Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, June 7, 1994 TAG: 9406070055
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: Allison Blake
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Upstairs at Burruss Hall is the Office of University Relations, which, loosely translated, means the place where folks who know what's going on inside Virginia Tech transmit info to people on the outside.
Often, they do this by way of reporters. Ergo, the tag "university spokesman," appended to the names Larry Hincker or Dave Nutter in the stories you read, see and hear.
Besides talking to reporters, these guys sell Tech. They put out internal newspapers, glossy magazines and oversee a network of folks who promote the university from posts within the individual colleges.
It seems to me, however, that there's another job their office could adopt: They could translate alphabet soup.
Academics apparently embrace acronyms with the alarming alacrity of bureaucrats. Argh!!
What of English?
The examples are legion, starting with the name of the place: Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, or VPI&SU (though officials have tried to avoid this serving of alphabet soup by using "Virginia Tech"). Hopefuls take the SAT and GRE to get in.
Long memories in my office recall the university renaming contest: Somebody came up with the Eastern Institute of Enlightenment and something-or-another, aka, EIEI-O.
Flip through the Tech phone book. There's CODAC - and that's not film. It's the Center for Optimal Design and Control. A listing for the Educational Technologies Division (LRC).
Equal Employment Opportunity - EEO - came out of Washington, so I won't blame the school.
Then there's the Center for Organizational and Technological Advancement, the budding, and hopefully someday high-profile, Hotel Roanoke-based think tank. Highly paid and equally powerful professors will train corporate types in the research they need to better perform their jobs. It's a great idea. They may have some built-in hurdles, but because the airline industry has created a world of "hubs" - where you've got to get off the plane at least once to get anywhere - we'll pretend that's not an issue.
But how 'bout that name? Everybody calls it COTA.
"Sounds like a little guy in a Spielberg movie," commented a university insider.
Or even a Midwestern state that's become a stylish Hollywood offspring name. Da-Kota. John Lennon was killed there, in Manhattan.
Imagine some CEO (translation: "Chief Executive Officer") in, say, NYC. New York has a way of looking to New England for bucolic relief, but let's pretend that this fellow doesn't want his execs hanging out in Newport because he knows they'll all take off for their friends' fashionable summer houses and miss the evening session. And, more to the point, Tech's COTA offers the training he seeks at less than the cost of a Harvard University training seminar.
Say he's looking at a bunch of brochures for the first time. What's doing to catch his executive-but-headed-out-to-a-fashionable-dinner eye? COTA? Or a name that implies peaceful learning?
Can't we work in "Blue Ridge"? Or even "mountain"?
Whether we want it to or not, marketing dominates our society. And one can't help but imagine an intensified initial buzz around CEO circles if they envisioned themselves in the Blue Ridge. Not at industrial-strength COTA. Whatever that may be.
In artistic circles, they're pretty hip to the aesthetics of naming their colonies and centers. "The Millay Colony" in upstate New York, where any self-respecting artist would rub up against the legacy of Edna. The Sweet Briar College-associated Virginia Center for the Creative Arts is mercifully called "The Virginia Center" by the artists and writers who go there. Evocative of an original colony, old gentility is around to support the arts.
Bureaucrats have taken the acronym to the highest form. Fairly or unfairly, that seems to fit in with our notion of bureaucrat-as-cog-in-machine. But academics and their administration? The ivory tower thinkers who postulate brilliance for the masses?
Maybe they just need a little help. Turn COTA over to the marketing experts. Without, of course, adding too much extra work.
by CNB