Elitist arrogance creates the kind of condescension that looks down its nose on folks who have less money.

University of Denver chancellor Robert Coombe’s letter to DU alumni about Metro’s proposed name change and the alleged harm it would do to DU’s “brand, ’’ oozes with elitist condescension. This is similar to the kind of bred-in-the-bone “we’re better than you” beliefs being disguised right now in Republican primaries where mega-millionaire Mitt Romney tries to reach out to ordinary folks — and falls flat on his face.

Did somebody say “class warfare?”

Coombe’s letter, intended for limited consumption, but obtained by The Metropolitan and printed in its entirety in these pages last week, is obsessed with the supposed sanctity of of DU’s “brand.” The missive mentions “brand” seven separate times and “brand or marketplace confusion” five more, in a rambling discourse on a supposed threat posed by Metro.

Sounding as though it were written by a patent lawyer, Coombe’s letter goes on to invoke the euphemism-filled language of marketing where there are no cities, but only “markets.” No people, only “consumers.” And no school identities, only “brands.”

How do you like being part of a “brand,” and an inferior one at that?

After beating the “brand” horse to exhaustion — citing unnamed sources and studies — Coombe’s letter rolls out the heavy guns of “trademark issues,” and the implied threat of legal action against trademark infringement. Last time I looked, DU had no cute little circled “R” attached to its name, logo or website. So who’s kidding whom about trademarks?

Make no mistake. DU is a fine school — ranked 82nd in the nation among all public and private “national universities” in 2012, according to U.S. News & World Report ratings, with a 57th ranking by Forbes. It has an extensive roster of esteemed graduates in business, sports and the arts as well as a history dating to 1864, before Colorado was even a state. With such a legacy — as the oldest and one of the finest universities in the Rocky Mountain West — it seems odd that DU should feel threatened by whatever Metro might be called.

Why is exalted DU so paranoid about what recent-arrival Metro decides to call itself? Rather than being insecure about being recent immigrants to Colorado’s university landscape, Metro students — and especially Metro’s administration — might keep in mind that Metro had already been around for two decades when DU, facing severe financial problems, nearly closed its doors in the mid-1980s before Dan Ritchie joined DU’s board to begin righting the financial ship. Later, Ritchie (who was chancellor from 1989 to 2005), launched a $500 million campus expansion program, starting with a $15 million contribution of his own, that transformed the campus. At the time, former chief campus architect “Cab” Childress said “working for Dan Ritchie is like working for a Medici. He builds in stone.”

I have never met chancellor Coombes, who may be a genial gentleman, but I did know Dan Ritchie, who now chairs the Denver Center for the Performing Arts, in the course of covering higher education for the Denver Post, and recall him as an exemplary human being.

DU’s claim of a 148-year-old “brand” also misfires. DU was founded in 1864 by Colorado territorial governor John Evans as a Methodist seminary, officially called the Colorado Seminary. Accordingly, streets in its locale are named for Methodist stalwarts like Francis Asbury and John Wesley. The seminary was re-named the University of Denver in 1880, when it moved seven miles southeast from its original downtown Denver site. To this day, DU still carries the legal name of Colorado Seminary.

Pedigree aside, DU has money and wealthy alumni. And when money talks about “brand confusion,” state legislators listen while Metro officials quaver. But there’s no need for either Metro students or administration to buy into the intimations of inferiority suggested throughout the Coombes letter.

Metro students and their parents typically aren’t well-off and can’t afford DU’s annual tuition of $36,000 or so. They have jobs and don’t have the leisure to stroll overpriced eateries along yuppified South University Blvd.

Having gone to two commuter campuses that were part of the City University of New York — when long subway rides from Brooklyn to the Bronx were the price of free tuition before the last Ice Age — I can relate.

My school, Hunter College, along with City College of New York and other city university commuter campuses served a clientele that was then mainly Jewish, Italian and Irish. Today, students are mostly black, Puerto Rican and Asian in keeping with City University’s historic mission of serving the city’s more recent arrivals seeking affordable higher education.

Sans subway commuters, Metro’s mission has been the same since 1965 and nobody need be intimidated by bullying and posturing by DU, as Metro officials and its board already have. Stop being pushed around, folks, by phantom fears. And, as deep-thinker Sarah Palin liked to say, “Man up!”

Tags: name change, University of Denver