On Va. Campus, A Slight Degree Of Discontent

Mary Washington College's New Name Off-Key to Some

Of course, they admit, it will sound strange at first. But before long, officials at the institution formerly known as Mary Washington College say, their new name will come tripping off the tongue with ease:

The University of Mary Washington.

One more time now:

The University of Mary Washington.

"You get used to it," insisted Ron Singleton, a senior vice president at the 96-year-old public college in Fredericksburg.

Yet as Mary Washington made the switch official last week -- unveiling a new logo and hoisting a new flag -- the name was still sticking in a few craws. After all, the lengthy search for something that could reflect the liberal-arts school's growth into a full-fledged university had managed to agitate several of the major sensitivities found in academia.

Such as gender. And tradition. And, of course, grammatical syntax.

"Linguistically, it would have been better to say 'Mary Washington University,' " said Ryan Butts, a 22-year-old senior who will graduate this summer and recently learned that her diploma will carry the new name.

"I'm not too happy about that," she said.

"University of Mary Washington" emerged very late, and as something of a compromise, in a debate that roiled the campus for years.

In 1985, President William Anderson proposed changing the name to Washington-Monroe College, which, he argued, would raise the school's profile and attract more applicants. But students took offense, seeing it as an attempt to conceal its origins as an all-female college. (Formerly a satellite campus of the then-all-male University of Virginia, Mary Washington went co-ed in 1972 and now has an undergraduate population that is about 34 percent male.)

Students protested the Washington-Monroe proposal by marching from the campus to the grave of the school's namesake -- George Washington's mother -- and then to the home of the college president, who later agreed to preserve the old name.

But the issue resurfaced in the late 1990s as Mary Washington began to expand its graduate programs. A new satellite campus in Stafford, now enrolling about 1,000 students, was named the James Monroe Center for Graduate and Professional Studies. And with the college recently being granted the status of university by the Carnegie Foundation, school officials decided that a new name was in order to reflect the new identity.

Surveys last year found that alumni and students both preferred "Mary Washington University" to "Washington & Monroe University" by a wide margin. After expressing a preference to keep the "College" name, faculty members issued a resolution supporting "Mary Washington University."