Spare a thought for New Zealand’s Victoria university. For years now, this Kiwi institution of higher learning has been pulling out all the stops to rid itself of its monarchial name. The events of recent weeks have made its mission much more difficult.

Victoria marks its 125th anniversary this December. Few things are likely to have gladdened the hearts of the university’s bigwigs than if this year could have been the last in which it was saddled with her majesty’s imprimatur. The death of Queen Elizabeth — and the tidal wave of warm Antipodean feel it has brought about — can only have thrown yet another spanner in the works.

New Zealand has eight publicly funded universities, seven of which seem to quite like their names. Victoria doesn’t. It wants to be known as university of Wellington, after the capital city in which most of its 22,000 students live.

To date, the institution’s political overlords have been lukewarm to the idea, which is a bit surprising given the government of Jacinda Ardern’s usual enthusiasm for ‘change’.

The country’s education minister, Chris Hipkins, who got his own bachelor’s degree at Victoria, says he is ‘not persuaded’ by the case for a shake-up. But neither has the university been persuaded by the official rejection, opting instead for a never ending ‘brand refresh’ aimed at pushing the old girl out of the faculty lounge window.

Even staff members have described the doggedness of the campaign as ‘bizarre’. Victoria says it’s only a much-needed fragrance of ’name simplification’, but some might say it carries a whiff of fragility about it.

In New Zealand, as elsewhere, linguistic turf wars are currently being fought over expressions or names thought to carry too much colonial era baggage. In this context, where the past must always be viewed as A Bad Thing, Victoria obviously has awkward connotations. As indeed, one assumes, does even discussing the matter in English.

Also in the spirit of the times is the belief underpinning the kerfuffle that by simply changing a name — rather than, say, recruiting snazzier educators and researchers — one somehow changes reality.

Today all of Victoria’s social media activity takes place under the rubric of ‘Wellington uni’. The same goes for some of its new signage. Most recently, local transport operators were encouraged to remove all V-word references from their schedules. Yet everyone else in the outside world keeps dead-naming her.

Officially at least, Victoria says this has only ever been about connections with that outside world. For the benefit of scholars it is desperate to recruit and intending international students it is even more anxious to enrol, it says it urgently needs to distinguish itself from other academic institutions with Victoria in their names — there are at least eight — who may even be reaping benefits from their Antipodean namesake.

Like many other institutions that slug it out in the lucrative fee-paying foreign student market, Victoria makes much of its showing in the various college ranking exercises which potential students from overseas are said to pore over before making a final decision on where to do a degree. How much better might the Kiwi recruiters be faring were it not for all these other Victorias crowding the field?

One problem with this idea is that all of these various Victorias in the rankings, whether they be in Australia, Canada or New Zealand, generally don’t cut the mustard; often they do not even make it into the top 500 charts.

Besides, as any internationally minded university would also know, the world of higher education has long been awash with similarly named institutions. In the United States, there’s Cornell university in upstate New York, which is one of the eight members of the venerable Ivy League, and Cornell college in Iowa, which most certainly is not. Nobody loses too much sleep over that. In Britain, Oxford Brookes university is occasionally, if momentarily, mistaken for the other one with the dreaming spires. Come to think of it, five of the colleges at Oxford — the Oxford, that is — also happen to have identical names to ones at Cambridge.

And if standalone institutional names are what it’s all about, why isn’t the scholarly world beating a path to the door of Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya university, in Thailand?

Exceptions exists, of course. In Pennsylvania, for instance, there was the liberal arts school Beaver college, whose website was always getting blocked by anti-porn filters and whose all-female student cohort was forever being ribbed because…well, never mind. In 2001, the college changed its name to the more ‘satire-proof’ Arcadia university; a prudent decision. But Victoria surely doesn’t have a Beaver problem.

Oh well, as GK Chesterton said, if a thing’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly. If this New Zealand academic entity really is hellbent on transitioning to Wellington, though, why get rid of one colonial figurehead in exchange for the name of the gent who trounced the French at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815?

In the interests of closing down one of the most wearying academic debates of recent times, perhaps the barons of Victoria ought to settle on the name of a self-styled young monarch situated far closer to home. Let’s hear it for the University of Jacinda.