The University of Florida

The University of Florida is an American public land-grant, sea-grant, and space-grant research university located on a 2,000-acre (8.1 km2) campus in Gainesville, Florida. It is a senior member of the State University System of Florida and traces its historical origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its present Gainesville campus since September 1906.

The University of Florida is one of sixty-two elected member institutions of the Association of American Universities (AAU), the association of preeminent North American research universities, and the only AAU member university located in Florida. The University is classified as a Research University with Very High Research by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Following the creation of performance standards by the Florida state legislature in 2013, the Florida Board of Governors designated the University of Florida as one of the two "preeminent universities" among the twelve universities of the State University System of Florida. In 2015, U.S. News & World Report ranked Florida as the fourteenth best public university in the United States.

The university is accredited by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS). It is the third largest Florida university by student population, and is the eighth largest single-campus university in the United States with 49,913 students enrolled for the fall 2012 semester. The University of Florida is home to sixteen academic colleges and more than 150 research centers and institutes. It offers multiple graduate professional programs—including business administration, engineering, law, dentistry, medicine, and veterinary medicine—on one contiguous campus, and administers 123 master's degree programs and seventy-six doctoral degree programs in eighty-seven schools and departments.

The University of Florida's intercollegiate sports teams, commonly known by their "Florida Gators" nickname, compete in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I and the Southeastern Conference (SEC). In their 108-year history, the university's varsity sports teams have won thirty-five national team championships, thirty of which are NCAA titles, and Gator athletes have won 275 individual national championships.

History:

Century Tower, begun in 1953, to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the founding of university and as a tribute to the alumni who perished in both World War I and World War II. The University of Florida traces its origins to 1853, when the East Florida Seminary, the oldest of the University of Florida's four predecessor institutions, was founded in Ocala, Florida.

On January 6, 1853, Governor Thomas Brown signed a bill that provided public support for higher education in the state of Florida. Gilbert Kingsbury was the first person to take advantage of the legislation, and established the East Florida Seminary, which operated until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. The East Florida Seminary was the first state-supported institution of higher learning in Florida.

James Henry Roper, an educator from North Carolina and a state senator from Alachua County, had opened a school in Gainesville, the Gainesville Academy, in 1858. In 1866,[20] Roper offered his land and school to the State of Florida in exchange for the relocation of the East Florida Seminary to Gainesville.

The second major precursor to the University of Florida was the Florida Agricultural College, established at Lake City by Jordan Probst in 1884. Florida Agricultural College became the state's first land-grant college under the Morrill Act. In 1903, the Florida Legislature, desiring to expand the school's outlook and curriculum beyond its agricultural and engineering origins, changed the name of Florida Agricultural College to the "University of Florida," a name that the school would hold for only two years.

University of the State of Florida:

In 1905, the Florida Legislature passed the Buckman Act, which consolidated the existing publicly supported higher education institutions of the state. The member of the legislature who wrote the act, Henry Holland Buckman, later became the namesake of Buckman Hall, one of the university's oldest buildings. The Buckman Act organized the State University System of Florida and created the Florida Board of Control to govern the system. The act abolished the six pre-existing state-supported institutions of higher education, and consolidated the assets and academic programs of four of them to form the new "University of the State of Florida." The four predecessor institutions consolidated to form the new university included the University of Florida at Lake City (formerly Florida Agricultural College) in Lake City, the East Florida Seminary in Gainesville, the St. Petersburg Normal and Industrial School in St. Petersburg, and the South Florida Military College in Bartow.

The Buckman Act also consolidated the colleges and schools into three institutions segregated by race and gender—the University of the State of Florida for white men, the Florida Female College for white women, and the State Normal School for Colored Students for African-American men and women.

The City of Gainesville, led by its Mayor William Reuben Thomas, campaigned to be home to the new university. On July 6, 1905, the Board of Control selected Gainesville for the new university campus. Andrew Sledd, president of the pre-existing University of Florida at Lake City, was selected to be the first president of the new University of the State of Florida. The 1905-1906 academic year was a year of transition; the new University of the State of Florida was legally created, but operated on the campus of the old University of Florida in Lake City until the first buildings on the new campus in Gainesville were completed. Architect William A. Edwards designed the first official campus buildings in the Collegiate Gothic style. Classes began on the new Gainesville campus on September 26, 1906, with 102 students enrolled. In 1909, the name of the school was officially simplified from the "University of the State of Florida" to the "University of Florida."

The alligator was incidentally chosen as the school mascot in 1911, after a local vendor ordered and sold school pennants with an alligator emblem imprinted on them. The school colors, orange and blue, are believed to be derived from the blue and white school colors of the Florida Agricultural College in Lake City and the orange and black colors of the East Florida Seminary at Gainesville.

College reorganization:

In 1909, Albert Murphree was appointed the second president of the university, and organized several of the colleges of the university, increased enrollment from under 200 to over 2,000, and he was instrumental in the founding of the Florida Blue Key leadership society. Murphree is the only University of Florida president honored with a statue on the campus.

The University of Florida campus in 1916, looking southwest:

In 1924, the Florida Legislature mandated that women of a "mature age" (at least twenty-one years old) who had completed sixty semester hours from a "reputable educational institution" would be allowed to enroll during regular semesters at the University of Florida in programs that were unavailable at Florida State College for Women. Before this, only the summer semester was coeducational, to accommodate women teachers who wanted to further their education during the summer break. Lassie Goodbread-Black from Lake City became the first woman to enroll at the University of Florida, in the College of Agriculture in 1925.

John J. Tigert became the third university president in 1928. Disgusted by the under-the-table payments being made by universities to athletes, Tigert established the grant-in-aid athletic scholarship program in the early 1930s, which was the genesis of the modern athletic scholarship plan that is currently used by the National Collegiate Athletic Association.

National and international prominence:

In 1985, the University of Florida was invited to become a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU), an organization composed of sixty-two academically prominent public and private research universities in the United States and Canada. Florida is one of the seventeen public, land-grant universities that belong to the AAU. In 2009, President Bernie Machen and the University of Florida Board of Trustees announced a major policy transition for the university. The Board of Trustees supported the reduction in the number of undergraduates and the shift of financial and other academic resources to graduate education and research in the future.

Admissions:

First Time Freshmen Statistics:

 2015 2014 2013 2012 2011

Applicants 30,800 27,853 27,109 27,420 27,295

Admits 13,667 13,112 12,619 12,092 11,786

% Admitted 44.1 47.1 46.5 44.1 43.2

For the Class of 2016 (enrolled fall 2012), Florida received 27,419 applications and accepted 12,092 (44.1%). The number enrolling was 6,289; the yield rate (the percentage of accepted students who enroll) was 52.0 percent. In terms of class rank, 77% of enrolled freshmen were in the top 10 percent of their high school classes; 98 percent ranked in the top quarter. The middle 50% range of SAT scores were 580 to 670 for critical reading, 590 to 690 for math, and 570 to 670 for writing. The middle 50% ACT Composite score range was 26 to 31. For fall 2014, the middle 50 percent of admitted freshman applicants had high school GPAs of 4.1 to 4.5, SAT scores of 1810 to 2060, and ACT scores of 27 to 31.

Scholarships:

The Lombardi Scholars Program, created in 2002 and named in honor of the university's ninth president John V. Lombardi, is a merit scholarship for Florida students. The scholarship offers $2,700 a semester for a total of eight to ten semesters. The J. Wayne Reitz Scholars Program, created in 1997 and named in honor of the university's fifth president J. Wayne Reitz, is a leadership and merit-based scholarship for Florida students. The scholarship offers a yearly $2,500 stipend that may be renewed for up to three years.

Libraries:

The University of Florida's George A. Smathers Libraries, is one of the largest university library systems in the United States. In total, the University of Florida has ten libraries, and over 5.3 million volumes of books and journals and 7 million microfilms. Collections cover virtually all disciplines and include a wide array of formats – from books and journals to manuscripts, maps, and recorded music. Increasingly collections are digital and are accessible on the Internet via the library web page or the library catalog.

The numerous libraries provide primary support to all academic programs except those served by the Health Science Center Library and the Lawton Chiles Legal Information Center. In 2006, Library West went through a $30 million renovation that doubled capacity. This facility is now better equipped to handle the information technology necessities that students need to complete their studies. Such progress is represented by its state-of-the-art Information Commons, which offers production studios, digital media computing areas, and a presentation area.

Museums:

The Florida Museum of Natural History, established in 1891, is one of the oldest natural history museums in the country and was officially chartered by the State of Florida. This facility is dedicated to understanding, preserving and interpreting biological diversity and cultural heritage. In over 100 years of operations the Florida Museum of Natural History has been housed in several buildings, from the Seagle Building to facilities at Dickinson Hall, Powell Hall, and the Randell Research Center. In 2000 the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity was opened after a generous donation from University of Florida benefactors. The McGuire Center houses a collection of more than six million butterfly and moth specimens, making it one of the largest collections of Lepidoptera in the world, rivaling that of the Natural History Museum in London, England.

The Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art, established in 1990, is also located at the University of Florida on the southwest part of campus. This facility is one of the largest university art museums in the South, the Harn has more than 7,000 works in its permanent collection and an array of temporary exhibitions. The museum's permanent collections are focused on Asian, African, modern and contemporary art, as well as photography. The university sponsors educational programs at the museum including films, lectures, interactive activities, and school and family offerings. In October 2005 the Harn expanded by more than 18,000 square feet (1,700 m2) with the opening of the Mary Ann Harn Cofrin Pavilion, which includes new educational and meeting areas and the Camellia Court Cafe, the first eatery for visitors of the Cultural Plaza.