A School By Any Other Name: Branding Committee Recommends Cal Sports Add 'Berkeley' to Its Sports Logo

Cal? UC Berkeley? Cal-Berkeley? Or the official-sounding, University of California, Berkeley?

In the Bay Area, we’ve grown accustomed to hearing that giant university in the city of Berkeley go by a few different names. But, outside the Bay, the school’s multiple personalities may be causing more than a little confusion.

“We’re all pretty used to calling it Cal or Berkeley interchangeably,” said Sam Littrell, a senior in computer science. “But I do notice that a lot of people that aren’t from Berkeley don’t always know it is Cal. So if we say Cal, people are like: ‘I don’t really know what that is?’”

Littrell has a point.

Last September, the university convened a Cal/Berkeley Identity Task Force to help create one unified identity for the school. Now, the task force has released its report (PDF) — and among the findings: People don’t realize all these names are actually the same school.

In a national survey, when asked if they knew “Berkeley,” “UC Berkeley,” “Cal Berkeley” and “Cal” referred to the same university, 42% said they didn’t know and another 24% said they weren’t sure. Even within California, 36% didn’t know the names were connected.

The difference is that “California” (in cursive script) or “Cal” tends to refer to sports teams (or is a term of endearment by alumni), where “Berkeley” is what’s known among academic and research settings.

“I don’t think that Oppenheimer ever once said ‘Cal,’” said journalism professor Bill Drummond — who first came to Cal as an undergrad in 1961 and returned as a professor in 1983. Nor, for that matter, he added, “did any of the Nobel Prize winners refer to it as ‘Cal.’”

Why does that matter?

“Having two distinct identities for one entity is highly problematic from a branding perspective,” wrote Chancellor Carol Christ to the task force last fall (PDF). This will come up even more often as Cal moves into the Atlantic Coast Conference next year, where East Coast viewers are unlikely to know what school “California” is.

The problem with this, reads the task force’s report, is that the full scope of what UC Berkeley offers is then missed. “The breadth of the institution is lost on them,” says the report.

The solution they recommend: Moving sports teams to the name “Cal Berkeley.” Cal script on top, Berkeley written underneath or next to.

But Drummond says it’s all just a bunch of marketing that doesn’t have anything to do with most of the students, the labs, the work or the research that happens at the school. “They need to create something the people who sell that, as a product, can hang their hat on,” he said.

“It’s not going to work,” he added.

And he believes it won’t work for precisely the reason that makes UC Berkeley or Cal or Berkeley (whatever you want to call it) such a great place: all the different communities co-existing together in one place. “They want to homogenize it,” he said. “That flies in the face of what this whole thing is about.”

“It’s not the kind of community where you can regiment them,” said Drummond. “That’s its strength.”

But that’s not going to stop the school from trying to wrestle this thing into one cohesive name. The other recommendation from the task force is to use “Berkeley” as the principal campus brand and to let Cal and Golden Bears be used in conjunction for community building.

This was another issue Chancellor Christ called out in her letter (PDF): The term “bears” or bear imagery actually cannot currently be used, per brand guidelines, with the word “Berkeley,” and the word “Cal” is only allowed in reference to sports. “Some students, such as student-athletes, feel excluded from the UC Berkeley identity because they’re only allowed to use Cal in athletics contexts. Similarly, multiple affinity groups have expressed concerns that current restrictions on the use of the Cal name hinder their equity and inclusion efforts,” she wrote.

Many people don’t even realize the school has official branding guidelines — which ban the use of UC-Berkeley, UCB, and University of California at Berkeley — as well as separate Cal Athletics branding rules (PDF). What’s allowed under the Cal sports parameters? California, Golden Bears, Cal Bears — absolutely not Cal Berkeley. At least not yet.

That directive, it turns out, was a remnant of a previous round of discussion about 30 years ago, said Drummond, when people associated with the sports teams started calling it “Cal-Berkeley.”

This isn’t the first time someone has aimed to tame the unruly campus community and create order. “Better people have tried,” he joked.

The task force’s recommendations, the report said, were based on the history of the UC system. Whereas other state school systems typically have a known flagship that’s referred to by the state (e.g., “Michigan” refers to the main school in Ann Arbor), the University of California’s schools all have developed distinct identities (e.g., UCLA, UC Davis, UCSF).

The task force also noted, “concerns were raised about George Berkeley’s legacy of white supremacy. The vice chancellor for equity and inclusion has been asked to help lead the university’s examination of these issues. These concerns are being considered as part of implementing these recommendations.”