Get rid of the damn 'U'

Sometime back in the early 1980s a group of computer administrators at Penn made a decision that has, over time, fed into the University's identity crisis.

By choosing upenn.edu as the school's home on what would become the Internet, these techies inadvertently institutionalized the practice of calling the University by the bastardized name "UPenn." Today, try as it might, Penn cannot shake that baggage.

Other schools such as the University of Massachusetts and the University of Connecticut embrace the monikers UMass and UConn, respectively, and emblazon them across the front of their basketball jerseys. That is fine for them, especially considering both "Mass" and "Conn" are not terribly catchy names. But Penn is not like that. Even the basketball media guides tell reporters, "It's Penn, please."

Yet most people on Locust Walk don't get it, and that is due in large part because "UPenn" has been ingrained in peoples' minds because it is in their e-mail addresses.

Ira Winston, the head of computing for the School of Arts and Sciences and the School of Engineering and Applied Science, was at Penn back then. In the early days of e-mail, he said the University chose upenn.csnet, which mimicked the University of Delaware's udel.csnet address.

At the time, the University had not developed Penn as its official name. Variants like the U of P and Pennsylvania floated around. Today, it's Penn without question.

Yet countless e-mails, notices, Web sites and even some T-shirts that were given to incoming freshmen a few years back carry the name "UPenn."

It is obnoxious when students cannot say the name of their school correctly. It is even more embarrassing when some of the school's own departments can't get it right. The Economics and Political Science departments, to name a few, use "UPenn" at the top of their respective Web sites when they appear in Google search results.

All of this is contrary to the directives set forth in countless University manuals and procedures. There are very well-defined conventions for how to refer to the school, none of which permit the use of the ill-begotten "UPenn."

Legal Studies professor Nicholas Constan, who has been actively involved with all aspects of Penn for more than two decades, abhors the use of "UPenn" and rightly suggests it should be changed.

"The place is called the University of Pennsylvania," Constan said. "Anyone who knows it refers to it as Penn. What we don't need is any proliferation of confusing names."

So why not penn.edu?

For a University that has changed the names of four college houses in as many years, making a much more important change such as its Internet identity should be a no-brainer. Apparently it is not.

Amy Phillips of Penn's Information Systems and Computing Department headed a study a few years ago that examined what it would take to change the entire University to penn.edu, which had been acquired in August of 2002.

In fact, penn.edu already forwards users to Penn's Web site.

Phillips' report outlined roadblocks to change such as the decentralized nature of Penn's computing systems -- the school has more than 200 e-mail servers -- and presented scenarios to then-University President Judith Rodin.

"The president decided it was not a good use of resources," Phillips said of Rodin's response. More than just costs, she said -- altering the thousands of University Web pages and the millions of links they contain would exact a significant cost in man hours.

But Penn's online presence will only continue to grow in the future, so devoting the resources now rather than later makes sense.

Changing the Web address is no different than any other campus construction process -- except that it has a lower probability of being repeatedly delayed by a spike in the cost of building materials. Gripes over the pain of change remind me of a sign I saw recently on the Garden State Parkway: "Delays during construction are temporary -- improvements are permanent."

Phillips also said changing the domain name could understandably cause confusion, both internally and externally. But Constan says to get it done, because it will lead to "zero confusion in the long run," and that is what matters.

A 2001 Trustees' report concluded, "Failure to maintain a 'state of the art' Web site may eventually place the University at a competitive disadvantage." Failing to maintain a Web site with the school's correct name is even worse.

For millions, their first interaction with Penn comes through the Internet. By standing by the outdated and inaccurate upenn.edu, the University is both giving the wrong first impression and causing unnecessary confusion. People know they can find Yale University at yale.edu, but ask anyone on the street in Center City, or better yet Kansas, and he probably couldn't tell you to find Penn at upenn.edu.

The whole issue is not a fear that Penn might be mistaken for a state school, or some sort of pretentious need to feel important. It is about being correct. Or, as Constan says, "Teaching people what is right."

If Penn is serious about respecting its name and keeping with its official brand, eradicating the use of "UPenn" has to be a top priority.

From now on, I'll type penn.edu. And you should too.

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