Southwest Missouri State University -- if you've never heard of it, you are forgiven, assuming you live outside Missouri -- is lobbying hard for the Missouri legislature to change its name to simply Missouri State University, a name that remarkably has gone unexploited to date. At present Missouri's set of tax-funded universities has a top tier consisting of the four research-oriented campuses of the University of Missouri system (Columbia, aka Mizzou; St. Louis, my campus; Kansas City; and the engineering school at Rolla), a second tier consisting of four large teaching-oriented schools with bidirectional names (Southwest Missouri State, aka SMS; Northwest Missouri State, which wants to convert itself into a fifth UM campus; Southeast Missouri State, aka SEMO; and Truman State, nee Northeast), and a third tier of smaller schools I know little about.

Southwest wants the new name in order to escape the image of a “regional” or “compass” institution, and therby to attract better students. According to the campus president SMS, with close to 20,000 students, is the largest institution in the United States with a “multidirectional” name. I guess he thinks a bidirectional name bespeaks third-tier status, and I'd grant that there's some truth to that. But the new non-directional name bespeaks first-tier status, like that of Ohio State, which for SMS is over-reaching a bit.

He says the name change isn’t about funding:

Keiser said SMS has asked for more state funding in the past and will continue to do so regardless of whether the name is changed.

The bill to change de-directionalize SMS also inflates the names of four other schools:

• Central Missouri State University would become University of Central Missouri.

• Missouri Western State College would become Missouri Western State University.

• Harris-Stowe State College would become Harris-Stowe State University.

• Missouri Southern State University-Joplin would become Missouri Southern State University.

For all these schools, including SMS, the objective is name inflation. Well, why not? If students get inflated grades, why shouldn't campuses get inflated names?

I wish that my own campus could change its name from UMSL, which the locals pronounce “Umm-sull”. If we reversed the first two words to make it Missouri University – St. Louis, or MUSL, we could pronounce the resulting acronym “muscle”. Think of clever advertising possibilities! But I suppose my proposal won’t fly – the Kansas City campus wouldn’t want to be known as “muck”.