I’m not immature, but I have to admit to having done a double-take every time I saw the name of the school. While living in Edinburgh my wife worked for a short while at the Medical School and I couldn’t help but notice the official name of the associated veterinary school: The Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies. I was sure Dick was a surname and yet little boys never grow up, it seems. Fast forward to just last week when I had occasion to look up Arcadia University, here in Pennsylvania. For those of you who’ve never had the privilege of being an editor at an academic press, I’ll say that one of the things we constantly do is check out colleges and universities. In the case of some church-related schools it’s easier to get the straight dope from Wikipedia before going to their actual websites. I never rely on Wikipedia alone, of course.
A defunct college (Marvin College). Image credit: Nyttend, via Wikimedia Commons
Still, the Wikipedia page for Arcadia explains that the school had to change its name because internet searches were being blocked for sexual language. The former name of the school? Beaver College. Human beings have a very wide variety of slang words to refer to our genitalia. I suspect part of the reason is the fun of establishing, and violating taboos. There are many schools that could fall into this category (Ball State comes immediately to mind), but when it gets to the point that search engines block you because they assume your mind is in the gutter, what choice have you got? Changing names is a big expense and even bigger hassle, but everyone searches for everything on the web. It’s our common reference book.
I don’t know whether to believe Wikipedia on this point or not, but I know from personal experience that employers or commercial servers can block “offensive” information. I’m a religion editor. When I took our car in for service some years back—they have free wifi for customers so they can work while they wait—I soon found I could not get onto any websites mentioning religion. Given my job, that’s a bit of a problem. The garage had blocked it as a taboo topic, perhaps for good reason—I have no way of knowing. What it means is that my wife now has to take the car in for service. Regarding Arcadia, it probably doesn’t help that it was an all-female school. Its first name was Beaver Female Seminary. Things have changed since 1853, but I’m afraid that those of us who are immature still find this a little funny.
