The Florida State University

The University of Florida (normally referred to as Florida or UF) is an American public land-provide, sea-grant, and area-furnish research college 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 strains its origins to 1853, and has operated constantly on its Gainesville campus since September 1906.

The University of Florida is one in every of sixty- elected member establishments of the Association of American Universities (AAU), the association of preeminent North American studies universities, and the best AAU member college in Florida. The University is classified as a Research University with Very High Research by means of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. After the Florida country legislature's advent of overall performance standards in 2013, the Florida Board of Governors designated the University of Florida as one of the  "preeminent universities" the various twelve universities of the State University System of Florida. For 2017, U.S. News & World Report ranked Florida as the fourteenth quality public college inside the United States.

The college is accepted by means of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS). It is the 0.33 biggest Florida college by way of scholar populace, and is the eighth largest unmarried-campus college in the United States with forty nine,913 students enrolled for the autumn 2012 semester. The University of Florida is domestic to sixteen academic faculties and greater than a hundred and fifty research facilities and institutes. It offers more than one graduate expert packages—consisting of commercial enterprise administration, engineering, law, dentistry, medication, and veterinary medicinal drug—on one contiguous campus, and administers 123 grasp's degree programs and seventy-six doctoral degree applications in 80-seven schools and departments.

The University of Florida's intercollegiate sports teams, normally acknowledged by their "Florida Gators" nickname, compete in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I and the Southeastern Conference (SEC). In their 108-year records, the college's varsity sports groups have won thirty-five countrywide team championships, thirty of that are NCAA titles, and Gator athletes have received 275 character countrywide championshipsThe University of Florida strains its origins to 1853, whilst the East Florida Seminary, the oldest of the University of Florida's 4 predecessor establishments, become based in Ocala, Florida.On January 6, 1853, Governor Thomas Brown signed a invoice that provided public support for better training in Florida. Gilbert Kingsbury become the primary person to take gain of the regulation, and hooked up the East Florida Seminary, which operated until the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861. The East Florida Seminary become Florida's first state-supported group of higher gaining knowledge of.

James Henry Roper, an educator from North Carolina and a kingdom senator from Alachua County, had opened a college in Gainesville, the Gainesville Academy, in 1858. In 1866, Roper offered his land and college to the State of Florida in exchange for the relocation of the East Florida Seminary to Gainesville.

The 2nd predominant precursor to the University of Florida become the Florida Agricultural College, installed at Lake City by means of Jordan Probst in 1884. Florida Agricultural College have become the kingdom's first land-supply college under the Morrill Act. In 1903, the Florida Legislature, desiring to make bigger the school's outlook and curriculum beyond its agricultural and engineering origins, modified the call of Florida Agricultural College to the "University of Florida," a call the school could keep for simplest  yearsIn 1905, the Florida Legislature surpassed the Buckman Act, which consolidated the state's publicly supported better schooling establishments. The member of the legislature who wrote the act, Henry Holland Buckman, later have become the namesake of Buckman Hall, one of the university's oldest buildings. The Buckman Act prepared the State University System of Florida and created the Florida Board of Control to manipulate the system. The act abolished the six pre-current nation-supported establishments of higher education, and consolidated the assets and educational packages of four of them to shape the brand new "University of the State of Florida." The four predecessor institutions consolidated to form the brand new university protected 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 colleges into 3 institutions segregated by way of race and gender—the University of the State of Florida for white guys, the Florida Female College for white women, and the State Normal School for Colored Students for African-American women and men.

The City of Gainesville, led via its Mayor William Reuben Thomas, campaigned to be domestic to the new university. On July 6, 1905, the Board of Control selected Gainesville for the brand new university campus. Andrew Sledd, president of the pre-current University of Florida at Lake City, changed into selected to be the first president of the new University of the State of Florida. The 1905-1906 instructional yr turned into a year of transition; the brand new University of the State of Florida changed into legally created, however operated at the campus of the vintage University of Florida in Lake City till the first homes on the brand new campus in Gainesville have been complete. Architect William A. Edwards designed the first respectable campus homes inside the Collegiate Gothic style. Classes commenced on the new Gainesville campus on September 26, 1906, with 102 students enrolled.

In 1909, the college's name changed into simplified from the "University of the State of Florida" to the "University of Florida."

The alligator was incidentally chosen because the college mascot in 1911, after a local dealer ordered and offered faculty pennants imprinted with an alligator brand. The college colors, orange and blue, are a reference to the historical past of the vicinity, and an homage to the Scottish and Ulster-Scots Presbyterian historical past of the authentic founders of Gainesville and Alachua County, most of whom had been settlers from North Carolina whose ancestors have been ordinarily Presbyterians of Scottish descent who had come to America from County Down and County Antrim in what has because come to be Northern Ireland, while a few had come directly from the Scottish Lowlands