PHILADELPHIA (AP) -- Get those nudge-nudge wink-wink jokes in while you can, because Beaver College has decided to change its name.
The board of trustees of the 2,800-student school in the Philadelphia suburb of Glenside voted 23-1 to form a committee to recommend a new name, a spokesman said Monday. Officials decided at the same time to petition the state for university status.
"Beaver College doesn't really represent who we are anymore," college spokesman Bill Avington said. "We're not in Beaver, Pennsylvania, anymore, and we're no longer what anyone would think of as a college."
Friday's vote by the trustees comes after Beaver president Bette E. Landman said in a letter earlier this year that the name "too often elicits ridicule in the form of derogatory remarks pertaining to the rodent, the TV show 'Leave It to Beaver' and the vulgar reference to the female anatomy."
Beaver College has appeared on David Letterman's Top 10 list, and Conan O'Brien and Howard Stern have made jokes about it.
Founded in 1853 in Beaver County near the Ohio state line, the school moved across the state to Jenkintown in Montgomery County in the 1920s and to its present location in Glenside in the 1950s.
