Why is Penn's name so stupid?

45_Percenter
Sun, 06 May 2012 13:19:28 +0000

^ Actually, “UPenn” is a relatively recent phenomenon (that isolated Crimson headline notwithstanding), and is probably related to the web site URL more than anything else. In fact, as a review of older university publications and media coverage reveals, the unversity has been known predominantly as “Penn” (which is what most of us called it when I attended in the 1970s), “U of P” (a family friend who attended Columbia in the 1950s told me that at games against Penn they used to shout, "U of P? [P.U.!](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.U.)"), and “Pennsylvania,” which the university called itself on team uniforms and school apparel, in the 100-plus-year-old school song (“Hurrah, hurrah Pennsylvania!”), and in publications and other places:

[This is Pennsylvania (1957) - YouTube](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tpo1GtbWPys&list=UUoAoM5UWcFff6XbUf7UJinA&index=6&feature=plcp)

[The First Century Penn Athletics - YouTube](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgLLdjgMygM&feature=relmfu)

http://www.archives.upenn.edu/primdocs/uplan/paoneuniv1972.pdf

Since I attended Penn in the 1970s, I don’t recall it regularly–or even occasionally–being called UPenn unti the growth of the internet and the use of the upenn URL in the past 15 or so years.

Other than “University of Pennsylvania,” the most common ways to refer to the university for more than a century–and perhaps more than 2 centuries–have been “Pennsylvania” and “Penn,” as reflected in, e.g., the name of the 117-year-old Penn Relays, and more than a century’s worth of school songs (“Fight on for Penn!”–1923; “Here’s a toast to dear old Penn!”–1901):

[The Songs Of The University of Pennsylvania](http://www.dolphin.upenn.edu/pennband/lyrics.html)

and as exemplified in this quotation from an 1887 (that’s eighteen eighty-seven) yearbook:



and as the walls of “Old Penn” grow dim in the distance,



[Penn Gazette | Penn Connected](Penn: Page not found)

So from the perspective of tradition and history, “Penn” is the best nickname. And, it’s what the overwhelming majority of living alumni call it, and have called it since long before the logo rebranding campaign of the early 2000s (which essentially was intended to make graphical representation of the Penn logo more uniform throughout the university and its schools).