This past summer, Florida Humanities announced the inaugural members of the Florida Humanities Hall of Fame. Alongside remarkable Floridians like Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings and Mary McLeod Bethune are two legendary members of the UF History Department, Michael Gannon and David Colburn. Their inclusion in this group is testament to the vital role our department has played in championing the humanities and helping to share Florida’s history. Their legacy of scholarship and service lives on at UF History, through the collective work of our faculty, students, staff and alumni. In these turbulent times for higher education, this work matters more than ever. So, too, I suppose, does the inspiration we take from it, so please read on!
There is always more work to be done. I often say that my primary responsibility as a department chair is to look for those places where ambition outstrips current reality, and work toward closing those gaps.
With respect to undergraduate education, I want to share with you two areas in which we’re working toward realizing our full potential as a department. First, how can we continue to ensure that what our history majors accomplish before graduation matches their ambitions as they enter UF? The data we have tells us that incoming students express a high level of interest in experiential learning opportunities, such as independent research, study abroad, or internships. But we know that students graduate with lower levels of participation than might be expected, based on their goals coming in. To bridge that gap, we now have a full-time experiential learning coordinator, Dr. Blake Strickland, who helps to connect young people to opportunities. We are also working to expand scholarship support, so that financial need is not a barrier to the realization of student ambitions. For example, this past year we launched the Noll Family Fund, started by Dr. Steve Noll and his family to support undergraduate research travel. We had a wonderful start on Gator Giving Day last spring, and I very much hope the generous network of alumni and friends will continue to help grow this vital scholarship fund. If you’d like to contribute, you can find the fund information here.
A second gap we are working hard to address is the one between our alumni and our current undergraduate majors. What a resource our alumni are for current students, and I’ve rarely met a history grad who wasn’t eager to give back! So, we are working on doing this more systematically. This September, we are hosting the first annual Student Alumni Career Conference here on campus. We’ve invited 15 history alums from various career areas to meet with students and discuss their career paths. The response from our students has been tremendous, and I’m looking forward to this inaugural gathering. If you’d like to make yourself available for future iterations of the conference, or for other career-focused programming for UF history majors, please let us know here on this alumni survey.
As always, let me invite you to reach out to me directly with any questions, ideas, or just to say hello, at spillane@ufl.edu.
Sincerely,
Joe Spillane
Professor and Chair