4 /GENERAL INFORMATION


be very precise). What matters is not the precision of the
measuring scale but the inclusion of our university in the
groups.


PUBLIC

 We exist thanks to the commitment and investment of
the people of the State of Florida. Generations of tax
dollars have constructed the facilities we enjoy and have
paid the major portion of our operating budget. The
graduates of this institution, educated with tax dollars,
have provided 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 univer-
sity determine many of our characteristics.
 We have many more undergraduate than graduate
students, we respond quickly to the needs of the state's
economy, we accommodate complex linkages with other
state universities and community colleges, and we oper-
ate in cooperative symbiosis with our state's media. We
also experience an often too-close interaction with the
political process. Private universities do not respond in
the same ways to these issues and have a different profile.
We, as a public university, must maintain a close, con-
tinuous, 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 that offers
insight or intellectual tools. Resource limits, human or
financial, may constrain us from cultivating one or an-
other 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 the commitment to the holistic pursuitof
knowledge.


LAND-GRANT

 Florida belongs to the set of American universities
whose mandate includes a commitment to the develop-


ment and transmission of practical knowledge. As one of
the land-grant universities identified by the Morrill Act of
1862, the University of 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 to come to recognize its commit-
ment to translating the benefit of abstract and theoretical
knowledge into the marketplace, where it can sustain the
economic growth that supports us all.
 This commitment permeates the institutional culture
and defines us as one of some 72 such institutions in
America. The land-grant university is, of course, a pecu-
liarly American invention and captures one of the power-
ful cultural beliefs of our country: that knowledge passes
the test of quality by remaining vitally connected to
industry and commerce.



RESEARCH

 Research defines a certain type of university. Our
faculty must dedicate themselves not only 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 under-
standing 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 ex-
perimental discoveries of the geneticist, the insights of the
semiotician, the re-creations of the historian, or the analy-
sis of the anthropologist. We define research to capture
the business professor's analysis of economic organiza-
tion, the architect's design, and the musician's interpreta-
tion or the artist's special vision. Research by agronomists
improves crops, and research by engineers enhances
materials. Medical and clinical research cures and pre-
vents disease. The list of research fields continues as
endlessly as the intellectual concerns of our faculty and
the academic vision of our colleges.
 University research, whatever the field, must be pub-
lished. 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 inter-
national public conversation about the advancement of
knowledge.
 The University of Florida remains committed to deliv-
ering this mission with quality and effectiveness on behalf
of the citizens of the State of Florida and in support of the
continued enhancement of their quality of life.