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.