Follow these guidelines when applying a name to a building, room, space, scholarship, faculty position endowment, department, school, lecture series, conference or other named program.
Use the shortest name possible. Longer names may not work well in social media or other electronic forms.
Titles should be avoided whenever possible. This includes professional titles such as president, professor or director, as well as courtesy titles such as Dr., Mr., Mrs. and Ms. Suffixes such as Ph.D. or M.D. may be included upon donor’s request.
SUNY Cortland class years should be included for alumni. The apostrophe should be curved and slant away from the numbers.
Clarity and the donors' wishes are key. If a maiden name is included, it may be necessary to repeat the last name to avoid confusion:
If the donors are flexible on the order of the names, the following arrangement may save space:
Namings in honor of the parent of an alum may include the graduate's class year, if desired. The letter "P," to indicate "parent," should appear before the class year:
In the above example, the honoree is the parent of a Class of 2001 graduate.
If both the parent and the child are alumni, the parent's class year should be listed first:
In the above example, the honoree is a 1981 graduate and the parent of a member of the Class of 2003.
Spaces or programs named by a class can use the abbreviated version of the year for both short and long names.
Note that Kappa and Beta namings must include their active years.
Other namings by fraternities or sororities should be the name of the organization followed by the program or space.
A naming by an athletic group may wish to honor a certain year’s team.
For scholarships, other groups may wish to use a creative name.
Some nicknames may be included in long names. Place them in curved quotation marks following the person’s legal first name and middle name or initial, if applicable.
In general, the official short version of a named entity should be the last name followed by the building, space or program. Class years should be omitted included in short names.
The first name can be included in short names to distinguish different people with the same last name.