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The University of Florida (Florida or UF) is a public land-grant research university located in Gainesville, Florida. The school, which officially became the University of Florida in 1905, traces its institutional roots to 1853.

It is the fourth-largest university in the United States, with 49,693 students (34,612 undergraduates and 15,081 postgraduates), and has the eighth-largest budget (nearly $1.9 billion per year). Florida ranked second among all institutions in the number of National Merit Scholar students enrolled, behind Harvard (as of the 2004-05 academic year). It is also the place where Gatorade was created.

Florida is the flagship institution of the State University System of Florida. Its undergraduate progam was ranked by U.S. News & World Report as first in the state of Florida, 16th among U.S. public universities, and 50th overall. Listed as a Public Ivy, Florida is a member of the Association of American Universities. The 2005 Academic Ranking of World Universities list assessed Florida as 57th among world universities based on research output and faculty awards.

Florida is also noted for its strong NCAA programs (especially in football). Its mascot is the gator. It has a faculty of about 5,000.

History
The 1905 Buckman Act, written by created the current University of Florida in its reorganization of the state public state higher education system through consolidating all of the existing white men's educational institutions. (The member of the Florida Legislature who wrote the act, Henry H. Buckman, is the namesake of Buckman Hall, one of UF's earliest buildings.

The Buckman Act provided for the merger of several institutions into the new University of the State of Florida: the University of Florida at Lake City (formerly Florida Agricultural College), the East Florida Seminary in Gainesville, the St. Petersburg Normal and Industrial School at St. Petersburg and the South Florida Military College at Bartow. (The act also designated Florida State University as a women's university and the State Normal School For Colored Students–now Florida A&M University and a historically-black university–as a postsecondary institution).

On July 6, 1905, the state legislature selected Gainesville for a new university campus. Andrew Sledd from the University of Florida at Lake City became the first president, while architect William A. Edwards designed the first campus buildings in the collegiate gothic style. Classes began on September 26, 1906. In 1909 the name was shortened to the University of Florida.

The year 1905 was considered the university's official founding date until 1935, when the date was changed to 1853 by Attorney General Cary D. Landis at the request of UF's third president John J. Tigert. 1853 is the founding date of the East Florida Seminary in Ocala, the earliest founded institution of the colleges which became the University of Florida. The East Florida Seminary had an unusual history in its short existence. It was founded in Ocala by Gilbert Kingsbury to take advantage of legislation passed in 1851 to establish the creation of two seminaries. It briefly closed during the Civil War and reopened in Gainesville having been moved by an act of the Legislature in 1866, and finally ended up being assimilated into the modern University of Florida created by the Buckman Act.

The Buckman Act established the University of Florida as the only public school in Florida for white males. In 1947, UF began allowing women to enroll. Admission of African-American students began in 1958.

Shands Hospital at UF first opened in 1958 along with the medical school. Rapid campus expansion began in the 1950s and continues to the present. In 1985, Florida became a member of the Association of American Universities (AAU), the prestigious higher-education organization comprised of the top 62 public and private institutions in North America. UF is one of only 17 public, land-grant universities that belongs to the association.

Throughout the 1950s, UF was one of the Florida universities that was the target an ongoing investigation by a McCarthyist committee of the state legislature, headed by Charley Johns, which resulted in a number of LGBT students' and faculty members' being ousted from the University and the publication of the Purple Pamphlet.

The alligator was chosen as the school mascot in 1911. The school colors, blue and orange, are thought to have come from both the Blue and Gold of the University of Florida at Lake City and the Orange and Black of East Florida Seminary at Gainesville.

Historic Sites
The University of Florida Campus Historic District was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1989. The district includes 19 buildings, eleven of which had been added to the register previously. Two buildings outside the historic district, the old WRUF radio station (now the university police station) and the old P. K. Yonge Laboratory School (now Norman Hall), are also listed on the register.

Additionally, the former East Florida Seminary Academic Building, now known as Epworth Hall, was listed on the register in 1972. Epworth Hall was deeded to the First United Methodist Church of Gainesville in 1911.

Academics


UF is divided into sixteen colleges, which offer over 100 undergraduate majors and 200 graduate degrees, including the only public pharmacy, dentistry, and veterinary medicine programs in the state. The centerpiece of the journalism programs at UF is WUFT, which consists of both a PBS television station and an NPR radio station. The commercial radio station, WRUF AM850, is also one of the oldest stations in the state.

The acceptance rate at UF has trended downward as the applicant pool has become more competitive. The university has a freshmen retention rate of over 90%.

National Merit Scholars are no longer being offered a competitive academic scholarship upon enrolling at UF. In past years, the university heavily recruited National Merit Scholars by offering $5,500 per academic year in scholarships, as well as a single $2,000 research stipend for summer study. That scholarship package has now been reduced to $1,250 per year plus a single $1,000 research stipend. It is expected that the number of enrolled National Merit Scholars will decrease due to this reduction.

The University of Florida is home to an Honors College that offers many honors courses to students who earned SAT/ACT scores of 1400/33 or above. The Honors program lasts for a student's first two years, but Honors program services and courses remain available to upperclassmen. Honors students must complete four honors courses to be awarded an A.A. degree with honors or high honors. Honors at the bachelors degree level are determined by rules set by the student's College and major.

The university is 13th among all universities - public and private - in the number of U.S. Patents awarded in 2000.

Student Government
Student government at the University of Florida consists of an executive, judicial, and unicameral legislative branch.

The executive branch consists of a President, Vice President, Treasurer, 9 agencies, and 41 cabinets. The President, Vice President, and Treasurer are elected in annual elections held in the spring. The legislative branch is composed of 92 senators, who serve one year terms. 46 senate seats are elected each spring semester and the remaining 46 are elected each fall semester. The judicial branch has four functional components: The Student Honor Court, Student Traffic Court, Campus Conduct Committee, and Residence Hall Conduct Board.

Colleges
The University of Florida is divided into 16 colleges and more than 100 research, service and education centers, bureaus and institutes--offering more than 100 undergraduate majors.

These colleges include:
 * College of Agricultural and Life Sciences
 * Warrington College of Business
 * Fisher School of Accounting
 * College of Design Construction and Planning
 * School of Architecture
 * M.E. Rinker, Sr. School of Building Construction
 * Department of Interior Design
 * Department of Landscape Architecture
 * Department of Urban and Regional Planning
 * College of Education
 * College of Engineering
 * College of Fine Arts
 * College of Journalism and Communications
 * College of Health and Human Performance
 * J. Hillis Miller Health Science Center
 * College of Dentistry
 * College of Public Health and Health Professions
 * College of Medicine
 * College of Nursing
 * College of Pharmacy
 * College of Veterinary Medicine
 * Fredric G. Levin College of Law
 * College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Athletics
The school's sports teams are called the Florida Gators and compete in the Eastern Division of the Southeastern Conference of the NCAA's Division I-A. Florida dedicates about $44 million per year to its sports teams and facilities. For the sixth time, UF swept the overall men's and women's Southeastern Conference All-Sports Trophy in 2002. With its third-place finish in the 2001-02 Sears Directors' Cup rankings, Florida has ranked among the nation's top 10 athletic departments for 19 straight years.

Football
The Gator football team first took the field in 1906. Florida originally competed in the Southern Conference, and in 1933 joined several other Southern Conference members in the new Southeastern Conference(SEC). Florida's first post-season game was a 14-13 victory over Tulsa in the 1952 Gator Bowl, played in Jacksonville, FL. The first major bowl appearance by UF was a 20-18 loss to the Missouri Tigers in the 1965 Sugar Bowl. Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Steve Spurrier led the Gators to a 9-2 record in 1966 and a 27-12 victory over Georgia Tech in that year's Orange Bowl. After nearly two decades of mediocrity, Florida finished in first place in the SEC standings in 1984 and 1985 under coaches Charley Pell and Galen Hall but was denied the conference championship due to NCAA probation.

Steve Spurrier returned to UF, this time as head coach, in 1990 and led UF to another first in the SEC finish, but again UF was denied a league title due to probation. 1991 saw Florida's first ever SEC football championship during a 10-2 campaign. Spurrier quickly built the Gators into the dominant team in the SEC, winning a string of conference championships, including four straight from 1993-6 In 1996, the Gators, led by Spurrier and quarterback Danny Wuerffel, won their first national championship. In January 2001, Spurrier left the Gators to coach the NFL's Washington Redskins, after having won 6 SEC titles in his 11 year tenure. He was replaced by Ron Zook who, in October 2004, was fired in the middle of his third season but remained coach for the rest of the regular season. In December 2004, Urban Meyer, previously the coach of the Utah Utes, replaced Zook as the head football coach. While the team is no longer at the same level of dominance it enjoyed under Spurrier, it still consistently posts highly successful seasons. Traditional football rivals include the Seminoles of Florida State University, the Hurricanes of the University of Miami, the Bulldogs of the University of Georgia, and since the early 1990's the Volunteers of the University of Tennessee. The Gators' home stadium is Ben Hill Griffin Stadium at Florida Field or "The Swamp".

Basketball
The UF men's basketball squad has also come to prominence in recent years. They went to the Final Four in 1994 under coach Lon Kruger. Since 1996, they have been coached by Billy Donovan, who is credited with bringing national acclaim to the program. Donovan returned the Gators to the Final Four in 2000, and into the NCAA Championship game, where they lost to Michigan State. They won their first Southeastern Conference Tournament title in 2005, beating the University of Kentucky, their primary basketball rival. After repeating as SEC tournament champs in 2006, the Gators went on to win the first basketball National Championship in the history of the state of Florida, defeating the UCLA Bruins on April 3, 73-57, at the RCA Dome in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Athletics

 * Official Athletic Dept. Site
 * GatorCountry.com - The Insider Authority on Gator Sports, since 1996

History

 * University of Florida history website
 * UF University Archives
 * Ray Washington, "Racism, Hubris And The Founding Of The University of Florida", Tampa Tribune, July 17, 2005