One has to wonder if Senator Elizabeth Warren was consulted.

Valerie Richardson of the Washington Times reports.

Easy for you to say: Campus considers dorm names ‘Houusoo’ and ‘Nowoo3’

Unusual campus names are a venerable college tradition — think Harvard’s Wigglesworth Hall or Southern California’s Argue Plaza — but nothing quite compares to those under review at the University of Colorado Boulder.

The Boulder Campus Planning Commission has recommended renaming two renovated dormitories “Houusoo Hall” and “Nowoo3 Hall” after two Arapaho Indian chiefs better known in the history books as Chief Hosa and Chief Niwot.

The Nov. 14 decision came after faculty members argued that using the phonetic or literal translations would be culturally insensitive. The names “Houusoo” and “Nowoo3” are the spellings from the Arapaho/Hinono’ei language.

“While the orthographies might initially seem foreign or hard to understand to non-Arapahos and non-Natives, choosing to spell Nowoo3 as Niwot would be equivalent to spelling Charles de Gaulle’s name phonetically [Sharl duh Gahl], which is culturally chauvinist and clearly primitivizing in a Native American context,” says a Nov. 13 letter signed by 23 members of the CU Native Studies faculty.

Supporters hope to win final approval for the name change at the CU Board of Regents’ meeting in February. The buildings undergoing renovation, currently named Kittredge Central and Kittredge West, are scheduled to be rededicated in the spring.

Adopting a name that few can pronounce may seem like an example of political correctness run amok, but it’s starting to look like a campus trend. In their proposal, supporters note that several universities recently have opted to use the native spellings of Indian names.