The University of Florida ( Florida or UF ) is a public land-grant, sea-grant, space-grant major research university located on a 2,000-acre (8.1 km 2 ) campus located in Gainesville, Florida, in the United States. The university traces its origins to 1853, and has continuously operated on its present Gainesville campus since the fall of 1906. Florida is one of 62 elected members of the Association of American Universities (AAU). The university has been recognized as a "Public Ivy," and is currently ranked 47th overall among national universities in the 2010 U.S. News & World Report rankings. It has been consistently ranked one of the world's top 100 universities (number 58 in 2008) by the Academic Ranking of World Universities report (ARWU).
The University of Florida is one of three "research flagship universities" within the State University System of Florida designated by the Florida Legislature. It is the second-largest Florida university by student population, and the most academically prestigious university in the State of Florida. The university is also the sixth largest single-campus university in the United States by student population, with 49,679 students enrolled for the fall 2009 semester. It is the largest comprehensive university in the State of Florida, as measured by the number of academic programs offered, and is home to 17 colleges and more than 150 research centers and institutes. Florida has one of the largest university budgets in the United States at nearly $4.377 billion per year. As of the 2007-2008 academic year, Florida ranked twelfth among all institutions in the number of new National Merit Scholar students enrolled. Researchers at the university developed the well-known sports drink Gatorade.
The University of Florida offers many graduate programs—including engineering, business administration, law and medicine—on one contiguous campus, and administers 123 master's degree programs and 76 doctoral degree programs in 87 schools and departments.
The University of Florida's NCAA Division I athletic teams, known as the "Florida Gators," compete in the Southeastern Conference (SEC). In its 103-year history of intercollegiate sports competition, the university has won 22 national team championships, 17 of which are NCAA titles, and 219 individual national championships.
History
Main article: History of the University of FloridaThe University of Florida traces its origins to 1853, when the East Florida Seminary , one of the University of Florida's four predecessor institutions, was founded in Ocala, Florida.
On January 6, 1853, Florida 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. 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, built a school, the Gainesville Academy, around the same time. In 1866, after East Florida Seminary had closed during the American Civil War, Roper offered his land and school to the State of Florida in exchange for the relocation of 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 Buckman Act consolidated the colleges of the state. The member of the Florida Legislature who wrote the act, Henry Holland Buckman, is the namesake of Buckman Hall, one of the university's oldest buildings. The Buckman Act reorganized the State University System of Florida and empowered the Florida Board of Control to govern the system. The Act also mandated the merger of four pre-existing state-supported institutions into the new University of the State of Florida ----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 sex—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.
On July 6, 1905, the Board of Control selected Gainesville for the new university campus. Dr. 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 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 new Gainesville campus on September 26, 1906 with 102 students.
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 imprinted on them. The school colors, orange and blue, are believed to be derived from the blue and white school colors of the University of Florida at 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 attempted to organize the colleges of the university and increased the enrollment of the school substantially. He is the only president with a statue on the campus, and he was also instrumental in founding the Florida Blue Key leadership society.
In 1924, the Florida Legislature mandated that women of a "mature age" (at least 21 years old) who had completed 60 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 teachers. 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 fourth 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 being used by the National Collegiate Athletic Association.
Post World War II
Beginning in 1946, there was dramatically increased interest among male applicants who wanted to attend the University of Florida, mostly returning World War II veterans who could attend college under the GI Bill of Rights (Servicemen's Readjustment Act). Unable to immediately accommodate this increased demand, the Florida Board of Control opened the Tallahassee Branch of the University of Florida on the campus of Florida State College for Women in Tallahassee. By the end of the 1946-1947 school year, 954 men were enrolled at the Tallahassee Branch. The following semester, the Florida Legislature returned the Florida State College for Women to coeducational status and renamed it Florida State University. This sequence of events also opened up all of the colleges that comprise the University of Florida to female students. African-American students were allowed to enroll starting in 1958. Shands Hospital first opened in 1958 along with the medical school. Rapid campus expansion began in the 1950s and continues to the present day.
National & 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 62 academically prominent public and private research universities in the United States and Canada. Florida is one of only 17 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
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