The University of Florida (commonly referred to as Florida or UF) is an American public land-grant, sea-grant, and space-grant research university 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 origins to 1853, and has operated continuously on its 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 in Florida. The University is classified as a Research University with Very High Research by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. After the Florida state legislature's creation of performance standards 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. For 2017, 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-nine national team championships, thirty-four of which are NCAA titles, and Gator athletes have won 275 individual national championships.
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History
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 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 Florida's first state-supported institution of higher learning.
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, 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 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 state's publicly supported higher education institutions. 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 complete. 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 school's name was 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 imprinted with an alligator emblem. The school colors, orange and blue, are a reference to the heritage of the region, and an homage to the Scottish and Ulster-Scots Presbyterian heritage of the original founders of Gainesville and Alachua County, most of whom were settlers from North Carolina whose ancestors were primarily Presbyterians of Scottish descent who had come to America from County Down and County Antrim in what has since become Northern Ireland, while some had come directly from the Scottish Lowlands.
College reorganization
In 1909, Albert Murphree was appointed the university's second president, 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.
In 1924, the Florida Legislature mandated 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 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 1946-47 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. These 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 opened in 1958 along with the University of Florida College of Medicine to join the established College of Pharmacy. Rapid campus expansion began in the 1950s and continues today.
The University of Florida is one of two Florida public universities, along with Florida State University, to be designated as a "preeminent university" by Florida senate bill 1076, enacted by the Florida legislature and signed into law by the governor in 2013. As a result, the preeminent universities receive additional funding intended to improve the academics and national reputation of higher education within the state of Florida.
National and international prominence
In 1985, the University of Florida was invited to join the Association of American Universities (AAU), an organization 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.
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Academics
Tuition
For the 2016-2017 academic year tuition costs were:
Demographics
In 2016, the University of Florida had 35,043 undergraduate students, and 52,286 students in total. The ratio of women to men is 55:45, and 32 percent are graduate and professional students. Professional degree programs include architecture, dentistry, law, medicine, pharmacy and veterinary medicine. Minority populations constitute about 36 percent of the student body, with 6.5 percent African-Americans, 21.0 percent Hispanics, 0.5 percent Native American, and 7.9 percent Asian-Americans or Pacific Islanders.
In 2016, the total number of International students attending the university was 5,169.
The University of Florida is ranked second overall in the United States for the number of bachelor's degrees awarded to African-Americans, and third overall for Hispanics. The university ranks fifth overall in the number of doctoral degrees awarded to African-Americans, and second overall for Hispanics, and third overall in number of professional degrees awarded to African-Americans, and second overall for Hispanics. The university offers multiple graduate programs---including engineering, business, law and medicine---on one contiguous campus, and coordinates 123 master's degree programs and 76 doctoral degree programs in 87 schools and departments.
Rankings
In its 2017 edition, U.S. News & World Report (USN&WR) ranked the University of Florida as tied for the 14th-best public university in the United States, and tied for 50th overall among all national universities, public and private.
Many of the University of Florida's graduate schools have received top-50 rankings from U.S. News & World Report with the school of education 30th, Florida's Hough school of business tied for 37th nationally, Florida's medical school (research) 43rd (tie), the engineering school 43rd (tie), the Levin college of law 47th (tie), and the nursing school 48th (tie) in the 2016 rankings.
Florida's graduate programs ranked for 2016 by U.S. News & World Report in the nation's top 50 were audiology 7th, analytical chemistry 8th, occupational therapy 10th, criminology 12th, physical therapy 12th, pharmacy 9th, veterinary medicine 14th, speech-language pathology 15th, physician assistant 27th, healthcare management 29th, public health 30th, statistics 30th, chemistry 35th, physics 36th, clinical psychology 37th, psychology 40th, history 46th, computer science 48th, economics 48th, and political science 50th.
In 2013, U.S. News & World Report ranked the engineering school 38th nationally, with its programs in biological engineering ranked 3rd, materials engineering 11th, industrial engineering 13th, aerospace engineering 26th, chemical engineering 28th, environmental engineering 30th, computer engineering 31st, civil engineering 32nd, electrical engineering 34th, mechanical engineering 44th.
The 2015 Academic Ranking of World Universities list assessed the University of Florida as 90th among world universities and 45th in the United States in 2016, based on overall research output and faculty awards. In 2016, Washington Monthly ranked the University of Florida 18th among national universities, with criteria based on research, community service, and social mobility. The lowest national ranking received by the university from a major publication comes from Forbes which ranked the university 78th in the nation in August 2016. This ranking focuses mainly on net positive financial impact, in contrast to other rankings, and generally ranks liberal arts colleges above most research universities.
In 2013, Florida Governor Rick Scott publicly announced his support for the University of Florida to ascend into the top ten among public universities, as measured by U.S. News & World Report. He called for additional funding to decrease the student-faculty ratio at the university.
Florida was ranked 14th in The Princeton Review's 2015 list of top party schools. It also was named the number one vegan-friendly school for 2014, according to a survey conducted by PETA.
On Forbes' 2016 list of Best Value Public Colleges, UF was ranked second. It was also ranked as number three on Forbes' Overall Best Value Colleges Nationwide.
Colleges and academic divisions
The University of Florida is divided into 16 colleges and more than 150 research, service and education centers, bureaus and institutes, offering more than 100 undergraduate majors and 200 graduate degrees.
These colleges include:
Admissions
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