Annenberg

This past semester, the lectures for ling0001 took place in a classroom located in Penn's Annenberg School for Communication, and one of the students in the course asked me something that I've wondered about myself from time to time: Why is it "The Annenberg School for Communication" rather than "The Annenberg School of Communications"?

There are two questions here:

• Why "for" rather than "of", as in most other post-secondary "School of X" institutions?
• Why singular "communication" rather than plural "communications"?

Compare the many web hits for "school of communications", where other programs made the opposite choice of preposition and plurality.

Wikipedia deepens the question by telling us that

The school was established in 1958 by Wharton School alum Walter Annenberg as the Annenberg School of Communications. The name was changed to its current title in 1990.

One clue can be seen in this plaque, displayed in the building's lobby next to a bust of WHA:

An informed source explained to me that WHA wanted to make it clearer that students and faculty should use communication for worthy ends. He felt that "for" conveyed purpose where "of" conveyed possession, and that "for" invited action while "of" brought to mind passive acceptance of the status quo.

And the plaque's text also suggests why he preferred not to share plurality with the world's many Ministries of Communications.

So this goes into my notes for future work on the semantics of prepositions and plurality. . .