I still think it'd be good to have a comment explaining why this is necessary. Something like:

```
/**
 * The professor names entered by people when reviewing courses may not precisely
 * match the professor names we have from section information. In order to be able to
 * link the two together, we use the heuristic of taking the first initial and appending the
 * last name.
 *
 * e.g. "Larry Smith" -> "l_smith"
```

In writing this comment, it also occurs to me that you probably want to downcase name using `.toLowerCase()`