Teaching. American colleges and universities share the fundamental educational mission of teaching students. The undergraduate experience, based in the arts and sciences, remains at the core of higher education in America. The formation of educated people, the transformation of mind through learning and the launching of a lifetime of intellectual growth: these goals remain central to every university. This undergraduate foundation of American higher education has grown more complex as the knowledge we teach has grown more complex. Where once we had a single track through the arts and sciences leading to a degree, we now have multiple tracks leading to many degrees in arts and sciences as well as in a variety of professional schools. Yet even with many degrees, American university undergraduate education still rests on the fundamental knowledge of the liberal arts and sciences.
In our academic world we recognize two rather imprecisely defined categories of higher education: colleges and universities. The traditional American college specializes in a carefully crafted four-year undergraduate program, generally focused on the arts and sciences. Universities extend the range of this undergraduate education to include advanced or graduate study leading to the Ph.D. Most American universities also include a variety of undergraduate and graduate professional programs and master's degree programs. The University of Florida shares these traditions. As an American university, we have a major commitment to undergraduate education as the foundation of our academic organization, and we pursue graduate education for the Ph.D. and advanced degrees in professional fields. We are, in addition, a major, public, comprehensive, land-grant, research university. Each of these adjectives defines one characteristic, and, through frequent repetition, this description takes on the style of ritual incantation: rhythmic, reverent and infrequently examined. What, then, does each of these key words mean? Major. Here is one of our most important aspirations. We will be, we must be and we are a major university. We define ourselves in comparison to the best universities we can find. We do not need to be the absolute best, but we must be among the best universities in the world. Exact ranking of the best universities is a meaningless exercise, but most of us can name 62 great universities. By whatever indicator of quality we choose, our university should fall into this group. If we define a group of universities that shares our adjectives (major, public, comprehensive, land-grant, research), then we fall into a group of perhaps the best 15 in this country. Public. We exist thanks to the commitment and investment of the people of the state of Florida. Generations of tax dollars constructed the facilities we enjoy and have paid the major portion of our operating budget. The graduates of this institution, educated with tax dollars, provide the majority of our private funding. Our state legislators created the conditions that permit our faculty to educate our students, pursue their research, conduct their clinical practice and serve their statewide constituencies. We exist, then, within the public sector, responsible and responsive to the needs of the citizens of our state. The obligations we assume as a public university determine many of our characteristics. We have many more undergraduates than graduates; we respond quickly to the needs of the state's economy; we accommodate complex linkages with other state universities, community colleges and K-12 public and private institutions; and we operate in cooperative symbiosis with our state's media. We also experience close interaction with the political process. Private universities, which have a different profile, do not respond in the same ways to these issues. As a public university, we must maintain close, continuous and effective communication with our many publics. Comprehensive. This adjective recognizes the universal reach of our pursuit of knowledge. As a matter of principle, we exclude no field from our purview. We believe that our approach to knowledge and learning, to understanding and wisdom, requires us to be ready to examine any field, cultivate any discipline and explore any topic. Resource limits, human or financial, may constrain us from cultivating one or another academic subspecialty, but we accept, in principle, no limit on our field of view. Even when we struggle with budget problems and must reduce a program or miss an intellectual opportunity, we do so only to meet the practical constraints of our current environment. We never relinquish commitment to the holistic pursuit of knowledge. Land-grant. Florida belongs to the set of American universities whose mandate includes a commitment to the development and transmission of practical knowledge. As one of the land-grant universities identified by the Morrill Act of 1862, Florida has a special focus on agriculture and engineering and a mandate to deliver the practical benefits of university knowledge to every county in the state. In our university, the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences and the College of Engineering respond to this definition most obviously; but over time, the entire university has come to recognize its commitment to translating the benefits of abstract and theoretical knowledge into the marketplace to sustain the economic growth that supports us all. This commitment permeates the institutional culture and defines us as one of 72 such institutions in America. The land-grant university is, of course, a peculiarly American invention and captures one of the powerful cultural beliefs of our country: that knowledge passes the test of utility by remaining vitally connected to industry and commerce. Research. Research defines this university. Our faculty dedicate themselves not only to the bedrock function of education, not only to the land-grant function of service, but equally to the essential activity of research. By research we mean the effort to expand our understanding of the natural world, the world of the mind and the world of the senses. We define research to include the theoretical abstractions of the mathematician, the experimental discoveries of the geneticist, the insights of the semiotician, the re-creations of the historian or the analysis of the anthropologist. We define research to capture the business professor's analysis of economic organization, the architect's design and the musician's interpretation or the artist's special vision. Research by agronomists improves crops, and research by engineers enhances materials. Medical and clinical research cures and prevents diseases. The list of research fields continues as endlessly as the intellectual concerns of our faculty and the academic vision of our colleges. We must publish university research, whatever the field. The musician who never performs, the scientist whose work never appears for review by colleagues, the historian whose note cards never become a book may have accomplished much, but their accomplishments remain incomplete. When we say research, we mean research and creative activity that contribute to the international public conversation about the advancement of knowledge.