The Name Game
by Jason Elliott on February 26, 2008 in Opinion
Elvis Presley didn’t send a telegram to friends announcing his nickname as “The King.” Wayne Gretzky never issued a press release demanding to be thereafter referred to as “The Great One.” The best nicknames appear organically.
This is precisely why our school’s artificially announced transformation to “HKS” elicits confused glances and awkward chuckles from students and staff accustomed to the natural nickname derived from the actual name of our institution, the Kennedy School of Government – KSG for short.
Most distressing is the white-hot fallacy of parallelism upon which the new moniker depends. In an attempt to cozy up with our more well-endowed neighbors, we must now follow a naming structure that begins with “Harvard” and ends with “School,” placing in the midst of these two potent words the subject of study. HBS studies business. HLS studies law. Starting now, we are HKS. We, of course, study Kennedy.
But wait. I am not here earning a degree in biography about the thirty-fifth president of the United States, John F. Kennedy, nor current Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. I’m learning about social policy. My friends study national security and infrastructure development. These all sound suspiciously like functions of a school of government.
So maybe the Dean’s decree should have forced a name change to HGS. After all, we do study government (or at least those of us not bound for a six-figure McKinsey desk job). A shift to HGS would, however, drop the Kennedy legacy from the school, forfeiting a major selling point and making the portrait of President Kennedy in the Forum seem oddly out of place.
So why change the name at all?
Are we so insecure about our place in academia that we must thrust upon all listeners the Harvard name like an atom bomb (or, rather, H-Bomb) of conceit? The Graduate School of Design seems content with their non-H moniker, GSD. Although, to be fair, their only other option is Harvard Design School, or HDS, and the Divinity School already has that one under lock and key. And I suspect that in the battle between Prophet Moses and Robert Moses, God always wins.
So why, exactly, is this name change so necessary? What is behind the impulse to copy HLS and HBS? Sure, Littauer is no Langdell, but I’m damn proud of the fact that I don’t have to wear wingtips to class. Sure, our red brick buildings are a bit dumpy compared to the movie set that is HBS, but a simple change of name will never transform our dear little café into Spangler. And, surprisingly, I’m fine with that.
Alas, the ship has sailed on this name change, and emails with “HKS” in the subject line now circulate among our student body like mononucleosis through a freshman dorm. Whine, we may. Yet instead of fighting a Sisyphean battle against the naming gods, I instead return my attention to the reason for the name change in the first place.
There seems to exist a challenge of simple arithmetic. There must somewhere be a secret rule that Harvard schools must identify by three letter codes, much like airports. FAS, SPH, GSE. We Kennedy kids have, unfortunately, four words by which we wish to identify ourselves: Harvard, Kennedy, School and Government.
Four words, three spots.
Apparently in the cosmic linguistic battle between purpose (Government) and prestige (Harvard), the powers that be decided in favor of the latter. So we heretofore are the Harvard Kennedy School. Apparently the omission of the name of our small East Coast liberal arts school has cost us billions in endowment and notable alumni. Or so the theory goes.
The dean insisted over email that the name change was necessary to distinguish the prestigious Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University from the “more than 900,000 institutions bearing the Kennedy name, most of them schools, (typically at the elementary or secondary level).”
My goodness, this lack of self-esteem runs deeper than I had previously thought. I was proud to be a student at Harvard University. Here I am, having worked my whole life to get good grades, succeed in jobs and perform well on standardized tests, and the public cannot differentiate between the Kennedy-named graduate school in Cambridge, Massachusetts and elementary ones in St. Joseph, Minnesota or Winder, Georgia.
The only plausible silver lining here: I feel a little less silly now for telling my teacher yesterday that my dog ate my homework.
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Hear, hear! This article was well-written and well-argued. It will always be KSG in my mind, if only for aesthetic purposes. Those three letters have a kind of regal elegance together, somehow. (Though to be fair, they are also a little reminiscent of “KGB,” which is decidedly less regal but is at least sort of sexy in a Bond Girl kind of way). HKS reminds me of a muttered sigh. hhkssss…
Sadly, in two years there will be no students left who remember the KSG days, and HKS will seem perfectly normal.
KSG! KSG! KSG! Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can!
Amen. Not to mention that every time I see it I think “Hicks” - though maybe this is an intentional way to counter-act our snobby reputation. Two birds with one stone: Harvard name and anti-intellectual touch.