Names Matter: The Quandary of "General Studies"

What’s in a name? Plenty, if it belongs to a college or university.

Consider Western Maryland College, which many prospective students assumed was a not-so-great satellite of a public university located in the wilds of rural Maryland.

It was not. Rather, it was a private liberal arts college situated just 45 minutes northwest of Baltimore.

Confused? Don’t be: The college was originally named for the nearby Western Maryland Railroad. But while that appellation made sense when the college was founded in 1867, it eventually obscured the school’s identity as a selective liberal arts institution, and the first coeducational college south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Hence the decision in 2002 to rename the school McDaniel College, in honor of William Roberts McDaniel, an alumnus who after graduating in 1880 went on to serve as everything from professor to president to trustee. This allowed the college to link its public profile to a figure who, as its own website declares, “helped shape its destiny and today personifies its mission,” instead of yoking it to a descriptive phrase that, with time, had grown to be profoundly misleading.

The change did not go unnoticed: By 2008, applications were up 68 percent.

This is not unusual. In 2001, the unfortunately titled Beaver College, so named for its birthplace in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, refashioned itself as Arcadia University. By 2006, student applications had doubled.

Admittedly, this was a special case; according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, internet browser pornography filters used by some parents and libraries prevented prospective students from even accessing information about “Beaver College” online. Yet the basic point still applies: Names matter.

You can probably guess where this is heading. Like McDaniel and Arcadia, the School of General Studies was born with a name that made perfect sense at the time, but that now does more to obfuscate than to illuminate. And a name change, if done right, could be just what GS needs to build on its achievements—and secure its future.

The School’s current name is itself the result of an earlier renaming that occurred after World War II, when an influx of returning soldiers supported by the G.I. Bill forever changed the character of what was then known as University Extension. The latter, in turn, originated in 1904 as Teaching Extension, Columbia’s first foray into adult education; and over time, it came to offer a broad range of courses—some vocational, some academic—along with a Bachelor of Science in “general studies.”

As the number of students seeking undergraduate degrees through University Extension ballooned after the war, the division was reorganized as a full-fledged undergraduate college. The name School of General Studies was chosen both for the sake of continuity, and because the phrase held deep resonance for faculty and students steeped in the classics: In the Middle Ages, the great universities of Bologna, Paris, Oxford and Cambridge were known as studia generalia. As the scholar and Columbia graduate Frank Pierrepont Graves explained in his 1910 tome, A History of Education during the Middle Ages and the Transition to Modern Times, those institutions accepted students “from all parts of civilization”— unlike the earlier studia particularia, which “taught only a few from the neighborhood.” The effect, says Dean Peter Awn, was to open up what had previously been an exclusive realm of elite higher education “to people from anywhere, to study anything.”

To those who know what the phrase originally meant, and who also know that the School of General Studies is now the finest liberal arts college in the country dedicated specifically to nontraditional students from around the world, the name seems perfectly apt.

Alas, far too few know any such thing.

In an age when the meaning of studium generale is hardly common knowledge, “general studies” no longer signals a radically inclusive and intensely rigorous model of liberal education. Instead, it just seems vague.

“It sort of sounds like you couldn’t decide on your major,” says Robert Moore, a higher education marketing consultant whose agency, Lipman Hearne, helped shepherd McDaniel through its name change. (The firm’s clients also include Columbia, Brown, Cornell, Penn, and Princeton.)

To make matters worse, a number of schools that lack GS’s singular mission and accomplishments have adopted similar sounding names, devaluing the currency of the original and sowing confusion in the minds of prospective students.

Schools ranging from Arkansas State to the University of Pittsburgh now offer programs with the name “general studies” attached to them in one form or another. But none have anything to do with making an Ivy League education available to nontraditional students. As a result, the people charged with attracting the best possible candidates to GS must dispel a fog of mistaken assumptions before they can even begin talking about what the school actually has to offer.

“With a new name, we would just be saying who we are,” says Vice Dean Curtis Rodgers, “and we wouldn’t have to say who we’re not.”

Yet if the name General Studies is no longer one to conjure with, the college behind it is stronger than ever. The School’s curriculum is fully aligned with that of Columbia College; its students participate fully in the life of the University; and it has gained an international reputation as a center for innovative programming. And it has achieved all of this while developing a recruitment, admissions, and advising system designed specifically to identify and support exceptional students who hail, to use Graves’ apposite phrase, from all parts of civilization, whether that means the U.S. Army Special Forces or the New York City Ballet.

All of which has led the GS senior administration to consider what kind of title would best serve the School’s constituents, and its underlying mission, in the years ahead.

“We need a name that doesn’t need to be explained away before you get to the identity of the college,” says Awn. Ideally, the new name would be one not easily replicated elsewhere—the simplest way to achieve that, he contends, would be to use a proper name, one belonging to a proper person. In addition to being unique and easily identifiable, such a name would also carry with it another major advantage: a significant donation.

Renaming GS in the absence of a gift would still make a difference. Neither the McDaniel nor Arcadia name changes were made in honor of major donors, but both schools were nonetheless buoyed by the experience. As Moore explains, the very act of renaming an institution can raise its profile, providing it with an opportunity to tell its story to an audience that might not even know it exists.

Yet a donation on the scale required to secure naming rights would, says Rodgers, “change everything” for GS, allowing it to provide an unprecedented degree of support to students who typically arrive on campus with far greater responsibilities—financial, familial, and otherwise—than their traditional counterparts.

And the list of potential donors is long, partly because GS’s unique mission and innovative programming—its pioneering Postbaccalaureate Premedical Program; its joint and dual degree programs with List College of The Jewish Theological Seminary, Sciences Po, and City University of Hong Kong; its commitment to veterans’ education, which has made it a model for selective colleges and universities across the country—tend to attract the support of people who have little else to do with the University. Indeed, the School’s largest donor in recent years never even attended Columbia.

It’s one thing, however, to recognize that a name change would be a good move—even a necessary one—to safeguard the gains that GS has made in recent years, and to place the School in the best possible position to accomplish even more. It’s quite another to actually do it, let alone with minimal fuss and maximal impact.

For every McDaniel and Arcadia, there is an NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering, whose remodeling as the NYU Tandon School of Engineering drew vocal protests from students, alumni, and faculty—not to mention coverage of their outrage in The Wall Street Journal. Or a King’s College London, whose administration ultimately abandoned a seemingly modest attempt to drop the word “College” from the school’s name after it sparked a firestorm of protest, garnering more than 12,000 signatures on an online petition and plenty of unflattering exposure in the British press.

To those who have a personal connection to a college or university, the institution’s name can be a powerful symbol, a kind of shorthand for a formative period in their lives and a set of values and experiences that are integral to their sense of self. So the prospect of seeing it change is practically guaranteed to provoke some kind of response.

“There’s going to be noise,” says Moore. “A name is a real touchpoint. It can be a lightning rod, or a point of pride.”

In the NYU Tandon School and King’s College cases, much of the furor arose from a lack of communication. Simply put, the proposed changes came as a surprise to everyone but the administrators who had been planning them, engendering more anger than excitement.

By contrast, when Western Maryland’s trustees initiated the process of renaming the college, they were as open as possible about it. A committee comprising students, alumni, faculty—“every single stakeholder group imaginable,” says Moore—was convened; input was solicited from the entire community; and in the end, everyone seemed to feel that the new name belonged to them.

That kind of transparency and engagement are crucial, Moore says. They also involve a good deal of time and effort, just as the renaming itself can involve a fair amount of money. Marketing materials must be revised, databases updated, and a thousand other details arranged, all of which can add up to hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars, depending on whether the institution decides to fully capitalize on the change by reintroducing itself to the world at large with an integrated marketing campaign.

Considering the payoff if done properly, however, these would seem to be wise investments. A well-executed renaming would put the School’s endowment on a new and far more secure footing, while at the same time allowing it to engage all of its constituents, from prospective students to alumni, in a conversation about how the college fits into the larger Columbia system, what it does, and where it is heading.

In that sense, a name change would help GS further the mission that the phrase “general studies” did, once convey: to welcome, as Awn says, all kinds of students into what had previously been an incredibly closed environment. That is precisely what the School continues to do today, albeit on an ever grander and more ambitious scale. The time has come for it to adopt a name that will announce that mission, and declare its true identity, once again.

This article first appeared in the 2016-2017 issue of The Owl magazine.