Penn Law was renamed Carey Law in 2019, after a guy named William P. Carey. South Carolina School of Law was renamed Rice School of Law in 2023 when a man named Joseph F. Rice gave them a significant wad of cash. The Ohio State Moritz College of Law was named for Michael E. Moritz who, it’s worth noting, graduated from Denver Law.
Yale and Harvard, on the other hand, haven't changed monikers at any point in the last 300 or so years.
So, “what’s in a name?”
As a Penn Law grad, I was shook—a little angry even—to hear that the school’s name was changing. Who was this Carey guy? Why should I have to invoke his holy name every time someone asks me what school I went to?
To some of you, this probably seems like a weird reaction to an event that technically does not affect me. But I know others of you get it.
Enslaved people in America were often given classical names by slave owners. One such enslaved woman named Venus worked in the home of Benjamin Wadsworth, President of Harvard College (1725-1737). In America, there are still places with names like Squaw Lake, MN, or Dead Negro Spring, OK. (Seriously. No joke.) Not to mention the actual US government renaming bases for Confederate generals.
Names have power. Names matter.
Consider, for instance, the fact that Vanderbilt had to pay the United Daughters of the Confederacy 1.2 million dollars just so they could stop calling one of their dorms “Confederate Memorial Hall.”
It hardly helps a law school to be named after some guy that none of its prospective students will know anything about, meaning this is an appealing deal only to the donor. So, why would a person want a university named after themselves?
Capital campaigns and nonprofits “emphasize naming opportunities to attract seven-, eight-, and nine-figure donations from high-net-worth individuals… less than one percent of major gifts are offered anonymously,” writes Anne Bergeron in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.
Bergeron puts these high-net-worth namers in the context of philosophical concepts like ethical egoism, impure altruism, utilitarianism, and the categorical imperative, to create a methodology for ethical fundraising that appeals to normative, utilitarian, deontological, virtue, care, gender, and race ethics.
Bergeron then comes to the conclusion, after much insightful deliberation and analysis of real cases, that “naming gifts, which are undemocratic by nature, pose challenges for nonprofits to balance donor recognition with social good while ensuring that fulfillment of the former does not harm the latter.”
Others are not so scrupulous when it comes to the philanthropic moral code. “With but few exceptions, universities and colleges, public and private, are in desperate need of funding to support the quality that all of our constituents want... so we name things in their honor, both to recognize the gift and to signal to others that we can be grateful for their help as well,” says John V. Lombardi in Inside Higher Ed.
In other words, sucking up is exactly the point. Big Name #1 gets a lavish ceremony for donating money to build a building that students need—and the government won’t pay for—and then Big Name #2 and #3 say “Hey, I want a building too!” Before you know it, there’s a whole satellite campus, and it costs the university nothing but a thimble of dignity.
So, what does this all mean?
To put it simply: names matter, but money talks, and it makes one heck of an argument.