The Edge

Brandon Worf

Photo Editor

This seriously can’t be reality. At first I was going to rant about traffic in this town, but I deferred that to my next column. I think this is more pressing of an issue.

Most of the students on campus have already heard the news, but many around town may not know this yet: there’s big plans in the works to change the university’s name from Fort Hays State University to something as desirable as a bag of poop, which would be the “University of Western Kansas.”

That certainly has a nice ring to it…if you’re in marketing at least. To the rest of us, it sounds trashy, and to some, it sounds downright demeaning. So let’s break this down.

The proposal language speaks a lot of adaptation and changing to meet the growing needs of providing education for a large portion of the rural communities in the west part of the state. Without getting into the rhetoric of it, this isn’t an uncommon issue. Just ask Kansas—they’re pushing 30,000 students already. While a large portion of their campus attendance comes from the Kansas City metro area, I think most people would laugh at, or threaten someone who proposed to change the university’s name to the, “University of the Kansas City Metro Area,” in an effort to represent the broadest demographic they draw from. While that’s a bad analogy, the concept is the same in our case. We all know where a majority of the student body comes from, and there’s no reason to change the name just to reflect that.

In one part, the proposal states, “[The word] ‘fort’ does not define any piece of the daily life of the university community.” So what’s the point? Baker University is named for a specific individual, who doesn’t have any piece of involvement in the daily life of that university, and yet the name remains.

This argument is bupkis. There’s no reason to disrupt the tradition and/or legacy of an institution simply because what it’s named for no longer plays an integral role in its daily life. If you stop and think about it, the fort was decommissioned three decades before ground was even broke for the university.

For all intents and purposes, the fort never really played a role in daily university life to begin with, but since it had a historical legacy, the founders thought it fitting enough to name the school after it.

Let me put this in terms the administrative board can understand: don’t change the name. If the efforts in the late 80s to do this didn’t work, why should they now? In the proposal, it said, “the name--the University of Western Kansas—has stuck on the campus and has often been used in signage around the area….”

Um, where? I thought our ubiquitous marketing slant was Affordable Success? Last I’d checked, they’d plastered that all over the state, and I can’t recall any instance where “the University of Western Kansas” was a secondary name for the school.

A long story short, there is no immediate need to change the name.

Claims that the associated costs with changing the name will be miniscule are not true.

A major institution such as Fort Hays can’t change it’s name and total image without incurring a fairly large chunk of expenses in the form of marketing, merchandise, and realignment of many university logos and signs. I’m sure President Hammond will be less than pleased with having to change the brand new seal on the floor of the Memorial Union that just opened.

Come on guys. Let’s be mature here. Do you really want to risk the legacy of so many people in the name of focusing on our brand and our image?

Sure, we want to stay up-to-date with everything that’s coming out. Fine, we can do that. But let’s leave the freakin’ name alone.

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FHSU name change idea ludicrous