In the face of persistent rumors that school leaders were mulling such a name change, University of Akron officials issued a statement Tuesday saying the school has no plans to rebrand itself.
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“We would like to be as clear as possible: There are no plans to change the name of The University of Akron — now or in the future. Period,” school president Scott Scarborough said in a campuswide email, according to the Akron Beacon Journal.
That declaration came a day after the Beacon Journal published slides obtained via an open records request that showed a prototype “Ohio Tech” football uniform and a new school seal that read “Ohio Institute of Technology & the Arts.”
A school spokesman told the newspaper Monday that the slides were part of a presentation Scarborough made over the summer after the decision to keep the Akron name already had been made.
“The potential name-change idea was considered and then discarded,” spokesman Wayne Hill said. “Instead of a name change, the university chose to rebrand the existing name of the university to accentuate our unique strengths as a great polytechnic university, uniting the arts and humanities with science and technology.”
Whatever ends up happening in Northeast Ohio, they’ll always be the Zips to us.
