Who is FNU?

I’ve been teaching at WSU for 12 years now, and on more than one occassion, I’ve had a student whose first name is FNU. These have always been international students, and I’ve worked hard to pronounce last names as best I could, and often refer to “Mr. Blank” and “Ms. Blank” of my students. I never thought to ask what FNU was short for. I assumed it was an abbreviated family name. After all, one of my favorite students (I have a lot of favorites) actually had more than 7 names. She said she was jealous that my last name had as fewer letters than she had names.

Anyway, while visiting the mall recently, I saw a student from last semester working at a restaurant. I remembered that she was FNU PretendName. Wanting to be extra friendly, I decided to finally google FNU to decipher the code. And man was I embarassed.

I read the story of Naqibullah in the Wall Street Journal ¹ who has one name, Naqibullah. After helping the US military in Afghanistan, came to the United States. A land of fixed data systems requiring a first and last name. Because he had only one name, our form-fillers can’t have NULL in the system, so he is reborn First Name Unknown.

And so, too, my students. And I’ve gone entire semesters unaware. I’m a little embarrassed, and I wanted to share. I wish that university database would have something to indicate they have only one name (clarifying that cryptic abbreviation), but I guess that’s also the purpose of the abbreviation. And our tightly-typed system requires something in that field, and it’s a whole lot better than naming someone “No first name’); DROP TABLE Students”