The Bulls brand themselves with a shorter, and they hope less geographically confusing, title: USF.
By ANITA KUMAR
Published July 23, 2003
TAMPA - It's not easy being the University of South Florida.
Prospective students keep asking where in Miami the school is located. Sports commentators like to shorten the name to South Florida, adding to the confusion. Some professors find the name downright embarrassing, given the school's location in Central Florida.
So after more than a year of discussion, USF officials are moving away from the school's full name.
The first step will be in athletics, where the university will be referred to only as USF on its uniforms, in its media guides and on ESPN. Then changes will be made to all of the fliers, billboards and other promotional materials used around the Tampa Bay area.
One day, officials say, the geographically-challenged school may take the final step - dropping South Florida entirely.
"This is a big moment," said Karen Clarke, USF's associate vice president for university relations and its chief marketer. "It's an ideal moment to be clear about who we are and what we want to be."
The change is one of the many ways that USF is trying to lose its commuter school image and embrace a new identity as a full-fledged university complete with fraternities, football and record-breaking research dollars.
The school has two football games on national television this year, including a home game for the first time.
School officials want to be ready.
"USF is in the midst of branding itself," said Tom Veit, USF's associate athletic director. "We're really starting to get our own identity. . . . We're so young of a university that we are at that point now."
The move toward an acronym puts USF in good company. In recent years, a number of major corporations have decided to switch to their initials.
The American Telephone and Telegraph company became AT&T. Kentucky Fried Chicken became KFC. The American Association of Retired Persons is now AARP.
Even some universities are best known by their initials. There's UNLV, UCLA and TCU, to name just a few.
USF's identity change involves a marketing metamorphosis that includes new athletic and university logos, a slight change in school colors to a darker green and gold and a mascot that looks less like a goat and more like a bull.
And for the first time, it will tell the media to be consistent when it refers to USF. The preferred choice on first reference is USF in sports and the University of South Florida otherwise.
"South Florida is a geographic region," Veit says. "We will never be South Florida again."
The reason: location, location, location.
USF opened its doors in 1956 as Florida's fourth public university, and the only one south of Gainesville. That's a major reason state leaders chose the name.
"What can I say? People didn't think," said USF Faculty Senate president Greg Paveza.
The school now has 39,000 students, making it the third largest in Florida. But prospective students and faculty often assume it is in Miami, or maybe Fort Lauderdale. When they find out the main campus is actually in Tampa, they ask why.
Almost everyone at USF is tired of answering the question.
"I'm comfortable with (the change)," said Steve Burton, an alumnus and member of USF's Board of Trustees. "It does make sense given people's personal experiences and the confusion it's caused."
"I think it's actually good - to be just called one thing," said Omar Khan, the school's student body president.
But there is a catch. There are other USF's out there.
There's the University of Sioux Falls, the University of St. Francis in Illinois and the University of San Francisco. USF - the one in San Francisco - even has the same school colors.
The small Jesuit school also is suffering from an identity crisis - going back and forth between USF and the full name, which officials there think is too long.
"We feel confident that USF is something we need to stick with," said Ryan McCrary, a University of San Francisco spokesman. "As long as people are talking about us in a positive light, we don't care."
-Times researchers Kitty Bennett and Mary Mellstrom contributed to this report.
