Some useful generalities, noted with the caveat that exceptions are numerous (feel free to note them, but kindly don’t call me out on “this breaks your rule” – because it doesn’t; I’m giving some often-but-not-always-true broad-brush generalizations:
Many “University of [Statename]” schools are the state-operated liberal arts ‘prestige’ institutions for their states.
“[Statename] University” is rarely a state-operated school, but “[Statename] State University” generally is, and is very often (a) engineering, technical, and/or agricultural oriented and (b) quite commonly the state’s Morrill Act land-grant school. (Note that “[Othername] State University” is generally a constituent part of a multi-university state-operated system simply located in “Othername,” such as Kent State and Appalachian State Universities, which are not the state schools of states named Kent and Appalachia, but constituent parts of the Ohio and North Carolina systems that are respectively located in Kent OH and the Appalachians. Likewise Wayne State U. in Detroit is named for Wayne County.
When “University of [Placename]” occurs, it is more often than not representative of [Placename] – even if only in a prestige sense. That is, it may well be a private school but is linked in some way, perhaps quite informally, to its namesake location.
I suppose “greatly disliked” is overstating it. I wouldn’t even mildly dislike someone for something this trivial. Come to think of it, “Cal” isn’t so bad, but I do object to “California” used to mean just UCB, because of the implication that the other campuses are just lower division feeders, or specialized institutes–which is, in fact, how many of them started out, but is no longer the case. UCLA, for instance, started life around 1880 as the Los Angeles State Normal School. Later when it became part of UC, it was first known as UC Southern Branch, and only taught the first two years of a four year program.
MsRobyn, speaking of Pennsylvania, I understand that Philadelphia Central High School is empowered to grant bachelor’s degrees to students who graduate with an average of 90% or better; this must be unique in the whole country, if not the world.
Which is just what the curators and alumni of Sothwest Missouri wanted you to think when they lobbied the legislature to change the name of the school to just plain Missouri State University. In our state, the University of Missouri is both the state’s designated research university AND the land-grant school. Missouri State is just a poseur.
I’ll bow to your superior experience. I live on the left coast, so have only hearsay evidence about it. Obviously it was wrong.
I don’t think anyone owns the three letters OSU as a trademark. Some schools may own the three letters in a specific graphic representation, though.
People, including Oregon State University, still use the letters OSU to refer to that institution. What the school did was to come up with a new logo that just has the letters OS in a specific graphic representation. Previously, their block letter OSU looked a whole lot like OK State’s block letter logo. Note that both schools have the same colors, orange and black, so you can imagine the potential confusion.
I don’t know if the Economist still does this, but it used to, as a matter of style, change any University of [State] to [State] University. “Michigan University” just looks odd, and isn’t sufficiently distinct from Michigan State University, but, no, they insisted.
Nitpick: it’s not the quality of the education (most of the [T]OSU faculty were, after all, educated elsewhere), but of the matriculants.
A bit of a hijack here, but do you guys care to list the exceptions to the general rule that the U. of ___ is more prestigious or selective than the ___ State school? For example, in Florida, FSU’s criminology program is said to be very good indeed… there must be many, many similar examples across the US.
As an aside, in 1999 THE Ohio State University and Ohio University had a trademark dispute over who had the right to the name “Ohio.” The parties settled. Link
We needn’t discuss tOSU’s recent trouncing of OU on the football field, or the OU mascot’s embarrassing mascot on mascot violence against Brutus Buckeye. Link
and then there’s Boston College and Boston University
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BU Alumni like to say that when someone tells you that they go to Boston College, They’ve lied to you twice! BC is mostly in Newton, Ma, and it’s a University!
Florida is an exception to #1 and #2. The University of Florida is the land grant school, and has the better agriculture, veterinary and engineering programs. For liberal arts, it’s probably about equal to Florida State University (formerly Florida State College for Women, if I recall correctly). Which is the flagship depends on who you ask, and probably mostly depends on the department you’re looking at.
