Campus Community Council - September 13, 2006
Good morning!
I can’t think of a better place to ponder the University of Florida’s 100th anniversary in the City of Gainesville than the Arredondo Room. Here, we can all see and appreciate this flagship university and this flagship town we have built together.
It makes me wonder, what would the view be like from some of the other places in Florida that wanted this university?
I am referring, of course, to that small town to the northeast of us. Fernandina Beach.
Perhaps you didn’t know this little beach town near Jacksonville, famous today for its shrimp, courted UF at the turn of the century. One Fernandina booster had a novel pitch. “If we once get the boys on the island,” he said, “they can’t run away from school without getting caught at the drawbridge.”
If that argument had flown, we might look out at these windows at shrimp boats and the Atlantic Ocean. And a heck of a lot of traffic at that drawbridge.
A small community near Melbourne, Eau Gallie, was a more serious contender for UF. There, during the reconstruction years, a wealthy Wisconsin family donated 1,000 acres for the university. That acreage was along the banks of the Indian River, and workers even cleared it and started to build. So we might have had a riverfront view here from the Arredondo Room…except reconstruction ended and the old guard came back to power. The Bourbon Redeemers – that’s actually what they were called -- quickly put the kibosh on the Yankee land donation in Eau Gallie.
Most of you know the official story. Florida’s first land grant college, the Florida Agricultural College, opened in Lake City in 1884. That college became the University of Florida in 1903. Gainesville lobbied for and won the university in 1906.
When a telegraph office in Gainesville announced the news to the waiting crowd, the celebration included the gong of church bells, a parade and firecrackers. I won’t claim the relationship between UF and the City of Gainesville has always been one of cheers and church bells. And I know the fireworks haven’t always been the celebratory kind. But these two institutions certainly have contributed immensely to each other’s growth and prosperity. We could not exist without one another. Such a town-gown relationship is worth celebrating, every year and especially now, in the fall. Homecoming is less than a month away. On University Avenue, Gainesville’s high-school bands will join UF’s marching band as Gainesville and University police keep the sirens blaring – to the delight of Alachua County’s schoolchildren.
With that sense of celebration in mind, I'd like to tell some more tales about this campus and the town that it calls home…
First, in the spirit of the season, a word or two about athletics. You may have heard that the University of Florida and Gainesville attempted to get the New York Giants to use UF as its spring training facility. The Giants came here in 1919 -- but only, it must be remembered, after we agreed to install showers in the gym. The City of Gainesville paid for the showers. But the Giants did not return in 1920. What most people don’t know is that UF was also the spring training site for another famous baseball team, the Toledo Mud Hens, who used our facilities in the 1950s. The Toledo Mud Hens were, you may recall, MASH’s Corporal Klinger’s beloved team.
If we never managed to hold on to a spring training team, our athletic program today is a huge reason for the university’s success and a wonderful resource for this community…
I bet a lot of people in this room have tickets for the Tom Petty concert a week from tomorrow. It’s Petty’s first visit to his hometown in 13 years. Although Petty, a graduate of Gainesville High School, never attended UF, he did spend some time on our campus. He worked briefly on our grounds crew, planting trees.
Some senior employees in physical plant still remember him. They affectionately call one of the trees he planted, an Ogeechee lime near Phelps laboratory, the “Tom Petty Tree.”
That lime is not the only tree on campus with a story to tell. There’s a sycamore known as the moon tree because it grew out of a seed toted to the moon and back aboard Apollo 14. And although the big live oaks on campus seem the most ancient, the oldest trees on campus are our towering longleaf pines. Some have passed their 200th birthdays! A lot of these old pines lean to the south. That’s their way of telling you about a hurricane that blew through Gainesville several decades ago.
A recent survey revealed that we have 183 tree species on campus. How fitting for Gainesville, which in this growing state of 17 million people still richly deserves its appellation as “The Tree City…”
We have a lot of trees, but our main job since the days of the Florida Agricultural College has been nurturing students. A lot of people think our first students mostly majored in agriculture To the contrary, although we were called an agricultural college, ag drew only a handful of students! According to university historian Carl Van Ness, arts and sciences had a much larger enrollment than agriculture. And when our law school opened in 1909, it quickly began graduating more students than any other.
Attrition in the early Gainesville years was horrendous. Until the early 1930s, about one-third of freshman and sophomore classes withdrew from school in any year due to poverty and poor preparation. Students of that era call still remember doom-and-gloom speeches to freshmen. “Look to your left and right,” they were told. “Only one of the three of you will receive a diploma.”
Today, our freshman attrition rate today is well under 10 percent. Our agriculture program is strong, but the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences remains the most popular home for undergraduates, with 13,000 majors this school year. Careers in health dominate students’ agendas. Fully one third of the students who come to UF today describe themselves as pre-health majors. To give you a sense of the growth in this area, 41 students signed up as biology majors when we created the major in 2002. Today, we have 600 biology majors.
Television plays a surprising role in these kinds of trends. CSI Miami has spurred a huge interest in criminology and forensic pathology. Ditto Grey’s Anatomy, for medicine. When LA Law was the hot show on the tube, pre-law majors soared. No word yet on how Desperate Housewives will impact enrollment trends.
The demographics of our aging nation make us confident that students who graduate with health-related degrees will fall into well-paying, productive careers. That’s in many ways the point of what we do – create an educated workforce that meets our needs…
We are, of course, also a research institution. You’ve probably already heard that our scientists and engineers passed the half billion mark in research dollars this year.
Here’s something you haven’t heard. Doug Jones, director of the Florida Museum of Natural History, tells me that William and Nadine McGuire, patrons of the McGuire Center for Lepidoptera and Biodiversity, have just donated a new collection of 2.5 million specimens. That will bring UF’s total collection of butterflies and moths to 8.5 million, about 100,000 specimens more than London’s Natural History Museum. As a result, UF now has the world’s largest butterfly collection! The McGuire gift also includes a library of more than 40,000 volumes. When combined with present holdings, that means we have largest butterfly and moth library in the world.
Not all of the museum’s 20-million-plus specimens are as charismatic or colorful as butterflies. There are the blue-green algae fossils, for example. These are some of the earliest fossils on earth, dating back 3.5 billion years. Algae, 3.5 billion years old. No wonder you have to work so hard to keep that stuff out of the pool.
From much, much, much more recent times, the museum houses many significant artifacts from St. Augustine, Florida’s and the nation’s first city. These include Spanish gold from some of the first Europeans to reach our shores.
The Florida Museum of Natural History is an archive of life. It is also a preserver of our state and local heritage. University and community are much enriched as a result…
I mentioned the $518.8 million we received in research funding this year. Here’s another number for you: 4,344,850. No, that’s not the total of parking tickets UPD doles out each year. It’s the number of trash bags we used on campus last year. Truly. And those four-million-plus trash bags weighed 163 tons…without the trash!
I gleaned this smelly little factoid from internal research tied to our sustainability initiative, the University of Florida’s ongoing effort to go green. We need this kind of detail to figure out how we can reach our goals. In the case of trash, we’ve pledged to try top reduce our solid waste to zero by 2015. You can see what an enormous job we’ve created for ourselves from that trash bag figure alone.
Last year UF bought 416,000 megawatts of electricity. Our projected power bill this year is $15 million -- double that for all our utilities. So, for us, building energy efficient buildings and our other efforts in sustainability are not just environmental matters, but also economic ones.
Gainesville and Alachua County have a long history as environmentally minded communities. A few years ago, Alachua County voters approved a property tax increase to fund $29 million for the land conservation program, Alachua County Forever. UF’s sustainability initiative dovetails with this strong local green ethic...
On the year of our 100th anniversary in Gainesville, a natural question is, ‘what does the future hold?’ I mentioned our students’ interest in health careers, and I think that gives us a clue. More than $250 million, or the majority of UF’s research funding today supports research in the biological sciences. The just-completed Cancer and Genetics Research Building, the biggest research building on campus, is devoted to biological sciences – as are the pending Biomedical Science Building and Pathogen Research Facility.
The point is, we’re striving to establish a leadership position in what J. Craig Venter, the pioneer in gene sequencing, famously called the “century of biology.” As our students and Florida’s youths return to school this fall, that bodes well for UF, for Gainesville and for Florida…
From the Toledo Mud Hens to Tom Petty, from butterflies to trash bags, I hope you have enjoyed some of the facts I’ve shared with you today. Some might call this information trivia, and I think that might be an apt description. But I hope I’ve also made clear that on this centennial year in Gainesville, UF and our host city are anything but trivial.
Thank you.
Bernie Machen