The Naming of Universities

You can tell a few things about universities from their names. If, for example, a university has a direction in its name then it is usually not ranked very highly: University of East London, Southern Illinois University. Those that are named after long dead people -- Yale, Duke -- are often but not always -- Bishop Grosseteste -- very prestigious.

It might be an idea to have a ranking of institutions with the most interesting or strangest names. After all nearly everything else about higher education is ranked somewhere or other. California University of Pennsylvania should be near the top. And of course there is Hamburger University and Butler University. Or, from a few years ago, The Universal Institute of Food Management and Hotel Administration I was Called by the Almighty and I Said Yes My Lord, which was actually a restaurant somewhere along the road from Maiduguri to Kano in Nigeria.

Another high flier might be the Lovely Professional University, a "semi-residential university college in North India", which is ranked 4326th in the world and 213rd in India by Webometrics. I doubt if it will get many votes in the QS or THE academic surveys unless it changes its name which I suspect might be a literal translation from Hindi or Sanskrit.