It seems wierd that Denver would be the choice since I can’t think of anything that had to do with Ronnie here. But I guess if someone donates land than you take it. It’s the first I’ve heard of it, and curious if anybody knows much about it. Another good school in the area probably can’t be a bad thing, But it just struck me a wierd because I always think of colleges as long established, and I never really considered that you could just start up a new one.
Know what you mean on that. The Florida Turnpike was renamed the “Ronald Reagan Turnpike” (by the 1998 Florida Legislature, according to the blue information signs scattered about the turnpike). Funny thing is, to my knowledge, he never stepped foot in the state ever during his tenure. And it’s weird, trying NOT to call it the “Ronald Reagan Memorial Turnpike” [yet], since most of the full named roads around here tend to be “Memorial” roads - “Irlo Bronson Memorial Highway”, “Astronaut Memorial Highway”.
As far as ‘creating’ a University, not only has Thomas S. Monaghan (he of the Domino’s Pizza empire) founded Ave Maria University in 2003, but is also developing the town of Ave Maria (right nearby).
Well, that might be enough for you, but for some people if you’re going to name something after a person, there should have been some kind of direct association between that person and that general area. Reagan has an airport named after him here in Washington, which makes sense. But why Denver? That’s the question.
Well, colleges and universities have to start sometime, don’t they?
I took some classes at George Mason University, which is a comparative upstart. It was added to the Virginia state university system only in 1957. Today, though, it had world leading departments in law, economics, and international development, in addition to very respectable departments in the other liberal arts.
Clearly some people believe there can never be too many memorials to Ronald Reagan, even if the poor man is technically not dead yet. (I’m no Reagan fan, but Alzheimers has to be on the short list for Worst Ways To Die… :()
I’m most amused by the decision that only students with an SAT score of at least 1400 will be admitted. First of all, that would probably make it the most competitive school in the nation. More importantly, I don’t think the Gipper himself would have qualified - that’s Top 1% territory, isn’t it?
There is a group of people, I can’t recall their name, but their soul purpose is to get things named after Reagan. They research and find anything they can to get it named after RR. New schools, roads and even trying to talk people into changing names on anything and everything. It’s very organized.
flodnak, Reagan was no genius, but he was no fool, either.
He would have understood the irony, surely. When he was given an honorary doctorate by his alma mater, Eureka College, he said in his acceptance speech that he was humbled and that he hesitated, at first, to accept.
He had had, he said, a sneaking suspicion all along that the first degree he received from them was honorary.
Brought the house down, and gave hope to holders of “gentlemen’s C’s” everywhere.
Isn’t it now the general trend of higher education to place *less * weight on standardized tests, as they mostly only measure your ability to take standardized tests?
They are planning on a 10,000 student campus. Which is much bigger than I imagined. I’m trying to imagine how much in donations you need to build a school that big, with enough good facilities to attract the top students they seem to want. I have serious doubts it will ever happen at that scale.
So were Jimmy Carter and Theodore Roosevelt, but as far as I can tell, there are no monuments, roads, or manatee-filled canals dedicated to them in Florida. Lots of Kennedy-monikered stuff, but that’s understandable, given the Space Coast and all that.
Yes, we have Polk, Taylor, Jackson, Jefferson, Monroe, and Washington counties, but I cannot, at first search, find if these are connected to the Presidents, or just well-heeled businessmen (Collier, for example). Gimme a bit, and I can find out if they had a connection to Florida.
What they have in common is in-your-face irony: [ul]
[li]Naming an airport after the man who fired legions of air traffic controllers.[/li][li]Putting a school in the hometown of former Rep. Pat Schroeder, who gave him the monker The Teflon President.[/li][/ul]Mind you, I’m not saying that the irony was intended in either case.
The businessman who donated the land in Denver is from Colorado Springs.
Colorado Springs is extremely conservative, Reagan-worship country (Focus on the Family is headquartered there, for example).
Other than temperament, though, I don’t think Reagan has any special connection to the Springs, either.
What I want to know is where they think they’ll find 10,000 1400+ SAT students who wish to attend Ronald Reagan University instead of, say, an Ivy. I think the SAT standard will quickly disappear.
The answer is simple. Geographic relationships are a non-factor. You could just as easily ask why there is a Martin Luther King street/avenue/boulevard in Denver or Milwaukee or Omaha. It is simply because he is a major figure in U.S. history, and there is a constituency that wants to commemorate him.
But Reagan doesn’t (yet) have his own holiday, and one could certainly argue that MLK affected more people than Reagan did. I mean, it’s not as if he were the father of our country.
