100th Anniversary Celebration - September 26, 2006
Good morning! It’s wonderful to see so many of you here.
This is the right place for this celebration of our 100th anniversary in Gainesville.
This University Auditorium was built in 1925. In the early years, graduation ceremonies were held here, as were many famous speeches. Orators who graced this stage included Ogden Nash, Gerald Ford and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and it’s said that Robert Frost read his poems aloud here during one of his many winter visits to Gainesville. This has always been a treasured place for musical performances and important memorial services.
From the beginning, whether in good times or bad, this auditorium has brought people from the university, Gainesville and Alachua County together under one strong and beautiful roof. It is powerful symbol of our shared purpose as a community.
A hundred years ago, when a telegraph office in Gainesville announced the news that UF would move from Lake City to Gainesville, the celebration included church bells, a parade and firecrackers. I won’t claim the relationship between UF and Gainesville and Alachua County has always been one of cheers and church bells. And I know the fireworks haven’t always been the celebratory kind.
But these institutions have contributed immensely to each other’s growth and prosperity. We could not exist without one another.
UF has shaped this community, and vice versa, in so many ways that it can be hard to separate the one from the other.
We are an environmentally-minded university, surely no coincidence in this place of such great natural beauty. Gainesville is known statewide as a great health-care city, a reflection of our university hospital and health-related research. And this area is seen as a cultural center, one with terrific art and natural history museums at UF -- and its own rich history as a home to the likes of Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings.
Alachua County has contributed more students to UF than any other county almost every school year since this university has existed. To me, that little-known fact is emblematic of our strong and vibrant town-gown relationship.
It’s a lot like the air we breathe. You don’t think about it or talk about it all the time, but it’s always there and completely essential. We collaborate on our share of big projects, but mostly, this relationship is about the little things that make life work. Cooperative efforts, such as allowing UF employees and students to ride city buses at no charge, a step that has reduced traffic on both university and city streets. Lobbying together in Tallahassee for the good of this university and this region. Working to solve problems the university and the town share, such as revitalizing the downtown corridor. Our occasional disagreements have only served to strengthen this relationship, one that has been nurtured for decades by my predecessors as well as former city and county leaders.
On the year of the university’s 100th anniversary in Gainesville, a natural question is, ‘what about the next 100 years?’
More than $250 million, or the majority of UF’s research funding today, supports research in the biological sciences. The just-completed Cancer and Genetics Research Building, the biggest research building on our campus, is devoted to biological sciences – as are the pending Biomedical Science Building and Pathogen Research Facility. We have important research agreements with the Scripps Research Institute and the Burnham Institute for Medical Research. North of Gainesville, there is a thriving and growing biotech center, composed largely of startup companies nurtured at our biotech incubator.
I think all these developments point to one big aspect of our future, both as a university and as a community. I think we are on track to developing a research and biotech hub here, establishing ourselves as leaders in what J. Craig Venter, the pioneer in gene sequencing, calls the “century of biology.”
If we can do that -- and I believe we can -- it will be something we can all celebrate on our next major anniversary together.
Thank you.
Bernie Machen