For decades, names affixed to college bathrooms have adhered to the time-honored tradition of vindictive dudes etching names and numbers of their exes on stall walls. Now the institutions are making the bathroom naming thing part of official fundraising efforts by affixing monikers of donors to the places where some of the deepest thought on campus takes place.
Inside Higher Ed rounds up several instances in which colleges are selling naming rights to bathrooms. Harvard Law School and Colorado have gone through with it, while the University of Pennsylvania lined a bathroom with plaques commissioned by a donor.
Not all bathroom-naming efforts have been successful. MIT deemed the possibility inappropriate years ago, turning down an offer from a former student who found a taker in Colorado. And Dixie State College tried and failed with the practice in an effort to save a musical theater troupe.
With the costs of running institutions of higher learning always escalating, it’s tough to blame fundraisers for looking for new ways to raise money. The bathroom naming rights sector seems to be flush with possibilities.
Well Endowed [Inside Higher Ed]
More From Consumerist
-
Suspected Peeping Toms Crash Through Ceiling Of Women’s Bathroom At Movie Theater
-
If Going Without Your Phone Makes You Want To Flip Out, You Might Be Nomophobic
-
It Is Our Journalistic Duty To Ask You If People Are Seriously Peeing On Stolen Pregnancy Tests Right There In The Aisle
-
Brits Abandon The Boy Wizard To 'Make Fifty Shades Of Grey' All-Time Amazon UK Bestseller
-
Where Has My Slow Fe Iron Supplement Gone?
They’d make more money if they put it on the toilet paper.
You can buy naming rights to a State Game area in Arkansas for $40K
or so I’m told….
Seems somehow appropriate, since higher education in the US is in the shitter.
“The Dick Cheney Memorial Outhouse at Yale University”. Has a nice ring to it, don’t you think?
+1
Can’t let that wasted space be go down the drain with everything else.
Watch how quickly it gets dropped when some poor kid kills themselves in the Megacorp Cubible.
They should put a small drop down table like on an airplane on the interior of the stall doors and charge 25 cents just to drop it down.
I work for a college. We don’t want to raise fees any more than the students want fees increased. Our budgets are getting squeezed hard by the governments that fund us. Less money coming in from the state and in my case, the state is late sending the checks pretty much 100% of the time. It isn’t hard to believe that the colleges are trying to find creative ways of increasing the incoming money coming in without having to charge it all to the students.
I’ll admit that there is probably plenty of wasteful spending in a lot of colleges, but that doesn’t mean that we can just tighten our belts and make due either.
“I’ll admit that there is probably plenty of wasteful spending in a lot of colleges, but that doesn’t mean that we can just tighten our belts and make due either.”
You don’t see the irony there do you? And you mean to tell me that funding has dropped by roughly 400% over the last 25 years? Because that’s what tuition has gone up.
It’s amazing what happens when you put a basically unlimited amount of cash in front of a business and give the debtor no recourse to escape it. Which is what the feds have effectively done with student loans.
http://inflationdata.com/inflation/inflation_articles/Education_Inflation.asp
If funds are low, wouldn’t it be better in the long run to just can the “professor” who teaches underwater basket weaving?
Or, if you can’t fire him, frame him in some sort of grades-for-handjobs scandal…
…frame him in some sort of grades-for-handjobs scandal…
Just make him a football coach, and let nature take its course.
I wanted to take a course in underwater basket weaving. It sounds like a lot of fun, and I did a pretty good job when I had to make a basket during a school field trip to the RenFest.
Huh. I thought colleges raised money by inflating tuition and padding their faculty rosters with overworked, underpaid adjunct professors.*
* I have nothing against adjuncts themselves – in fact, some of the best professors I had were part-timers, including my MIS teacher to whom I refer exclusively as the Most Helpful Man Alive (note the caps – yeah, he was that good). This is more a comment on the entitled “star” professors whose insane prima donna tactics contribute to the aforementioned tuition-jacking.
“Hold on a sec, man — I gotta go take a really big Best Buy.”
Yeah, that’d work.
That would be EPIC.
“This stall has been provided to you by Major League Baseball. Please, no upper deckers.”
Actually, somebody has already jumped at the opportunity to have a bathroom stall named after him…
This Stall Was Made Possible By A Generous Donation From Senator Larry Craig
Oh yeah — my foot’s-a-tappin’
The good senator’s favorite song:
These boots are made for tappin’
That’s just what they’ll do
Either I’m asking for TP
Or else I wanna screw
Send a letter the the CEO of every poorly behaved financial institution, and enclose a photo of a very nasty stall.
“Dear Mr. CEO,
Please make a large donation to our school, or we will be forced to name this stall in your honor”
Would be nice to put something to read in there.
They could name one of the postseason college football games the “Ti-D-Bol”.
I know, you could pay to put a Company name down in the toilet bowl.
Old news. Didn’t anyone watch “The Green Berets”?
or oppurtunity knocks?
In college we already had names for certain parts of the bathrooms. My favorite was the Dean Anderson Glory Hole.
Good times!
Send me the list of buyers.
Cause they can be easily fooled.
I mean, if they’ll buy something from a Dana Carvey movie…
“This bathroom was brought to you by Brawndo the Thirst Mutilator- drink Brawndo instead of toilet water”