So I wonder how many people are really happy with the naming of the
"Ted Stevens" airport in Anchorage, Alaska, these days.
Generally, I think it is a bad idea to name bridges, streets, airports or schools after people who are still alive. There is still plenty of time for them to screw things up.
But that isn't stopping anyone from naming institutions after President-elect Barack Obama. A Long Island school
has just been renamed after Obama.
Last year,
The Washington Post found that generally, school systems are moving away from naming schools after people:
According to a new Manhattan Institute for Policy Research study, impersonal school-naming practices are a national trend. Three researchers found that 45 percent of public schools built in
New Jersey before 1948 were named after people, compared with 27 percent of schools built after 1988. Similar patterns were found in
Minnesota,
Arizona,
Florida,
Massachusetts,
Ohio and
Wisconsin.
"Of almost 3,000 public schools in Florida," researchers Jay P. Greene, Brian Kisida and Jonathan Butcher said, "five honor George Washington, compared to 11 named after manatees. . . . In the last two decades, a public school built in Arizona was almost fifty times more likely to be named after such things as a mesa or a cactus than after a president."
"Today, a majority of all public school districts nationwide do not have a single school named after a president," the researchers said in their report released this week, "What's in a Name? The Decline in the Civic Mission of School Names."
Students in Portland, Ore., started a movement to name a school after Obama.
The prime minister of Antigua, meanwhile, has proposed to rename the island's highest mountain after Obama.
A South Florida town is about to name a street after the president-elect.
