By David Topping

In what might not be the wisest move, OCAD—the Ontario College of Art and Design—wants to be called OCAD University. Yes: Ontario College of Art and Design University. Sort of.
According to the Globe, the school’s new appendage is the result of “creative brainstorming” throughout the school, and follows a branding expert’s advice that the school’s acronym “OCAD” not change (which would typically be the route to take when one of the words in an acronym becomes incorrect); more details are available in the school’s release. What is most confusing, though, is that the school is going to pretend that the acronym OCAD isn’t an acronym anymore, but some sort of weird all-caps word imbued with non-collegiate meaning. According to the Globe‘s article, OCAD—which has been officially designated as a university since 2006—”felt the word ‘college’ created confusion for future students and others about the school’s status in the world of postsecondary education.” (Guess the Obay campaign was right.)
All the college needs now is provincial approval for their new name to stick, which means there’s still time to fix it—but we need some help from U. Torontoist has solicited advice from our staff and has come up with two initial candidates for a new name: Christopher Bird’s “Ontario Higher Institute School of Art and Design Learning College University” (OHISADLCU), and Marc Lostracco’s “Ontario Higher Art Institute” (OHAI, “for a Bachelor of LOL”). If you’re got an idea of your own for OCAD’s new name, serious or not, please share it in the comments. We’ll pick our favourites, poll our readers on them next week to select three front-runners, then send those names along to OCAD to see what they think. For a city and a school full of creative, cool, and interesting people, surely we can do better.
Photo by Michael Chrisman from the Torontoist Flickr Pool.