There’s a peculiar weight to the name you carried on your ID card at eighteen. It clung to your chest like a badge of honor or a scar. You entered the university as a dreamer, but the name of that institution, whether whispered with pride or muttered with apology, began to shape how the world saw you… and sometimes, how you saw yourself.
University names have power. They open doors for some. They close them for others.
Say Harvard, and a room leans in. Say Yale, and the interview tilts in your favor. Now say Federal University of Agriculture, Ogbomoso West Campus, Satellite Extension Annex and watch how even your own voice starts to doubt your brilliance.
We don’t like to admit it, but branding matters. In Nigeria and across much of the world, a university’s name is a social currency. For some alumni, their alma mater is a lifetime endorsement. For others, it’s a footnote they’d rather redact.
What’s in a name? Everything when that name precedes you into boardrooms, job interviews, visa applications, political campaigns, and dinner conversations. Alumni of world-renowned institutions often ride on that institutional prestige like a well-oiled machine. They’re assumed to be competent, polished, global. Their mistakes are “learning curves.” Their mediocrity is “potential.”
But alumni from lesser-known, poorly funded, and underpromoted institutions? They must fight. They must explain. They must prove over and over that their knowledge is valid, that their degree wasn’t an act of charity, and that their value is not the sum of their school’s broken chairs and unpaid lecturers.
It is a harsh, classist, post-colonial reality.
And now, just when some of our public universities have fought to build prestige around their original, proudly institutional names the names are being tampered with. Changed almost casually by politicians who want to immortalize their own or others’ names in brick and stone.
But beyond branding and alumni pride, there’s a troubling trend creeping into Nigeria’s academic landscape.The political renaming of public universities.
Just yesterday, the University of Maiduguri (UNIMAID) a respected institution with decades of legacy in the northeast was abruptly renamed Mohammadu Buhari University. With no widespread consultation, no alumni consensus, and no national dialogue, a school with generational significance was reduced to a tribute plaque.
And this isn’t an isolated incident. Years ago, Nigerians vehemently rejected the proposed renaming of the University of Lagos to Moshood Abiola University, recognizing that such name changes do not honor they erase. These institutions are more than buildings and founders. They are brands, they are history, they are memory.
When a university’s name is changed to serve political ego, it doesn’t just confuse alumni it diminishes their academic credibility in global spaces. Certificates start to look unfamiliar. Institutional pride becomes fragmented. Job applications require explanations. And international recognition begins to fade.
These names were built over decades by students, lecturers, researchers, and generations of sweat and sacrifice. Changing them on a whim dishonors that legacy.
A university name is not a political souvenir. It is a symbol of collective effort, national progress, and intellectual sovereignty. When we rename them without a national conversation, we are not preserving history we are rewriting it without permission
Why would anyone rename Ahmadu Bello University? Or Obafemi Awolowo University? Or the University of Lagos?Or the Great University of Ibadan or the University of Nigeria Nsukka?Why strip away decades of identity, alumni pride, and global recognition to satisfy political vanity?
Renaming prestigious public universities after individuals, however noble, reduces centuries of academic legacy into personal tributes. It fractures the brand equity that thousands of alumni have carried into the world. Suddenly, resumes become confusing. Alumni associations lose cohesion. International networks pause. The name no longer speaks for itself.
A university name is not a personal plaque. It is not a statue. It is a living, breathing brand built painstakingly over time, brick by brick, reputation by reputation. When you change the name, you reset the memory. You dilute the history. You confuse the future.
Some schools are proudly local, yet tragically invisible in global conversations. Some have alumni whose brilliance is buried under the silence of institutional neglect. While graduates of elite institutions ride networks, others build theirs from scratch brick by painful brick.
But here’s the twist,it shouldn’t be this way.
Universities were never meant to be fashion brands or prestige labels. They were built to be factories of knowledge, places where minds are shaped and destinies launched. Yet, in our society, they’ve become status symbols gatekeepers of class mobility. And now, with reckless renaming, they are also becoming playgrounds for political ego.
Until universities in Nigeria and elsewhere stop being neglected by the state, and until the names of long-standing institutions are protected like national treasures, we will continue raising geniuses who walk into rooms with their shoulders hunched not because they lack talent, but because they fear their university name doesn’t ring enough bells anymore.
And to the alumni of schools with low-budget branding and zero PR clout this is not your shame to carry. Some of the finest minds walked through cracked lecture halls and used stones for stools. Some of the best ideas came from places not found on world rankings. It is not always about the name but the name can either magnify or mute your worth.
So yes, university names do impact their alumni sometimes as launchpads, other times as burdens. And when political hands start altering those names without national consensus, they are not just renaming buildings they are erasing legacy, disrupting identity, and wounding the very pride of a people.
But wear your name with pride. And if the world doesn’t know it yet make them learn it.
Let them rename buildings if they must. But never let them erase the name you carried, the legacy you earned, or the fire that school lit in your bones.
