Bustle Down South

A deep yearning for growth grips Florida's state universities, but so far the system seems created half to rise and half to fall. On the main campus, the University of Florida at Gainesville, new and needed buildings sprout almost monthly; the now-rising University of West Florida in panhandle-tip Pensacola may have to draw students from neighboring states to fill its classrooms. Spanking new Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton is the nation's most computerized, automated and flexible institution of higher education; at Florida State University in Tallahassee, a frustrated president is all set to leave.

Within Commuting Distance. Until five years ago, the Florida university system consisted essentially of the campuses at Gainesville and Tallahassee, plus Florida A. & M., for Negroes, also at Tallahassee. The state ranked last in the South in money spent on education as a percentage of personal income. Change began when new Governor Farris Bryant decided to provide a college education for any Florida high school graduate who could raise $226 in annual tuition. This meant building fast and furiously, and Bryant floated bond issues totaling $102 million.

The University of South Florida was completed in Tampa. The state poured money into building 30 two-year community colleges which are administrated by county school boards and located so that 70% of all students are within commuting distance. Florida Atlantic, built on the site of a former U.S. Air Force base, opened four months ago as a two-year senior college to absorb graduates of the community colleges. Classes will begin at Pensacola in 1967, and at Orlando a year later. Enrollment, currently 40,000, is expected to rise to 135,500 by 1975. A system of closed-circuit TV education, aimed at supplying graduate courses to scientists such as those at Cape Kennedy, is in operation at four campuses.

"Irrevocably Political." But if building is the glory of Florida's universities, politics seems to be its jest. "The present Florida system is basically, irrevocably political, not higher-educational," says the Council of 100, made up of civic-minded businessmen. "It is foreign to the whole philosophy of intellectual inquiry and learning." Currently Florida politicians are doing their worst to prove how right the council is.

With a wistful look at California and New York, Florida decided last year to create a board of regents to set policy for the university system. Some kind of coherent direction was direly needed. Picking sites for new campuses has mostly been settled by which Chamber of Commerce hollered loudest. Division of educational functions among the universities has often depended on the chumminess of a school's president with lawmakers; Gainesville had a big edge because a session of the legislature is virtually a class reunion of its law school. In the confusion, no one ever established a school of dentistry, and Florida is currently spending $300,000 to send 205 students to dentistry schools elsewhere.

Such matters as the hiring of professors have been bucked all the way to the state board of control, an appointive body almost identical with the state cabinet. The board kept faculty and even presidents' salaries scaled well below the $19,000 that board members get; teachers' pay in Florida is second lowest among the nation's state university systems.

To help keep the new regents nonpolitical, they were to be named for stagger appointments of one to nine years, thus extending their sway beyond the maximum four-year term of any one Governor. Last month Farris Bryant was followed into the Statehouse by Haydon Burns, who charged during the campaign that there were an unspecified number of "pinks and Communists on the campuses," and warned that "they would be wise to resign." Five days before the end of his term, however, Bryant named the first nine regents. Burns refused to accept them, then announced that he would contest in the State Supreme Court the law establishing what Bryant had sometimes called "my" regents. Ignoring the legal assault, the regents last week proposed spending $303 million in the next two years, a 60% increase in the current budget. Ignoring the regents, Burns and the Board of Control are still making university decisions.

Fed Up. The strain tells on the faculties. Florida State's President Gordon Blackwell leaves this month to become president of Furman University in Greenville, S.C., in evident disgust at the lack of scholarly independence. Similarly fed up with "academic frustration," George T. Harrell, dean of the college of medicine at Gainesville, has resigned to become head of the medical school at the University of Pennsylvania.

"This whole system is 15 to 20 years behind such states as North Carolina," says one of Florida's critics. But the mere awareness of comparison shows some sensitivity to higher standards. And if Burns, who has said nothing more about campus subversives since the campaign, keeps his promise to be an "Education Governor," Florida's academic growth may some day turn into academic promise.

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