Good news! Starting next Fall, students will be able to log a preferred name in their ePortfolios to appear on most University documents instead of the legal given name. I sat down with Dean Mike Whaley of Student Affairs some time ago to get the details:

pyrotechnics: If you could start off by describing what the project is?

Dean Mike Whaley: Yeah, so a number of years ago we had a student who, even prior to coming to Wesleyan, was very active on trans* issues, and when ze arrived on campus one of the requests was ‘can I change my name, so that not my legal name but rather my preferred name appears on class lists, email… everything but transcript and diploma.’ And at the time, we made that happen in an ad hoc way, but that got me and others thinking about… there are a number of students, trans* students, international students, even students from New Jersey who use their middle name instead of the first name, nicknames, [etc.]. So we’ve been thinking for quite a while now that it’d be really helpful to give people the option to record a preferred name, to store in the system a preferred name, and to have that name appear in most places. There are certain issues with diplomas and transcripts and having to have your legal name on those, but most of the business we conduct can make use of preferred names. At the time we talked to the Registrar’s Office about that; they had a very long list of things they were working on with ITS and so this was at the bottom, and last year… [laughs] I’ve kinda raised it every other year or so… and last year we got some traction on it. Folks said ‘yeah, we can accommodate this and make it happen.’ So that’s what we’re working on now.