Why not? There’s also a Northern Michigan. They’re all aptly named. University of Michigan’s main campus (Ann Arbor) is located only slightly west of Eastern, but it is to the west. (It has at least one smaller school as part of its system closer to Detroit, which is east of Eastern, but so what?) I’m pretty sure most if not all of them started as normal schools as indicated above. When you get founded by the state to train teachers for the area and don’t have a benefactor to be named after, you get pretty generic names.
And let me tell you people will let you know about them really quick if you mix them up. It is almost as if Memphis, Nashville, and Chattanooga are capitals of 3 different states. I know a few East Tennesseans who feel a closer affinity for Atlanta than Nashville (at least in sports allegiances).
How about the University of Southern California?Iits hard to have more of a directional school than that.
Not quite. The Oregon Territory was established in 1848. And California became a state in 1850, if you’re only counting states. The explanation that it was meant to serve the former NW Territory makes sense, though.
As for the OP, I do think the University of South Florida is poorly named, as it was founded in Tampa, which is in west-central Florida. It would have been South of the two major Universities, but isn’t really in South Florida. It is, though, a highly accomplished research university.
But I’m also puzzled by the point of the OP in general.
Not universities, but these Chicago street names have always struck me as absurd:
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Western Avenue is in the eastern half of the city.
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North Avenue is south of a good 1/4 of the city.
On the other hand, Wisconsin is a college town: it seems like every CDP has a bar with an Old Style shingle out front and a UW-ThisPlace.
It is? I’ve always just thought of it as a massive commuter school and a home for those who couldn’t get into FSU or UF
Texas State (used to be Southwest Texas State) is firmly in Central Texas, about halfway between San Antonio and Austin. West Texas A&M is in Canyon, which is squarely in the Panhandle, not West Texas. South Texas College of Law is in Houston.
The only directional school I can think of that’s actually accurate in terms of the nominal direction is University of North Texas, which is in Denton, about an hour north of Dallas and Fort Worth.
My high school had a West Campus and an East Campus.
As I’m sure you know, both streets were once their respective directional borders of the city. To this day, I still kind of think of Western, at least over here on the South(west) Side, as a kind of a western border of the older city.
Michigan’s fight song says, “Hail, hail, Michigan, the champions of the West.”
Oklahoma has:
East Central University
Northeastern State University (with two campuses in different cities)
Northwestern Oklahoma State University
Southwestern Oklahoma State University
University of Central Oklahoma
Northern Oklahoma College
Western Oklahoma State College
Sure, but that doesn’t make them any less anomalous. Nor explain why Chicago Avenue is a relatively short, minor street instead of the grand thoroughfare you’d expect.
I always thought that was because they dominated the early Rose Bowl games played in Pasadena, but I could be wrong.
Southern Oregon University is indeed at the near-extreme south of the state, just some 15 miles north of the Oregon-California border. It’s also very far to the western end of the state as well. The school has won an NAIA national championship in college football.
That whole region of Oregon (Rogue Valley and/or Jackson County) is often referred to simply as “Southern Oregon” to the exclusion of the southeast part of the state (which is sparsely populated).
There is also a Western and Eastern Oregon University, which are in the northwest and northeast parts of the state, respectively.
The OP asked about how directional schools are regarded by employers. I had a chance to go to either a large D1 name-brand school or a small directional school where I could get a better education. I asked my dad what I should do and he said, that directional school is great if you stay in the area but if you move out of state no one has ever heard of it. He was right.
I could also point out City University which when I was in Seattle had a great reputation and had some gravitas if you had a degree from there but if you’re not from Seattle and I said I had a City University degree you may respond, “You couldn’t even get into University of Phoenix?”
And I have a master’s from a state college. Now in my specific field, telling you my degree is from this school should impress the hell out of you and it did while I stayed there. But since I moved away employers see that school’s name and think, “Meh just another State College.”
Relatively short and minor? It’s one of the mile markers and runs from the lake across the entire city into Oak Park, River Forest, and Melrose Park before it finally ends. You mean why isn’t it a N-S boulevard? I suppose, but is it usual to have streets named after cities be the major thoroughfare in a city? Picking a random sampling of cities, I’m not finding that to be the case. Chicago Ave actually is a major E-W thoroughfare, and a mile marker to boot (which makes it an important street on the grid) not just some random side street.
There’s the University of Southern North Dakota at Hoople, but it’s not much of a sports school.
I’ll show myself out…
Wow, consider me schooled. I once lived a block north of Chicago Ave. but – maybe because it has no highway interchanges – never traveled further than a few blocks on it. I had no idea it went that far west.
Weirdly, I now live in a distant suburb, and there’s a Chicago Avenue nearby again. It’s only a mile long and has no significance whatsoever.
It’s not in the Eastern half, unless you’re up north. It’s actually right in the middle:
https://www.npr.org/local/309/2019/07/15/741161117/the-heart-of-the-city-finding-chicago-s-geographic-center
It is definitely not the case in Atlanta, where Atlanta Avenue is just a regular ole street.
I mean the biggest thing that has happened to Atlanta Avenue recently is that at the intersection of that and United Avenue the city changed up the road sign so that Atlanta was above United… to match the name of our soccer team.