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As a professor who teaches college-level grammar at Howard University, I read with interest about the recent proposal and triumph of the name "University of Mary Washington" ["College board spares Mary," Nov. 23].
I believe one reason that the name "the University of Mary Washington" had not been proposed before Nov. 18 is that it is not preferred and possibly ill-formed.
A basic generalization of the English language is that proper nouns referring to humans are avoided in most constructions with the preposition "of." Compare the ungrammatical "the pencil of John" versus the grammatical "John's pencil."
In a database I made of the names of 3,098 universities and colleges from around the world, 882 contain the preposition of. What follows the "of" is a geographic location 59 percent of the time, typically a city (e.g., University of Richmond) or a state (University of Virginia), but sometimes a region or country. The field of study follows "of" in 38 percent of the cases (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). The remaining 3 percent were a hodgepodge.
In the database, 89 institutions (2.9 percent of the total) contained a proper first and last name, in which case the modifying names are almost invariably placed before the head noun, following the preferred pattern of English: Mary Baldwin College, George Mason University, The George Washington University, Fairleigh Dickinson University etc.
The sole exception I found was the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor, a small, second-tier school in Texas. Six other exceptions of personal names following "of" were named after people who did not typically use surnames: saints (College of St. Catherine), or royalty (College of William and Mary).
These data demonstrate that the syntactically preferred placement of proper names like Mary Washington is before the noun, as we have now with Mary Washington College.
The board of visitors is to be commended for trying to preserve Mary Washington's name in the overarching name of the institution. However, the name "University of Mary Washington" is oddly constructed, highly irregular, and virtually unprecedented.
The General Assembly should consider revising the board's choice to the linguistically preferred "Mary Washington University."
Paul D. Fallon
Fredericksburg