FWIW, I think that the capital U is required by the formal rules of capitalization when you are referring to a specific university. If you write out University of Texas, clearly it must be capitalized. (Anybody want to disagree so far? No? Good.) When you then write "the University" it is elliptical for the University of Texas. Just because you omit the "of Texas," you are still referring to that particular university, not to any university (and yes, there they are both lower case because I was not referring to UT but using university generically). It's akin to writing about the United States -- when you shorten it to the States, you still capitalize it, as opposed to writing about a group of states (such as all the states whose names begin with A), when you do not. A pronoun referring to a proper noun is, of course, not capitalized (exept when referring to the divinity). So you can say "when the University is at full enrolment, it has 25,000 students." But university is not a pronoun, but is used as a shortening of the full, formal name. So I think leaving it uncapitalized is technically wrong.
Okay, now take me on. |
