The Voice

Judging from the student chatter, this name change situation is a certifiable mess–a debacle if you will.

Not too many students who pass by our office have positive things to say about it either. In fact, the bit usually goes something like, “Wow, they’re going to change the name, what an expensive, stupid idea.”

With all the comments from faculty and staff on the e-mail talk lists, theses points are clear to more than the students, but yet, the fight continues.

Precious time that could be spent hammering out the budget crisis is now being spent talking about stationary, sweatshirts and an incredibly expensive rebranding process that could end in a regression back to “Georgia College.”

There are students who think changing the name is a good thing. Georgia College might sound more prestigious, like Dartmouth College or College of William and Mary. One day, our reputation might improve with a new name, but is is really worth it? Do the costs outweigh the benefits?

What’s in a name? Is the quality of our education at stake? No. Is our liberal arts mission at stake? No. GC&SU will smell just as sweet if we were Georgia College, but it will cost us nothing.

Changing the name would be totally superficial. Functionally, the change might help the school avoid the onslaught of phone calls for Georgia State University. Student records might not be as confusing. But even if we change our name, we’ll still get wrong numbers and hiccups in our records.

And during the transition, won’t everything be in worse shape for a while? Some records will have the old name, while others have the new.

Again, it seems that the Board of Regents has gotten us into a unique situation that will require forum after debate after forum. Can they swoop down from their Atlantan cloud and help fix this like they did with the budget cuts (kind of)? They required us to change in the first place, maybe they can help us pay to revert.

Yeah, right.

We’re going to have to pay for it, no matter how big the cost. And for what? A few less phone calls? A few less conversations explaining what our university is and how we got here?

Honestly, after seven successful years under the GC&SU monicker, is it really worth it? Even if it might mean possible improvement to the school’s long term reputation and image, in a time of budget cuts and financial uncertainty, the editorial board of The Colonnade says, “no.”

Keep the name, save the money and reexamine our priorities.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Oct 29 2004. Filed under Our Voice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry