In a recent article on the collegesportsinfor.com website entitled, "Is It Time for San Jose St. to Consider a Name Change to California St?" The writer Matt Peloquin brought up some great remarks and views about this particular question. Here is my answer to the question that was the title of this article............
I am a 2004 graduate of San Jose State University (SJSU). As much as I love saying SJSU or San Jose State. Even when I was a student I always wondered why we didn't go by California State University or Cal State. My father was a graduate of Cal, and even though a lot of people consider them UC-Berkeley, they are still very well recognized at Cal or California. They were the first in the UC system, just like San Jose State was the first in the Cal State system.
I can see where a lot of us would not like our school to be referred to as Cal State San Jose or even worse CSU-San Jose. But from reading the article as well as my own beliefs I do feel that our alma matter should be referred to California State University or Cal State plain and simple. If you look up and down the coast and beyond almost every state has a University of and a State University. And they refer to them for example as Washington and Washington State. Oregon and Oregon State. Even Wisconsin who doesn't have a Wisconsin State does have a University of Wisconsin even thought they have more campuses in the system other than the one that is most recognized from Madison.
So with that, here is my Coach's RULE of the day.....Why can't we have a California State University to go a long with our University of California? Especially when there are more than one UC schools but the one that counts is the first one from Berkeley referred to simply as Cal. So with having many schools in the CSU system, why not do the same and only have the one that counts be the very first one being the one in San Jose and simply refer to it as California State or just Cal State. I think I can say it..........
Let's go Cal State Spartans!!!!!
The only negative is it takes San Jose out of the name. I do like the idea of being the UC-Berkeley version of the CSU system. I think it could be a little confusing since we call it the CSU system, and our new initials would be CSU.
ReplyDeleteHow about a compromise: Leave the initials SJSU, and call is Cal State.