In 2020 the American football team called the Washington Redskins finally ditched their name, yet they didn’t settle on their current name, the Washington Commanders, until 2022. In the interim they called themselves the Washington Football Team. Factual, if not very exciting.
In 1980, St. Olaf College opened a new dorm. Some of my sister’s friends lived there her junior and senior years, and since the college hadn’t yet settled on a new name, the students called it New Dorm. Factual and not very exciting. My sister graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1982, and New Dorm was renamed Rand Hall in 1983, after former college president Sidney Rand. I arrived as a freshman in 1984. For me, Rand was still New Dorm, that’s all I had ever heard it called. For my friends, new to the college, it was Rand. I clung to the name New Dorm out of a sense of “I know better” or “I want to be different” or some other unhealthy bias toward the cantankerous.
Forty plus years after being a freshman in college I decided to create my own university masters program in Scandinavian Studies. After I had a handful of digital docs I made a Google folder to keep them in, naming it My Scandinavian Studies. Factual, like those other interim names, and not at all exciting.
Now I’m approaching the middle of the first semester and I still haven’t settled on a name. I haven’t even mulled over any good candidates for a name. Furthermore, I don’t have a good term for describing my studies (my program?) and what I will receive from it (a masters degree?). I am marching off the map and haven’t any names for the places I will visit. It’s time for that to change.
So what [program] am I in and what [degree] will I confer on myself when I am done? Maybe starting with the degree will be easiest.
The University of Bologna conferred the first university degrees over nine hundred years ago. The system of degrees were more or less like in medieval guilds, those organizations of craftsmen that looked after their financial interests by establishing some dos and don’ts. There were those learning the trade, those doing the trade, and those so good and experienced in doing the trade that they set the norms and kept others in line about how things were to be done, something we call teaching, I guess. Apprentices, journeymen, and masters, the masters being the teachers.
When this thinking and the terms to organize the thinking were pulled from the guilds into the university, the master, from the Latin magister, meaning teacher, signalled a license to teach. At first it provided teacher status only at the university that had granted the master degree, but after intervention from the pope in 1233, anyone with a rank of master at the University of Toulouse could teach at any university, opening the gates to mobile masters (teachers) while laying the groundwork for university terminology.
Nowadays we have academic alphabet soup, with for example MA, MEd, MPhil, MFA and we haven’t yet filled the bowl, not even close. I suppose I could continue in this manner of creating new degrees and add a Master of Self (but MS is already taken, also called MSc, thank you Durham University in England, back in 1878). Or a Master of Agency (nope, MA) or a Master of Me (nope again, taken, Master of Management). Seems like I’m a little late to the name game.
One option, to open up more possibilities, is to switch the letters around, creating for example AM and SM. Some universities do this because they continue to enjoy the erudition of Latin: Artium magister and Scientiæ magister. That doesn’t help for the Master of Me, or the Me Master, of course. Plus Me Master just sounds stupid now that I’ve written it a few times. Maybe it sounded stupid after reading it just once, probably so.
Looking back over my own examples, MPhil sticks out for some reason. How about MSelf? That seems to be original and unclaimed, and it gets the idea across, a masters one did oneself … I’m going to let that simmer.
Let’s say I award myself an MSelf when this year of study draws to a close. Maybe I don’t need an additional name then for Scandinavian Studies. After all, what I am studying is indeed Scandinavia, at least a few aspects about it. Maybe what I am working on is an MSelf in Scandinavian Studies.
Thinking, thinking …
Mmmm…That might be it. MSelf is nicely like the word “myself,” the format is based on the accepted system of M-this-or-that, it doesn’t already exist anywhere else, and unless you disagree, I don’t think it has the feel of “trying too hard” or being “too cute.” Maybe just a little cute, but not trying to hard.
Here’s the test. Let’s imagine that over coffee a colleague says they heard I was working on a new degree.
“Yes,” I say, “it’s an MSelf.”
“A what?”
“You know, a master degree I created myself. It’s an MSelf in Scandinavian Studies. Have you ever thought of doing an MSelf? I know you’ve already done quite a bit of work in ….”
You tell me, do you think that will work? Finding a suitable name may have been easier than I thought. Certainly faster than the National Football League and St. Olaf College handled their new names.