You know, for a mob who are always sneering about alleged “white fragility”, the brown woke left seems to be an awfully snowflakey bunch. Just this week, we’ve had Aboriginal activists telling us that the mere name of the late Queen makes them feel “culturally unsafe”. In New Zealand, Maori activists are variously “offended” by: Chris Luxon sitting on a table, “mispronouncing” te Reo, not pronouncing te Reo at all, a Christchurch gondola ride… well, I could go on, but you get the picture.
But if Aborigines (or, at least, the deathly white city activists who pass themselves off as “Aborigines”) are offended by Queen Elizabeth II’s name, New Zealand activists are even more offended by Queen Victoria’s. Heaven help the poor petals if they ever visit Melbourne. Especially when it adorns a university.
New Zealand has eight publicly funded universities, seven of which seem to quite like their names. Victoria doesn’t. It wants to be known as university of Wellington, after the capital city in which most of its 22,000 students live.
Shh, don’t anyone tell them who Wellington was named after.
To date, the institution’s political overlords have been lukewarm to the idea, which is a bit surprising given the government of Jacinda Ardern’s usual enthusiasm for ‘change’.
The country’s education minister, Chris Hipkins, who got his own bachelor’s degree at Victoria, says he is ‘not persuaded’ by the case for a shake-up. But neither has the university been persuaded by the official rejection, opting instead for a never ending ‘brand refresh’ aimed at pushing the old girl out of the faculty lounge window.
Even staff members have described the doggedness of the campaign as ‘bizarre’. Victoria says it’s only a much-needed fragrance of ’name simplification’, but some might say it carries a whiff of fragility about it.
Undeterred by official rejection, Victoria has taken to branding its social media activity and signage with “Wellington uni”. The university is trying to strong-arm local transport operators into renaming their schedules.
Because in these days of brown fragility, the poor petals who brag that they were once warriors can apparently be laid low by the mere mention of a name associated with colonialism.
Wellington, Wellington… there’s that name again. Now, where did it come from?
Victoria’s other justification is that it needs to distinguish itself from the eight other academic institutions in the world named after Victoria.
How much better might the Kiwi recruiters be faring were it not for all these other Victorias crowding the field?
One problem with this idea is that all of these various Victorias in the rankings, whether they be in Australia, Canada or New Zealand, generally don’t cut the mustard; often they do not even make it into the top 500 charts.
Besides, as any internationally minded university would also know, the world of higher education has long been awash with similarly named institutions. In the United States, there’s Cornell university in upstate New York, which is one of the eight members of the venerable Ivy League, and Cornell college in Iowa, which most certainly is not. Nobody loses too much sleep over that. In Britain, Oxford Brookes university is occasionally, if momentarily, mistaken for the other one with the dreaming spires. Come to think of it, five of the colleges at Oxford — the Oxford, that is — also happen to have identical names to ones at Cambridge.
And if standalone institutional names are what it’s all about, why isn’t the scholarly world beating a path to the door of Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya university, in Thailand?
Spectator Australia
Sometimes unis change their names for good reason. The all-female liberal arts college in Pennsylvania, Beaver, changed its name in 2001 to Arcadia university. Mostly to avoid being blocked by anti-porn filters.
Still, it would be kind of funny to let the university rid itself of associations with colonialism by dumping the name “Victoria”, only to re-brand itself “Wellington”.
Just don’t tell them why we’re laughing at them. That might offend them.
