Beaver College Not a Filter
Fave
In 1927, the
following dirty little ditty was published in an anthology of American
folk verse:
She took off
her clothes from her head to her toes and a voice at the keyhole
yelled, 'Beaver!'
Poof,
"beaver" had a new meaning in the English language. Poof,
little Beaver College, founded in
1853 in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, had the seeds of a PR problem.
"The word 'beaver' too often
elicits ridicule in the form of derogatory remarks pertaining to ...
sexual vulgarities," wrote Beaver College President Bette Landman
in a recent letter to Beaver alums, students, and staff.
Still, for 75 years the proud, plucky
Beavers ignored the double entendre, just never you mind those ribald
jokes from the likes of Howard Stern and Conan O'Brien. Never mind the
spate of self-proclaimed "beaver movies" spawned by a 1969
Supreme Court ruling that pubic hair wasn't obscene.
But then came the Internet, and
suddenly the Beavers mind -- mind so much that after 147 years, Beaver
College is thinking of ditching its name.
"We have a lot of evidence that
people aren't able to get our information in high schools because of
Web filters in the libraries" that block out sites with
"Beaver" along with other presumed smut words, said Beaver
spokesman Bill Avington. "With so many people using the Net as
the initial means to look at colleges, that's a serious
disadvantage."
Filters will block email from Beaver
college staffers to perspective students, too, Avington claimed. Mail
that isn't filtered is frequently deleted by people who assume it's
porn spam when they see the domain name.
And kids who go searching for
"beaver" on the unfiltered Web find it all right, but they
don't necessarily find the Beaver College website.
Search for Beaver College on the
Deja.com and up comes an anatomically graphic snapshot captioned:
"Jenni's application to Beaver College for graduate studies has
been accepted."
"I got a call from a father who
was irate because his daughter, who was trying to find our site, had
stumbled on a 'beaver site' with an extremely crude image on it,"
Avington said. "He was upset with us, and I said, 'I can't
control what's on the Internet.'"
All this, plus a survey that found 30
percent of high schoolers wouldn't even consider attending an
institution called "Beaver College," prompted Landman to
mail out a letter and survey last February to 20,000 Beavers,
ex-Beavers, and families of Beavers, asking, "Is it time to
change the name?"
As of Tuesday, more than 6,000
surveys had been returned. Avington declined comment on early results.
The deadline to return surveys is
Friday. Beaver College will tally the results, then host a series of
"town meetings" to solicit further input. The name change
committee will then make its recommendations to Landman, and by the
end of May, there may be no more Beaver College.
But sophomoric denizens of the Web
need not lament -- there are, apparently, other mockable fish in the
sea of higher learning.
"Apparently, there's also a Ball
State University!! LOL!!" wrote one thrilled poster in a
newsgroup discussion of the Beaver dilemma.
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