About

The Journey to the Revolutionaries

Throughout the 2022-2023 academic year, the university worked to provide multiple opportunities for GW students, faculty, staff, and alumni to provide input and feedback on the development of the new moniker, and we kept the GW community informed of the process on a regular basis via GW Today stories, social media and direct emails.

We hosted engagement activities during Alumni and Families Weekend 2022, held several student-athlete town halls and put out an open call for moniker suggestions from the entire community. We received approximately 8,000 moniker suggestions. We also developed a set of guiding principles that we used to narrow the list to ten names that we believed best reflected the spirit of GW. We then invited all GW students, faculty, staff and alumni to rate the ten names and, and based on the ratings, we subsequently reduced the list to four finalists: Revolutionaries, Blue Fog, Ambassadors and Sentinels. Following this, we invited the community to rate videos representing the four finalist names.

Over the course of these engagement activities, GW received approximately 47,000 points of feedback from the community. Revolutionaries consistently ranked as the top choice throughout the moniker development process.

In May 2023, the GW Board of Trustees decided to accept the recommendation of President Wrighton and the Moniker Advisory Committee to select Revolutionaries as the new GW moniker. The decision was based on the extensive feedback and engagement gathered from the across the university community.

The full adoption of the Revolutionaries moniker will be implemented during the 2023-2024 academic year.

To learn more about the journey of the moniker development process, please read the following GW Today stories: