Sunday, December 19, 2021

It Once Was Great to be a Florida Gator….


I have a long history with the University of Florida. My parents met there in the days after the Second World War when my Dad attended UF on the GI Bill and my Mother helped break the gender barrier as one of the first undergraduate coeds at the formerly all-male university.

My Aunt had previously made a dent in that glass ceiling by becoming one of the first women to attend the UF Law School during the war. The law school at Stetson University where she was a student had closed down to provide training grounds for US soldiers headed overseas to fight the Axis powers that threatened our world. The Stetson students were provided a place at UF despite the fact that it was still officially an all-male university.

UF along with its female counterpart, Florida State College for Women in Tallahassee, would both become coeducational after the war. The women in my family were the pioneers in Gainesville.

From Baby Gator to Gator Grad

 

My own association with the university began early. My Dad returned to UF to get his Master’s Degree in agriculture shortly after my birth. We lived in the FLAVETS Village, an assemblage of former frame construction army barracks moved from Camp Blanding near Jacksonville to the UF campus to house married students and their families. I was a Baby Gator, occasionally attending class with my Dad and present with my parents at the dedication of the Century Tower in the middle of the UF campus in 1954.

In the summer of 1964, my Dad returned to UF once again to become certified to teach Driver’s Education. I went with him, attending summer school at the university education college’s laboratory school, P.K. Yonge. We stayed with my grandparents who lived across town from the university. It was a long, hot summer in Gainesville in the days before air conditioning, full of memories of the rumblings of the civil rights movement and students lined up in University Avenue at night to see the opening of Cleopatra starring Liz Taylor and Richard Burton.

 

 


I would return to UF for an undergraduate degree in 1973, transferring in an A.A. from Lake-Sumter (then) Community College in Leesburg. My original major in political science left me cold – way too focused on politics and strategies and not enough on the big picture. After transferring into a history major, I was much happier. This was a discipline that actually required thinking about ideas. Along the way I would tack on a minor in journalism and take enough hours in the education college to become certified to teach social studies and language arts courses in secondary schools.

It was UF where I would become a fraternity boy, living in my Dad and uncle’s house at the corner of University and 13th Street across the street from the old law school my Aunt had attended. I would meet my future husband there and eventually became president of the house. It was one of the many experiences at UF that convinced me my future did not lie in politics, an assessment informed by my time as a reporter for the Independent Florida Alligator and my service in the student government senate and cabinet.


Following graduation in 1976 I would spend two and a half years teaching public schools in Citrus and Indian River Counties. Having always planned to go to law school, I immediately began applying to schools across Florida. After admission to the mid-year class at UF in 1979 I returned to Gainesville. In 1981 I would graduate with a Juris Doctor. 

Both of my siblings would get degrees from UF in their acclaimed journalism program. And my Sister’s older boy has just completed his bachelor’s degree in political science hoping to go on to law school. He marks the third generation of my family to attend UF. We have a long history at this university.




On the Road to Greatness

For most of my life UF has been seen by most Floridians as the best of the state universities in a somewhat unremarkable system. With no small amount of self-serving ego, UF called itself the flagship of the state university system. While its arts and social science programs were often eclipsed by those at its new rival, Florida State (now) University, its programs in engineering, agriculture, journalism, medicine and law were well respected nationally.

 


Even so, for most of my life UF has struggled to shed its image as just another Southern football factory with a college attached. And in recent years, it began to appear that this struggle had proven successful.

Rankings of universities are often based largely in arbitrary factors. Among the most recent have been employment records and earnings of graduates, aspects that turn largely on economic factors outside the university’s control and connections that many students bring with them to college.

But in some of the more serious academic rankings, factors such as student/faculty ratio and the test scores and GPAs of entering students allow for some comparisons based upon the composition of student bodies and the learning opportunities students are offered once at the university. Moreover, levels of production and quality of research and publication of faculty allow for a comparison of academic climates in colleges.

Within the past decade, UF has slowly but surely become an impressive state university climbing into the top 10 in most rankings. Even as its sports programs became successful, winning national titles in football, basketball, baseball and women’s softball, increasingly UF became academically respectable.

Over the last decade, when other state universities accepted the untenable position they were forced into by a state legislature that simultaneously cut funding while demanding more admissions to the state universities, UF cut its entering classes to insure student/faculty ratio would not suffer. Admissions became much more competitive at all levels of the university and large state universities like UCF where I taught became the default destinations for students who could not get into their first choice.

There was much to be envied in this slow but sure climb to fame. Until now.

 

Black Eyes and Backpedaling


In the past year, UF has received more black eyes from troubling developments largely originating out of Tallahassee than in the past several decades combined. In a widely publicized scandal, its professors were found to have been prohibited from testifying in cases involving voting rights bills passed by a white male Republican dominant legislature intent on insuring that a diverse Democratic party can never again win elections in this state.

The University quickly rationalized its prohibition with alleged concerns for conflict of interest. The question quickly became whose interests were in conflict when state university professors, serving the people of Florida, offered research and expert witness testimony in the cases challenging voter suppression laws.

UF officials backed down on that after being threatened with the loss of accreditation by the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools and scrambled to put the best spin on it. But so far SACS is not buying it. The accreditation of the university remains in jeopardy. This is a very big deal.

 


Then came complaints that the ideological crusade against Critical Race Theory was beginning to impact the teaching of history, one of the university’s long-time strengths. Professors rightly complained that their academic freedom and the ability of students to learn their own history was constrained. Thus far the university’s response has been little more than denial.

This week, the news reported that research regarding the dangers of COVID in Florida under its current policies was repressed by university officials and prevented from consideration by policy makers. On its heels comes news that the state’s surgeon general, an ideologue imported by the governor to affirm his deadly approach to COVID (Florida ranks third in total deaths and sixth in deaths per million population), was fast tracked through tenure processing at UF to provide a faculty member for the governor to use in his campaign to place profits over people in the midst of a pandemic.

Tainted Greatness

 

When I was a student at the university, we used to cheer “It’s great….to be….a Flo-ri-da Gator!” Whether it was true or not, we certainly believed it. And in recent years I have been increasingly proud of my alma mater for its slow but sure progress in shrugging off its Southern football school mentality to become an academic powerhouse worldwide.

But I’m not so sure if it’s really so great to be a Florida Gator these days. This recent performance by this university to which I have so many long time ties is embarrassing at best if not disillusioning. As the second of three generations of UF graduates, it breaks my heart to watch this. And I fear it is going to take a long time to repair the damage the ideologues in Tallahassee and their lap dogs in Gainesville have inflicted upon it.

What I do know is that things can improve. The university recently acted quickly to replace a football coach whose team only produced a break-even season and a minor bowl game. For most of my childhood as a Gator fan such a coach at UF would have been seen as successful. Those were the days before the big bucks of athletic associations and television contracts became the bottom line. 

But the point is that if the university can act this quickly and decisively on issues involving extra-curricular activities, however profitable they might be, surely it is capable of replacing an administration that appears to have sold its soul to a demagogue with unlimited political ambition. Bear in mind, the stakes are very high here. In the end, it is the very soul of this university that is on the line.

 


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 Harry Scott Coverston

  Orlando, Florida

  frharry@cfl.rr.com

 hcoverston.orlando@gmail.com

 If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound bites.

 Those who believe religion and politics aren't connected don't understand either. – Mahatma Gandhi

 For what does G-d require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d?  - Micah 6:8, Hebrew Scriptures

 Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)

 © Harry Coverston, 2021

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