Stanford University is the Leland Stanford Junior University.</p>
<p>I was confused when I first was on CC to see references to UIUC (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign). Growing up in central Illinois, it was (and still is) referred to as the U of I. (as if Iowa and Indiana don’t exist…!). The University of Illinois that is located in Chicago is referred to as “Circle”.</p>
<p>I suspect there’s a lot of “local” references across the country…Here in NC, UNC is the generic name for UNC in Chapel Hill. References to all the other UNC campuses have the initial of the town where they are located… UNCC = University of North Carolina at Charlotte, UNCP, UNCW, UNCA, etc…</p>
<p>At one time California State University East Bay was California State University at Hayward, and yes, we called it Hayward State. (And certainly we called the CSLB Long Beach State.)</p>
<p>UCD is often referred to as Davis, mostly because there isn’t anything else going on there, so referring to Davis refers to the University. (And, as with all UCs, the official name is University of California, with the city as an identifier, not really part of the official name.) With University of California at Berkeley being the grand daddy of them all, they get the Cal moniker.</p>
<p>The CSU’s using names like “San Diego State” tend to be the older campuses, while the “Cal State Fullerton” tend to be newer. The naming scheme was changed in the early 1970’s, when the campuses were transitioned from “State Colleges” to “State Universities”. At that time, it was decreed that all of the campuses would use the name format “California State University, [city of location]”, so as to include the word “University” in the titles. But there was a backlash from the older campuses (Fresno, San Francisco, San Jose) that liked their former names, especially the older, larger campuses. So they were allowed to keep their original names, albeit with the word “University” tacked on the end instead of “College”.</p>
<p>That’s strange, because “Long Beach State” is what CSULB’s sports teams officially go by. Until my older brother went through admissions that’s the only name I had ever heard for it.</p>
<p>The “3rd” state college in Indiana is Indiana University Purdue University at Indianapolis. the initials are IUPUI. We always called it “Ewwee Pooee”. I don’t hear kids saying it as much though. </p>
<p>Univeristy of Illinois in Urbana will always of U of I to me. I had never seen UIUC until I came here.</p>