Considering recent events, a pressing question has come to my mind: How can I get my name on something at ASU?
I walk around and all I see are buildings with peoples' names scrawled on them - names that have no meaning to me. Does anyone around here know who any of these "people" are? Who in the world is G. Homer Durham?
Well, now I know about one of them, William Polk Carey. Carey's $50 million is the second largest gift ever given to a business college in the United States. He seems like an OK guy to name the school after, although one has to doubt the credibility of anyone who would call ASU "one of the leading public universities in the country today."
While the new W.P. Carey School of Business sees its financial star rising, the rest of the university is not quite so lucky. In short, Carey seems to be the only one willing to pony up for higher education.
Right now, ASU is caught between students who don't want to pay any more tuition and a state legislature whose best idea seems to involve a strange combination of torches and trickle-down economics.
If this Carey guy has so much money to give away, he must be kind of smart, right? Nobody makes that much without having some brains to back it up. Let's see what he has to say about this issue:
According to Carey, "The key to future economic growth is quality education."
And all the while I had thought that it was just giving corporations and really rich people huge tax cuts. Boy, this guy is really onto something!
Still, it seems unlikely that the average ASU student (usually sleeping or inebriated) or the average Arizona state legislator (usually sleeping or inebriated) will see Carey's logic. So, we might have to employ a somewhat more creative solution.
When you visit one of those really nice private universities that you weren't able to get into (assuming you share this experience with me), you'll notice that everything is named - not just the colleges. The rooms, the pianos and even the professorships have names attached to them.
ASU is an enormous university and we have a serious overstock of nameable items. We need to have a red tag sale on naming stuff at this university. No price is too low until we have a name for every pane of glass.
Imagine, instead of typing this column on some anonymous computer at the Computing Commons, this computer could be the Jessica Wanke Center for the Advancement of Computer Skills. Instead of relieving myself on the cold seat of a faceless toilet, we could call it the Joshua Deahl Clinic for Intestinal Health and Wellness.
Instead of being just another professor, John Devlin could hold the Ben Thelen Chair in Kicking the Crap Out of Everyone. As an added bonus, I would be glad to offer my assistance in the form of motivational verbal abuse.
Now that I think about it, ASU doesn't have anyone's name attached to it. Maybe we should offer to name our own university after every student that pays higher tuition and every state legislator that votes to make education a real priority in this state.
That way, a giant black blob could form over ASU's name and, as it grew, we would know that a few people out there had figured out what seemed so obvious to Carey in the first place.
Benjamin Thelen is a philosophy and political science senior. Reach him at benjamin.thelen@asu.edu.
