An argument against the VUW name change

Hugh Rennie QC has a lengthy well argued article against the proposed name change for VUW. Some key points he makes:

• In my view the reasons proposed for it are banal and lack any credible reasons. The alleged commercial features for national and international recruitment count for nothing. Status comes from a university building up its reputation over decades and even centuries.
• A geographic name is meaningless (leaving aside the number of towns of that name worldwide). One instantly thinks of Monash, Macquarie, Harvard, Stamford, Sorbonne and many others without even knowing which cities they are found in.
• VUW has spent an unknown number of hundreds of thousands of dollars20 without establishing a credible case for change, and is now about to commit to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars more to implementing a break with its past as a risky and unnecessary experiment as to its international reputation which is unlikely to succeed and whose failure would cause serious damage to VUW.