Before I die, I hope to be wealthy enough to found a university. With a relatively small amount of money?say, a few million dollars?I could easily start a small institution focused on training students for a specific range of careers. But that wouldn’t be any fun, because trade schools don’t usually have real sports teams. And the best part about founding your own university would be getting to name the team.
So I will need more than a few million. Easy enough. The hard part is naming the team. And this exercise may be the single most important part of the founding of my mythical university. Because team names are, in fact, a self-fulfilling prophecy regarding the makeup of the student body. Produce an aggressive-sounding, perfectly yellable mascot guaranteed to inspire generations of meatheads to night after night of beer-fueled fury, and your school will soon be overrun with just that (see: Fighting Irish). What, then, do I make of the Hoyas? Perfectly yellable, even somewhat aggressive sounding and easily mistaken for the name of our bulldog. Yet the name comes from an oft-modified story involving a dead language, suggesting the emergence of a student body that, while profoundly dedicated to partying, is better educated than most.
So what kind of a student body do I hope to incubate in my nascent university? I don’t know. But I do know that I want to bless them with something memorable. Hopefully not a name which will make them all so ashamed that they avoid competitive athletics altogether. There are plenty examples of teams that I know we would all avoid if we found ourselves on their campuses. The Tulane Green Wave, for example, fails on all fronts. It isn’t intimidating, and it doesn’t suggest anything deeper; it’s just stupid. The Alabama Crimson Tide, on the other hand, is a name that I am quite certain was coined in my seventh grade health class. And who wants to be a part of that?
I want a team with a name that students could learn to love, learn to bear as a mark of pride. Any idiot can love a team with a traditional name; my students will be distinguished by their love of a team that is a bit self-aware, maybe even a bit laughable. If I had been lucky enough to be among the Jesuits who founded Georgetown, I would have pushed for a team name that better reflected our Catholic origins. The Papists would have been my top pick. But the Wafers wouldn’t be bad either. The Inquisitors, the Priesthood, all great names. Yet when presented with the overwhelmingly rich body of Catholic lore, the Jesuits left it up to the students, who, much like students today, apparently had a hard time keeping their academic-related conversations within the confines of the classroom. Thus, we are the Hoyas. But it could be worse. At least it’s a fun name to yell.
