What’s in a Name? Part 3 - Who gets remembered? (#564)

If Part 1 of this series was about identity, and Part 2 was about money,then this part is about something softer and perhaps more personal:

Memory.

Because naming rights are not just financial decisions. They are acts of remembering.

And every act of remembering is also, inevitably, an act of forgetting.

How institutions remember themselves

Walk through any veterinary college and you can read its history in the walls.

A hallway of class photos.

A plaque honoring the first dean.

A scholarship named for a beloved clinician.

A teaching award quietly endowed by alumni.

These small recognitions tell a collective story. Not of one person, but of many.

The technician who stayed late for years.

The pathologist who trained three generations of residents.

The farmer who donated calves for teaching labs.

The alum who sent $100 every December without fail.

Most veterinary schools grew this way - incrementally, communally, almost organically.

Like a stone wall built one rock at a time.

No single stone claimed ownership of the wall.

The scale problem

Naming rights change the scale of memory.

When a room is named, the story stays local.

When a building is named, the story grows.

When an entire college is named, the story narrows.

Suddenly, decades of shared effort compress into one surname.

It’s not intentional. It’s not malicious. But it is powerful. Language always is.

Students don’t say:

I study at the College of Veterinary Medicine.

They say:

I go to the ___ School.

Over time, the name becomes the history.

And everything before it fades into preface.

The quiet math of contribution

There’s something else that troubles me, and it’s rarely discussed openly.

Most veterinary colleges weren’t built by one transformational gift.

They were built by thousands of modest ones.

Consider the arithmetic:

20,000 alumni giving $50–$200 a year for decades.

Faculty accepting lower salaries because they believed in public service.

State taxpayers who never set foot on campus but funded it anyway.

Staff who quietly kept the place running.

Collectively, that support often exceeds any single donation.

But collective support has no single name.

And so, it rarely appears on the letterhead.

Large gifts deserve recognition. Of course they do.

But when the highest level of recognition goes to one person alone, the message can feel out of proportion to the broader story.

It subtly rewrites authorship.

As if the school were built primarily by a benefactor rather than a profession.

The psychology of belonging

Names shape belonging more than we realize.

A place called State University College of Veterinary Medicine feels public.

It feels like it belongs to:

Students.

Farmers.

Pet owners.

Taxpayers.

The profession.

A place called The [Add A Person’s Name] College of Veterinary Medicine feels different.

Not worse. Just different.

More private.

More proprietary.

More owned.

More exclusionary.

Even subconsciously, the tone shifts.

It’s the difference between our school and their gift.

For a profession built on service and shared stewardship, that psychological shift matters.

New schools, new names, new narratives

Right now, veterinary medicine is expanding quickly.

We have 33 accredited colleges, with numerous additional programs proposed or emerging across the country.

Many of these schools are brand new.

Which means they have no inherited memory yet.

No walls covered in decades of photographs.

No alumni traditions stretching back half a century.

Their identity is being written now.

If those identities begin with a donor’s name, then that becomes the foundation story.

Future generations won’t even know there was once another way to name a veterinary school.

They’ll assume this was always the norm.

Culture doesn’t change with debate.

It changes with familiarity.

The faculty perspective

I sometimes think about this from the viewpoint of faculty.

Imagine spending 35 years building a program:

Training residents.

Writing grants.

Teaching night after night.

Helping shape the soul of a place.

Then, one day, the school is renamed.

Again, no wrongdoing. No disrespect intended.

But there’s an odd emotional dissonance.

Your life’s work now sits inside someone else’s surname.

It’s a small thing.

Yet small things accumulate.

And over time, they influence how connected people feel to the institutions they serve.

The alumni perspective

Alumni feel it too.

When a college changes names, graduates sometimes feel as though their history has been quietly rebranded.

The place they knew - the one printed on their diploma - becomes archival.

I’ve heard colleagues say: I still call it the old name.

Not out of defiance.

Out of attachment.

Because names anchor memory.

They hold our younger selves.

Changing them can feel like moving the furniture in a childhood home.

Everything still works.

But it doesn’t feel quite the same.

Gratitude without erasure

None of this is an argument against philanthropy.

We need donors.

We need advocates.

We need people willing to invest in veterinary education.

And those gifts should be celebrated generously.

The real question is not:

Should we honor donors?

Of course we should.

The question is:

How do we honor them without unintentionally erasing everyone else?

That’s a design problem, not a moral one.

Perhaps it means:

Naming hospitals and centers rather than entire colleges.

Creating enduring endowed programs.

Telling fuller stories about collective contributions.

Preserving the institutional name while celebrating individual generosity.

In other words:

Gratitude without surrendering identity.

Recognition without rewriting history.

A personal confession

Maybe this is just nostalgia.

I came of age in veterinary medicine when schools felt almost monastic - humble places with practical names and a strong sense of shared purpose.

Nobody expected their name on the door.

The reward was the work itself.

When I walk onto a campus now and see a surname stretching across the facade, part of me understands the necessity.

But another part quietly misses the anonymity.

The sense that the place belonged to everyone equally.

There’s something deeply democratic about a simple name.

Something reassuring about a college that doesn’t belong to anyone in particular.

The question we should keep asking

As more schools launch and more gifts arrive, we would do well to pause occasionally and ask:

Who gets remembered?

Who gets thanked?

And who quietly disappears from the story?

Because in the end, veterinary education has never been built by one person.

It has always been built by many.

Our names, or the absence of them, should reflect that truth.

Coming next

Part 4 -Is There Another Way? Alternative models for philanthropy that fund growth without trading away institutional identity.

Background

On January 28, 2026, the University of California at Davis (UC Davis) announced a record-breaking $120 million donation from Joan and Sanford I. Weill to its School of Veterinary Medicine.

In recognition, the institution was renamed the UC Davis Joan and Sanford I. Weill School of Veterinary Medicine.

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