'Whose Brilliant Idea Was This?’: How Ohio State Successfully Trademarked the Word 'THE'

Ohio State’s media-relations department knew little about the filing, the documents show, with the university’s then senior associate vice president for university communications writing in an email to a professor that “no one asked me whether we should do this.” Boyle and Jennifer Jenkins, a clinical professor of law at Duke University, are the authors of “Mark of the Devil: The University as Brand Bully,” an article in the Fordham Intellectual Property, Media & Entertainment Law Journal examining “trademark bullies” at colleges, especially their own, Duke. The Chronicle reported in 2019 that one example of the branding could be a simple T-shirt sporting the university’s colors — scarlet and gray — along with the three-letter word on the front. Since 1878, “The” has been slotted ahead of Ohio State’s name after its Board of Trustees designated its new name, according to the university.