Does naming a division after a someone make it seem more prestigious?

Scipio
Sat, 14 Nov 2015 00:39:40 +0000

“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.