Celebrate 50 years of growth

By Margaret Leonard
Editor in Chief Florida State Times

This issue of the Florida State Times is devoted to telling about Florida State's great journey of the last 50 years.

Just after World War II, Florida State College for Women was still a small, women-only school with very high standards (A University of Florida president had complained that FSCW offered Greek as well as Latin, while UF offered onlyLatin).

Then, almost overnight, the school was transformed by the arrival of men and all the changes they brought.

It was the most exciting time in the history of American education. Thousands of young men coming back from the war had a choice most had never had before: to go to college or not.

Many - like novelist Joseph Heller, who says he would never have thought of college if the GI Bill hadn't made it so possible - grabbed the chance and were changed forever.

And America was changed forever. No longer would the Joseph Hellers have to go to work in factories instead of giving us Catch 22. No longer would higher education be reserved for the upper classes, giving the young ladies a sheltered place to study the classics and the young men a school 200 miles away to learn a profession.

Florida State jumped into the new era with a vengeance. Two years after the first men came, the university launched a hiring frenzy that brought scores of Ph.D.s from America's best universities to teach science and other subjects that appealed to men.

A few years after that, new professional schools opened, one every few years for a couple of decades. People came to coach football and start a circus so the men - some of them combat veterans - would have physical-education choices more suitable than synchronized swimming.

The challenge was clear and inescapable: to accomplish, on one campus, the goals that had once been scattered among many. Florida State would pass on the culture ­ Latin, Greek, science and the arts ­ and teach the professions.

Florida State would struggle to be comprehensive ­ a student body from all classes and both sexes learning liberal arts and preparing for a profession ­ without sacrificing depth; the standards would not be lowered.

That struggle continues, and will into the next century. In the 1960s, when the school opened to racial minorities, and in the 1970s, when women poured into fields that had once discouraged or barred them, Florida State absorbed the newcomers and worked hard to give them as solid an education as earlier, smaller, richer and more homogenous classes had enjoyed.

And in the '80s and '90s, when public money got scarce and college presidents had to raise money before they could spend it, the struggle continued. FSU President Sandy D'Alemberte came into office promising to raise standards and raise the money to give those standards meaning.

Somehow, in case after case, D'Alemberte and his predecessors have succeeded.

Florida State has brought Nobel prize winners to campus to teach and do research. The fine arts programs are among the best in the country, and the professional schools are thriving. English students read Toni Morrison and Shakespeare, and some write their own novels before they leave. Scientists are doing research that draws more scientists, bigger names and grander technology, such as the National Magnetic Field Laboratory and the nuclear accelerator.

Every student has a free internet account, and many study in Europe, some excavating Etruscan ruins, some reading the classics and others studying the great European artists. A biology professor figured out how to synthesize Taxol, and law professors have helped the emerging democracies in eastern Europe write their new laws.

We invite you to come to campus April 4 for the Ten Days of Gold celebration.

Send a letter to the Editor: fstimes@unicomm.fsu.edu

Copyright @ 1997 Florida State Times