Opening Remarks at Jim & Alexis Pugh Hall Groundbreaking Ceremony - September 30, 2006
Good morning!
Did you know the University of Florida is the site of Bob Graham’s first political campaign? In 1955, he ran for president of the freshman class. It was quite a beginning to a long and storied career in politics.
He lost.
Senator Graham next decided to run for Freshman Honor Court. In his second campaign for office, he demonstrated he had learned a few things about politics. He knew he had to make his candidacy stand out above the pack. So rather than a put a picture of himself on his campaign poster, he used an image of a somewhat better-known leader…Abraham Lincoln.
The Senator related the story in an oral history recorded through UF’s oral history program, and it appears in Julian Pleasants’ terrific new book, Gator Tales. As Graham remembered, “the hook was that people would say, ‘who in the hell is this guy who has got Abraham Lincoln on his poster?’”
Graham won that election.
Such is the making of a political career. Senator Graham graduated from UF in 1959 with a degree in history, went to Harvard Law School, then became perhaps Florida’s best-known and most successful politician, serving two terms as Florida governor and three terms in the U.S. Senate.
I tell this story now because it speaks directly to our purpose here this morning – letting the dirt fly for the Jim and Alexis Pugh Hall and soon-to-be home of the Bob Graham Center for Public Service.
People like Senator Graham have a natural desire for political leadership and knack for doing what it takes to get there. We still have students like that, but the informal network of business and political leaders that nurtured aspiring leaders in Senator Graham’s early years has, to an extent, broken down. Too, the hardships and pitfalls faced by today’s leaders are so daunting that many of our best and brightest students opt out. They may be naturally drawn to public service, but the rewards seem paltry compared to, say, business. As students might say, you do the math. The result is that we desperately need to raise the profile of public service as desirable career choice for our students. We must also do our part to make available education that encompasses the complexities of our global era.
That’s exactly what the Graham Center for Public Service, to be based at the University of Florida and the University of Miami, will do. And I know the Jim and Alexis Pugh Hall will be the perfect home to the center here at UF.
Senator Graham and the Graham family have always been a strong advocate of education at both the secondary and university levels. In his vision, the Graham Center will focus on public leadership, the Americas and homeland security. It will educate students in ethics, communications, government, history and intelligence. And the center will draw scholars and policy markers from around the world.
No center of the sort that Senator Graham envisions would be complete without a home. So it’s a good thing that when he was an undergraduate here, he befriended a fellow Sigma Nu fraternity brother, Jim Pugh.
Nearly a half-century later, that friendship is the basis of Jim and his wife Alexis’ extraordinarily generous and far-sighted decision to support the construction of Pugh Hall.
Jim is a remarkable man in his own right. A 1963 graduate with a degree in building construction, he was a U.S. Army Airborne ranger from 1963 to 1966 and commander of a Special Forces unit. Since 1970, he has owned Epoch Properties, a national property development company, and has been active in numerous and wide-ranging public causes. That’s also true of his wife, Alexis Pugh, a 30-year veteran of advertising and public relations and owner of Lakeshore Advertising Consultants in Orlando.
I will leave it to Jim to tell you more about the couple’s reasons for supporting the construction of Pugh Hall. But before I conclude, let me say that although it doesn’t look like much today, the building that will rise nearby will encompass 40,000 square feet, and include a teaching auditorium, classrooms and lecture halls.
It will serve as a beacon to our future public leaders and a nursery for their dreams of making the world a better place.
I am excited and proud to join all of you today in getting this building off the ground!
Thank you.
Bernie Machen