Talk:State University of New York at Geneseo

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: no consensus. After much extended time for discussion, there is a clear absence of consensus for the proposed move at this time. There are reasonable policy arguments on both sides of the question, but a consensus is required to change the long standing status quo. BD2412 T 16:58, 23 April 2026 (UTC)

State University of New York at Geneseo → SUNY GeneseoSUNY Geneseo – The current title is not the name of the college in either official or common usage and it does not appear in the article prose. The current title does appear in independent sources (and in some copy from the college), however, this is a mistake or other shorthand, seemingly working backwards from the COMMONNAME of SUNY Geneseo, and copying the style of SUNY university campuses, which Geneseo is not. Officially, it is the State University of New York College at Geneseo.

Opposition to a prior move request made as part of a mass RM streak was grounded partially in ACROTITLE and states that US News and Forbes rankings don't use the abbreviation, which is surely true for many of the schools in that series of bad RMs, but is not true for this, and several other, SUNY campuses. SUNY is also not an ambiguous acronym, used in several other article titles such as SUNY Brockport. SUNY Geneseo is widely used both nationally, as in the New York Times, and locally, as in the Rochester Democratic and Chronicle. SUNY Geneseo is CONCISE and also used as an official name. I don't believe the alts like State University of New York, Geneseo, Geneseo State College, College at Geneseo or the full official name are adequately common to be good titles, while the full official name shares that problem while also lacking concision. —BrechtBro (talk) 20:44, 22 March 2026 (UTC) — Relisting. TarnishedPath^talk 22:19, 29 March 2026 (UTC) — Relisting. theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 23:58, 5 April 2026 (UTC) — Relisting. BilledMammal (talk) 06:56, 13 April 2026 (UTC)

• Oppose per MOS:ACROTITLE. As an encyclopedia, we should avoid acronyms in article titles. The rare exception where readers "are likely to only recognise the name by its acronym" does not apply to this case. Acronyms are always used more often than full names by their very nature and purpose; they are a shorthand used to avoid repeating a longer full name after that name has been established, but they are still abbreviations and not names themselves. Station1 (talk) 02:20, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

  Per ACROTITLE, the subject is known primarily by the acronym and the acronym is primarily associated with the subject. The current article title is not the full name of the college.

  Some additional data pts: at JSTOR, "SUNY Geneseo" appears in 1,308 results, "State University of New York at Geneseo" in 731. "State University of New York College at Geneseo" in 282 results. At ProQuest, SUNY: 11,869; "State University..." 10,341; "State University ... College at Geneseo" 2,810. At Google Scholar: 8,990, 4,520 and 1, respectively. —BrechtBro (talk) 18:03, 23 March 2026 (UTC)

  That data doesn't support that conclusion, even assuming "SUNY Geneseo" is used exclusively in every search result for that string. At JSTOR, "State University of New York, Geneseo" gets 775 results. So both JSTOR and ProQuest show some variation of "State University of New York..." being used more than "SUNY". At Google Scholar, the 1 is actually 1,480, plus 1,780 for the other variation. I'm not opposed to any change, just to using an acronym that is not as WP:RECOGNIZEABLE as the current title for readers who are not already familiar with what "SUNY" means. Station1 (talk) 05:20, 24 March 2026 (UTC)

Note: WikiProject Western New York, WikiProject SUNY, WikiProject New York (state), and WikiProject Higher education have been notified of this discussion. TarnishedPath^talk 22:20, 29 March 2026 (UTC)

• Support per nom. voorts (talk/contributions) 22:22, 29 March 2026 (UTC)
• Oppose, per Station1's argument about ACROTITLE. Nothing seems to override that argument here. Raw volume of SUNY Geneseo mentions vs. State University of New York at Geneseo is especially faulty metric—an article might mention the full name and then abbreviate all subsequent mentions to SUNY Genesoeo. An article that mentions the college 5 times would contribute one mention of the full name, but then four mentions of the abbreviated name. It also doesn't fit the general practice for these schools. The UC system, the UNC system, the SUNY system all follow the same full-title template. The only exception with a peer university is SUNY Brockport, which looks wrongly moved.

Dizzycheekchewer (talk) 13:42, 30 March 2026 (UTC)

SUNY Brockport was moved per COMMON following a discussion. See also SUNY Adirondack, SUNY Downstate Medical Center, SUNY Polytechnic Institute, SUNY Erie, SUNY Niagara, SUNY Sullivan. UC and UNC are ambiguous terms, note the the above links had to be disambiguated, but SUNY does not. —BrechtBro (talk) 17:17, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

There is also no uniform naming convention across the system: University at Buffalo, University at Albany, Binghamton University, Buffalo State University, Purchase College, etc —BrechtBro (talk) 17:25, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

The ones that are peers to Geneseo (four year (primarily) bachelor degree colleges) are Buffalo State University (which developed the different common name for obvious confusion with SUNY Buffalo/UB), Purchase College (which has some question marks around its own move (only one other person supported it and there's a note on the talk page about promotional language), and SUNY Brockport. Other peers to Geneseo that do not follow the trend include Potsdam, Oswego, Delhi, Plattsburgh, New Paltz, Fredonia, Canton and Oneonta (among others), all of which follow the same WP standard as Geneseo.

The four SUNY university centers in Buffalo, Binghamton, Stony Brook, and Albany have somewhat different branding and, either way, they also follow the MOS:ACROTITLE in their different name. But they are one set of exceptions.

The other instances you cite are generally not four year bachelor's degree colleges. Almost all are community colleges (w one polytechnic school and one medical school) and they all seemingly only have the one name, whereas Geneseo and all the other aforementioned examples have their full current titles as well as the SUNY BLANK shorthand. Dizzycheekchewer (talk) 06:33, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

• Support per WP:SHORTFORM. As noted above, we have several other SUNY article titles that don't spell out the abbreviation in their titles. Readers seem more likely to easily recognize the SUNY term than the spelled-out form, and it's more WP:CONCISE. It wouldn't make sense to have this one spelled out and not the others. We have Central Intelligence Agency, but CIA activities in Vietnam and List of CIA station chiefs, not Central Intelligence Agency activities in Vietnam or List of Central Intelligence Agency station chiefs. Similarly, we have Federal Bureau of Investigation, but FBI files on Elvis Presley and FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives, not Federal Bureau of Investigation files on Elvis Presley and Federal Bureau of Investigation Ten Most Wanted Fugitives. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 17:55, 2 April 2026 (UTC)

  That applies to things like UCLA Bruins men's basketball, UCLA Bruins football, UCLA Bruins women's gymnastics, when the distinct article receives the full, non-acronym University of California, Los Angeles. WP: ShortForm also redirects to MOS: Acrotitle, which says

  "In general, if readers somewhat familiar with the subject are likely to only recognise the name by its acronym, then the acronym should be used as a title. If the acronym and the full name are both in common use, both pages should exist, with one (usually the abbreviation) redirecting to the other or being a disambiguation page."

  The current system of the acronym redirecting to the page seemingly works best. If you are not American or familiar with higher education "SUNY Geneseo" as a page title is much less legible than State University of New York at Geneseo which tells you a) it's a public university from b) New York that is c) part of a larger system. SUNY is very recognizable to people in and around NYS, but much less so to anyone beyond. Dizzycheekchewer (talk) 07:01, 3 April 2026 (UTC)

Relisting comment: Right now, there's no consensus on whether to use the acronym, but in the interest of avoiding a WP:Bartender close, do people have suggestions on what the title should be other than the current one, which doesn't seem to be commonly used or official? theleekycauldron (talk • she/her) 23:58, 5 April 2026 (UTC)

@Theleekycauldron I think that the current title is a commonly used name and is marginally official (as is, fwiw, SUNY Geneseo, they're effectively two forms of the same name). The second, more recent, logo on the page uses that name (i.e. GENESEO in big letters with State University of New York (written out, not SUNY), though without the implied "at"). I don't know if I'd support "Geneseo, the State University of New York," but that (or the current title) is one official name the college is presenting.

The original move request also cites the numbers of mentions at JSTOR, nearly a third of which ("'[...]SUNY Geneseo' appears in 1,308 results, 'State University of New York at Geneseo' in 731[...]") are the current title, which says to me that it is commonly used—and as I mentioned earlier, some of those "SUNY Geneseo" mentions may be abbreviating the other longform names on second-mentions. I see the current formula at Princeton Review and The New York Times as well.

There is no name change, no recent rebranding toward SUNY Geneseo, and a common usage of the name (as demonstrated by the JSTOR stats (which over-represent, not under-represent SUNY Geneseo). Also, in the name of Wikipedia:Consistency in article titles, a significant majority of Geneseo's peer 4-year colleges do not go by SUNY blank. The only one that does, SUNY Brockport made a distinct branding change to put SUNY in their primary wordmark. Dizzycheekchewer (talk) 01:57, 7 April 2026 (UTC)

• Weak Support. Downgraded to 'weak' following subsequent discussion 15:08, 8 April 2026 (UTC). Usage is all over the place but SUNY Geneseo is the most consistent form. I was skeptical of this proposal and after following along and looking at sources, I am persuaded that this is the best title. I reviewed the references in the article. Many links were broken and the college itself was a frequent source, but among external sources I could access SUNY Geneseo was the most common usage and I don't know that I saw any two other sources using the exact same long name. A Google News search for Geneseo only returned usage of SUNY Geneseo among the links I clicked. This was largely local/regional sports coverage, which may carry less weight, but this is what I found and is consistent with many other sources. Editors basing their opposition on a narrow reading of MOS:ACROTITLE are missing the mark. The guidance is most applicable in a situation where there are just two article candidates—a full name and exact acronym (e.g., FBI vs. Federal Bureau of Investigations). This situation is quite different. Here, we have a hodge-podge of long names that are used inconsistently and are completely unstandardized, and one short name that is used more often than any of the long names. Nowhere does ACROTITLE suggest that we should arbitrarily select from a bunch of variant long names that are unstandardized and used inconsistently over a single, common short name. The article naming WP:CRITERIA require that we choose a name or description of the subject that someone familiar with, although not necessarily an expert in, the subject area will recognize. The title is not meant to define the subject for someone who has never heard of it and has no clue what it is. The fact that readers who have never heard of this school or the SUNY system won't recognize this title is irrelevant. Readers who've never heard of the bacterium and don't know what a nuclease is won't recognize the article title Serratia marcescens nuclease, either, but that's not the appropriate test. Readers who first encounter the name of this college via one of its other names and want to learn more will be served by redirects and the article content, which lists several variant names for the institution. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 00:51, 7 April 2026 (UTC)

  @Myceteae I appreciate your case, but the opposite argument, even the one that uses ACROTITLE, is not against acronyms in totality. If there were a case about an article regarding Geneseo sports team or an event that took place at the school "SUNY Geneseo sports teams" or "BLANK at SUNY Geneseo" would be uncontroversial. But this is the main article for specific entity (this four year college) and, while concision has value, precision and avoiding ambiguity/confusion also matter.

  And to that end, my main basic concern is with Consistency (as well as ACROTITLE, which I know others disagree about). There are 60-odd members of the SUNY system. There are some that follow one naming convention (commonly, officially, and here on Wikipedia), some that follow a second, and some that follow a third, with exceptions. The first is the 4 main university centers, which over recent years have sought to distinguish themselves, changing their names and/or branding to that end. The second is 4-year bachelor-granting colleges like Geneseo (and Potsdam, Oswego, Delhi, Plattsburgh, New Paltz, Fredonia, Canton and Oneonta, among others), which generally brand themselves as part of the system, but also as their own, distinct, local entities, competing with each other. The last is the community colleges, which generally joined more recently than the others, and which go by SUNY BLANK almost exclusively. Looking at other public university systems, the trend is similar. Unless a member of the state's public system chooses a different name or branding, that school is generally referred to as University of STATE at CITY (or a comma instead of an "at"). This is something that has been established and followed with consistency.

  This move, done without any name change or branding change or meaningful new development, would be inconsistent with the existing practice. And while there are many possible names, no one is arguing here for the hodgepodge. It is between "SUNY Geneseo" and "State University of New York at Geneseo." Or, as the original commenter researched, it is between a name used on JStor 1300-odd times and another used 700-odd times. I would say that both of those names are perfectly common enough to fit the bill. Given one avoids consistency issues, clarity issues and acronym issues, that one seems valuable. It's only defect is length.

  This ended up being an over-long response to your comment, but I wanted to challenge the "hodge-podge" comment (there are two expressed choices) and the comment about a narrow reliance on ACROTITLE (it's more about SoP overall, especially with similar articles). It seems the tide has turned against my preferred outcome (and so be it), but I felt I should again raise the "what next" question. If this change proceeds, then there is no reason not to change at least a dozen other pages that would meet the exact same standard here. Dizzycheekchewer (talk) 02:47, 7 April 2026 (UTC)

  You've said more than anyone in this discussion and I would gently suggest dialing it back to avoid WP:BLUDGEONing the process and so as not to overwhelm other editors who might want to jump in and take stock of the discussion. I appreciate the you acknowledged the length of your response, and that you are engaging with my arguments, so please take this as a friendly nudge and not a warning. "Hodge-podge" was perhaps more dismissive than I intended, but my review of sources and the discussion here did reveal a surprising amount of variation. I looked at a series of Google Ngrams which tell an interesting story. It's a bit messy and I had to truncate some of the names due to character limits but this shows a lot of variation and a more recent emergence of SUNY Geneseo—though it's not exactly new—which is consistent with my findings. As for the rest of the SUNY system, the outcome here doesn't necessarily require us to take particular action with any of the other article titles. WP:CONSISTENT titles are desirable but that is always balanced with usage in sources and other considerations. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 21:16, 7 April 2026 (UTC)

  @Myceteae I appreciate the comment-thread-stats and won't respond after this comment unless pinged to avoid discouraging any further discussion. I had taken to responding to comments that I felt missed the mark, which I saw the original move-nominator doing with the "Oppose" comments, but certainly seems I responded to too many, too vociferously. Apologies to anyone who feels/felt put down.

  I'm a bit perplexed by the Ngrams. They show a slight increase/emergence of "SUNY Geneseo" in the early 2000s, but almost for the entire graph, "State University of New York at Geneseo" is either at the level of SUNY Geneseo or more prominent than it. I genuinely don't know the specs or implications of a search like that, but that and the JStor stats seem to make clear that the current title is very much in common usage, either the most or the second most common usage.

  Regardless, Wikipedia:Consistent is not a trivial thing. It's given the same value as WP: Concise and other factors. And, of course people disagree, but the raw volume of a shorthand being moderately higher in usage than the also-still-common longform seems pretty specious reasoning given the consensus-built practice.

  Pursuant to that (and regrettably increasing my word count) I leave this from the Wikiproject advice page for WIkiproject Higher Education:

  • Never use abbreviations or acronyms in titles unless the institution you are naming is almost exclusively known only by including such terms and is widely used in that form. See Wikipedia:Naming conventions (abbreviations) for more information.
  • For universities that are part of a larger system, in general, the university name is followed by a comma and the name of the city in which the institution is located. For example, University of California, Berkeley and University of California, San Diego. Residential colleges within universities often follow a similar form, for example – Jesus College, Cambridge and Jesus College, Oxford. Some university systems use at (e.g., University of Colorado at Boulder); others use an en dash (e.g., University of Wisconsin–Madison), both of which are acceptable. Most university websites should provide clarification, but in general, it is preferred that all institutions in the system use the same naming convention. This may be overruled by common branding.""

  Dizzycheekchewer (talk) 04:35, 8 April 2026 (UTC)

  I've adjusted my position from full 'support' to 'weak support'. All of the article title candidates have problems. The root of the problem is inconsistent usage in official and external sources for Geneseo specifically and across the SUNY system. I find "SUNY Geneseo" to be a reasonable title that balances the various considerations but I don't dismiss the objections. —Myceteae‍🍄‍🟫 (talk) 15:20, 8 April 2026 (UTC)

  There are over a dozen articles for campuses that can be called the State University of New York at BLANK that do not use that format, including at least 10 that are SUNY Blank. I count sixteen that do use that format. Claims like The first is the 4 main university centers, which over recent years have sought to distinguish themselves, changing their names and/or branding to that end. and The last is the community colleges, which generally joined more recently than the others, and which go by SUNY BLANK almost exclusively are simply not accurate.

  The case for COMMONNAME here is less strong than for some other SUNY schools (where it is the case that they are "almost exclusively known only by" the acronym, from doctoral degree granting schools to community colleges), but here, it is just as consistent to use SUNY as it is to spell it out. None of the SUNY articles that do not begin "State University of..." append SUNY to the end (following a recently move at University at Albany, per COMMON and CONCISE), as it's not needed to disambiguate any of the schools, unlike the examples cited in the advice. Likewise, official university branding is irrelevant to article title polcy, except inasmuch as it has been adopted in use by reliable sources. —BrechtBro (talk) 18:42, 9 April 2026 (UTC)

Relisted to generate a more thorough discussion and clearer consensus.
Relisting comment: Final relist, in the hope of a clearer consensus
Please add new comments below this notice. Thanks, BilledMammal (talk) 06:56, 13 April 2026 (UTC)

Comment: I said I wouldn't comment further, but after the final relisting and discussions in the talkpage for the Wikiproject: Higher Education style guide, a few things in summary of the above arguments against a move:

• This change is not based on a recent increased usage of the name. This ngram—helpfully provided by Mycetae—indicates that they are, at best, in equivalent usage, with the (current) longform name being more historically common (and SUNY Geneseo peaking in usage in the mid 2000s). There is no namechange toward SUNY, nor is there any secondary source support for a recent uptick.
• This RM also does not persuasively indicate that "SUNY Geneseo" is the COMMONNAME. As Station1 noted above, with JStor showing that "SUNY Geneseo" appears in 1,308 results, "State University of New York at Geneseo" in 731. "State University of New York College at Geneseo" in 282 results. "State University of New York, Geneseo" gets 775 results. So both JSTOR and ProQuest show some variation of "State University of New York..." being used more than "SUNY". At Google Scholar, the 1 is actually 1,480, plus 1,780 for the other variation. Both they and I noted as well that SUNY, as an acronym, would naturally have more raw usage than the full longform, which would likely be used on first reference and then replaced with SUNY Geneseo on successive references. That it has the same or less as the longform version means that it is a common way to refer to the college, but by no means the common name.
• Lastly, WP: Consistent is a necessary concern. WP: Precise and other policies have a role, but so does whether articles follow consistent standards. SUNY is complex and, some SUNY schools have verifiably rebranded in the past few years (eg the community colleges adding SUNY to their name , ), but Geneseo and most others have not. I cited the guidance for article titles for universities, which both mentions avoiding acronyms and including the full system name. That is the usage for the UC schools, UNC schools, UT schools, UMass schools etc. even when some are far more commonly referred to by acronym (ngrams for (Berkeley, Davis, Irvine compared to Geneseo, Plattsburgh, Fredonia). This may require a thorough look at other schools, but, with the aforementioned flaws in the argument, Geneseo is better left as WP: Consistent with the pattern of spelling out names. That's most accurate. It would also be most Consistent within class of SUNY colleges this is the wikipedia category of those schools

I won't comment again after this summary. If it's a move, it's a move. But I think it would create more problems than the shortening is worth. There's no real value to the different names, so there is no reason to be hasty with a move here without a solid basis. Dizzycheekchewer (talk) 06:03, 15 April 2026 (UTC)

SUNY, as an acronym, would naturally have more raw usage than the full longform, which would likely be used on first reference and then replaced with SUNY Geneseo on successive references. This is entirely speculative and not borne out by sampling the search results in question. —BrechtBro (talk) 17:20, 18 April 2026 (UTC)

• Strong Oppose. MOS:ACROTITLE is one factor to consider. Also, with WP:TITLECON, this page move may set a concerning, unnecessary, not well-established precedent for moving so many pages about schools and institutions within the SUNY system. In a larger context, how about California (UC Berkeley, UC San Francisco), North Carolina (UNC Chapel Hill, UNC Charlotte), and so many other state university system campuses in the United States? This may be a very concerning and influential precedent. We should avoid this. Cfls (talk) 16:56, 18 April 2026 (UTC)

  UC, UNC, UT, etc, are highly ambigious acronyms both inside and outside of higher ed, unlike SUNY, so I don't believe there would be an applicable precedent, at least not beyond SUNY.

  Precedent for this move within the SUNY system is discussed above, but see also Talk:SUNY Brockport#Requested move 1 December 2022 which moved the page to SUNY Brockport per COMMON as an alt rename vs State University of New York Brockport. —BrechtBro (talk) 17:11, 18 April 2026 (UTC)

• Oppose per MOS:ACROTITLE and relevant comments above. -- Necrothesp (talk) 11:03, 20 April 2026 (UTC)