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Hello. I'm Mike Cannon. And this is conversation. Whenever one speaks of the academic mission of the University of Florida, one turns naturally to a discussion of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. It is the heart and center of the university. It is a large unit with 550 faculty members and 18,500 students.

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It is larger, in fact, than six of the universities in the state university system. But it is not size that makes this college unique. It is quality, and it is quality will be talking about when I return in a moment with my guest. Mhm. Thank you.

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Mhm. Yeah. Mhm. Thanks. No. Yeah. Conversation from the University of Florida. A discussion of social, political, scientific and religious issues of the day. Your host is Michael V. Gannon, professor of history and ethics and associate dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Florida.

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Mm. Right. My guest on this conversation is Charles F. Sidman, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Chuck, welcome back to conversation. Well, thank you very much for having me. Mike. It's good to be here. I think it's been three or four years probably sent you, and I talked about the college and a lot has happened in that time.

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I said that we were going to talk about quality. Suppose we start with the faculty. Since the three or four years when we visited last, a large number of new faculty members have joined the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Over the past six years, 170 new faculty members, in fact, have been hired.

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But in the last 3 to 4 years, to members of the National Academy of Sciences, two fellows of the Royal Society and one Pulitzer Prize winner have been hired. And of the faculty members who were hired within the last four years, the college now has this year six on Guggenheim fellowships.

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That's a remarkable number unprecedented for the college. I believe it ranks the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and the University of Florida in the very top group nationally in terms of this kind of academic distinction, and the Guggenheim Fellowship is by consensus the most prestigious of all fellowships for colleges of liberal arts and sciences.

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But that's a fellowship that's one also by people in the professions, in medicine in law and other such schools. It is indeed it is indeed so. We are very pleased to note the significant progress in quality of the faculty, a condition I think that bodes very well indeed for the many students at the University of Florida who profit a great deal, I believe, from taking their degrees at a university that has won the kind of distinction that the University of Florida has significantly one in the last few years.

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I know that two of the departments in the college anthropology and zoology are the only two departments in the state of Florida that recently were ranked in the top 10 nationally. Yes, The New York Times, of course, reported on a pole of such departments and rank those two departments in the top 10 departments nationally and the only two from the state of Florida.

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Well, let's talk about what that means for the student who comes to the university. Obviously, when the student upon graduation receives his or her degree, the degree means all the more knowing that it was achieved through a college and at a institution. The University of Florida, where there is a very high prevailing standard of excellence.

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But what does it mean to the incoming student with a freshman or a sophomore student ever had a chance to be in a classroom with one of these outstanding professors whom you describe? The students would indeed have that opportunity. I was speaking just this afternoon to the chairman of the Department of Geography, where we have made some very significant advances in recent years with six new faculty members within the last three years, one of whom has a Guggenheim fellowship, as a matter of fact.

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And he told me that everyone of these new faculty members, all of them quite distinguishing the field, were teaching freshman courses this fall semester. And I think that is illustrative of the kind of expectation that we have set four faculty involvement in undergraduate indeed, freshman teaching.

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And it shows once again the commitment of these fine faculty members to teaching at the university scholarship is absolutely vital because, as you say, it is important for students to know that when they take the degree that they earn here anywhere in this country, they can be sure that people will recognize that degree is something worthwhile because they will know excellent faculty members who teach here as well.

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However, we want to have a university where the best faculty members teach the students at the undergraduate level and where they are committed to this kind of education. It's very exciting for an undergraduate entering a classroom to know that the instructor is someone who is on the cutting edge of his or her discipline, who is doing exciting research work because that comes out in the lectures.

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It's always been thrilled for me to hear presentations by our faculty members on the things that they are doing, opening up new avenues of knowledge because you can see the excitement, you can hear the excitement of the voice and the students. I think recognized, too, that these faculty members know a great deal about their subject, that the subject lives with them and that people around the world respect the views that these faculty members have about their field.

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I think it is absolutely essential to the kind of education that we wish to pervade here at the university. Chuck, Let's talk a little bit about some of the departments there are 24 departments and 10 programs in the college. But talk about the physical sciences for a moment.

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Chemistry and physics. Those are two very successful programs, are they not? They are indeed in. The Department of Chemistry, of course, has long had an excellent reputation for scholarly and teaching excellence at the university. A large number of students are served by that department. The department holds two very high scholarly standards.

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The regular faculty take turns teaching the basic chemistry courses. It is a tradition that is long established and one that is honored by successive generations of faculty members as they come to this university. And I think the graduates of the Department of Chemistry have a very high record of admission to graduate schools around the country, one of the very highest.

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I think they ranked third or fourth nationally in terms of admission to graduate programs. Yes, now you have a number of exciting things going on in physics. There's a group that calls itself the High Energy Physics Group. What is that? Could you say a little bit about the composition of the group four years ago as a result of an internal self study and then following upon a national review of the Department of Physics at this university.

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The decision was made to build certain research groups, both in theoretical and experimental physics. The first group that was put together under this new initiative was the High Energy Theory Group. An effort was made to bring to this campus the very brightest young full professors that the university could find in nationally.

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Of the first three scholars who filled positions in this new research group to came from California Institute of Technology and one from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, two of the finest universities technical universities in this country. And those three scholars have subsequently brought two more here, one from Switzerland and the other from the University of Chicago so that the group now comprises five members.

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All of them are still quite young. None of them has reached yet the age of 50. They are exceedingly active in research and very popular teachers as well. Well, let's talk about two of the humanities departments, English and history There. One sees a number of exciting new appointments.

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Perhaps you'd like to talk about English first. There have been some very fine recent appointments to the Department of English. I should mention at the outset that while we have emphasized thus far in our brief discussion senior faculty members of quality who have come to the university, you must remember that most of the new faculty members who have been hired have been hired at the junior level.

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And I suppose I would like to mention in that context one of the junior faculty members just hired into the Department of English. This year he published his very first novel. Earlier in the year, it was serialized in The New Yorker. It was one of the Book of the Month club selections.

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It was the product of a feature article in Time magazine only several months ago, And Padgett Powell must certainly count now as one of the finest young writers in America with exceeding promise. And we are very, very pleased to have selected him as one of our new faculty members, and I might add at the same time that while we do engage always in national searches of a comprehensive nature, where we take great care in selecting these people because we want the very best and we are interested not only in the best in scholarship but also teaching ability that we know will serve the students well.

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But it must be said that pageants book was not published yet when we made our decision to hire him, it was an excellent decision. And the senior people in the Department of English must be given the lion's share of the credit for recognizing that among the shortlisted candidates, he had special qualities.

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That's outstanding. The department has an eminent scholar chair in Norman Holland. Yes, a very fine representative of the of the senior generation in scholarship, I think, one of the foremost English literature specialists in the world, in working with the phenomena of psychology in relation to literature.

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And Norman is just superb in his field, recognized as one of the very best in the world and another edition. Giles Gun, who has come here from the University of North Carolina, has been described as having done the best book on the relation of religion to literature as well as an interest in working with various scholars who investigate the relationship between psychology and literature.

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The Department of English has decided to specialize in the relationship between religion and literature. These are various ways in which the scholarly interests of diverse faculty members might find some compatible overlap. And we have tried to build strengths for the students and for the university by finding scholars who work in compatible fields of interest.

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We could mention many others in the Department of Interest, including older professors who have been there for many years and have established the high quality upon which you're now building. And the same may be said for history there, too. There was a very fine faculty to which now you have added, by way of appointments, some truly distinguished individuals.

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Perhaps you'd like to mention the type of person that you brought in there. Yes, we have added into the Department of History over the last several years 11 new faculty members, five of them at the associate and full professor level, but six at the assistant professor level.

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One of the people about whom I might speak just briefly is Kermit Hall, and Kermit came here as a specialist in legal and constitutional history. He has his history degree from the University of Minnesota, but a law degree as well from Yale University and as a result of his dual interests.

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Early on, he sought permission to teach in the College of Law at the University of Florida. And one of the features of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences in the last five or six years has been an eager interest in collaborating with the professional schools as frequently as possible and on as many fronts as possible.

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And I have supported faculty interest in these cooperative ventures. And Kermit was accepted by the College of Law and now teaches a course in the College of Law. Every semester he has an office that he uses as well in the College of Law is exceedingly popular there, but he does his history courses as well and is an absolutely superb teacher and scholar for the Department of History in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

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But it demonstrates, I think, in a very special way, this particular collaboration, how a college of liberal arts and sciences can serve the interests of the whole university and can draw together it's diverse parts into some consistent uniform hole. History also has an eminent scholar chair in the person of Bertram Wyatt Brown, who was a guest on this program last spring and who wrote Southern Honor book that was a runner up to the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award.

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And he makes a fine addition to that department to he does, indeed. And, of course, his interest in the South is particularly fitting for the University of Florida, and his influence on the department in only one and year and a few months has been entirely positive.

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Uh, he was, as you know, the program director for the American Historical Association at the national meeting held in San Francisco last December, which gave him a tremendous access to historians all over the United States. And because of his move just prior to being appointed to that position, he has given a wonderful publicity to the University of Florida.

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You mentioned the relationship that Kermit Hall has with the law school. There are some formalized relationships between departments and colleges on our campus colleges that we customarily called professional schools such as engineering, and I understand that physics is building such a relationship with a program that it and engineering call micro fabric tech.

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Could you tell me what that is some 2.5 years ago, uh, the representatives of the Department of Physics and those of the College of Engineering were brought together for the first time in my office to discuss the possibility of cooperating on a broadly based research effort which ultimately drew the name micro fabric check to it.

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The idea was to try to find a major area of research interest that would occupy the time and energy and intelligence of the experimental and theoretical physicists, and one which at the same time would be important to the engineers. There is a long spectrum between basic knowledge and the application of that knowledge, but I believe that there is a good deal of common interest on the part of all people who work on a line of research from the development of the original idea to the commercialization of a product.

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And the ultimate decision was to develop expertise and a specialty at the University of Florida between physics now chemistry as well, and several of the departments in engineering material science and electrical engineering in particular, which really concerned mainly the outer layer of materials and how that our outer layer of materials might be modified in order to produce perhaps somewhat different materials for use in various technological ways.

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And this has developed into a major cooperation with investments by both colleges, in human resources and in equipment. And thanks to a grant from the Kellogg Foundation, the Department of Philosophy was able to reach out and establish a relationship with the College of Agriculture or the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

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Yes, the idea there was, of course, to establish some basis for humanistic considerations in agriculture, but is all but as well to promote a better understanding of the problems of agriculture in, uh, philosophy and history and in other areas of the humanities and social sciences. Chuck, Speaking of the professional colleges, you and I have talked many times about the fact that many people are unaware, even on our campus, of the amount of credit hours taken in your college by candidates for degrees in the professional colleges.

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I think the figures are something like 70 to 75% of credit hours for the for the College of Journalism and Communications and also for chemical engineering. But the average sorts out to about 40% 40 to 50%. And it represents, I think, a very considerable portion of the education of any graduate and undergraduate student at the University of Florida.

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What we really see here is the necessity of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences serving the instructional needs of the professional schools. But as importantly, on the other side, I think the importance of basic education to the university degrees of all students, whatever their professional, uh, specialty.

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And the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences intends to provide not only specialized courses that serve the professional schools, but to furnish all young people at the University of Florida with some basic knowledge that will help those people become better citizens and more productive human beings in their lives.

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All of the basic sciences are taught in your college, all of the mathematics, so the background for advancement in the technical schools is all based in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. But all of the languages are taught in your college, too, and, as a matter of fact, ranging over 24 departments, one sees everything from anthropology to zoology.

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It's a it's a marvelous mix. It's it's almost as though you see the whole breath of human knowledge laid out in one place where you can at least behold it if not understand it all. There are two tools, I think, particularly that require the attention of young people seeking a good undergraduate degree.

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The one has given a good deal of trouble to American students, especially in recent years, and that is mathematics. And I think one cannot stress too strongly the importance of young people mastering the rudiments of mathematics at the college level and the other. And mathematics particularly serves the sciences.

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But I think for educated people to have an ability to understand mathematical principles is very important. But the other an equally important skill to master, I think, is a foreign language. I have stressed it, I think here before, and I would like to repeat it again today.

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And the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has tried to develop international programs of various kinds in order not only to give faculty members an opportunity to travel and to have bases overseas, but more importantly, to provide an example and an opportunity for students to broaden the base of their understanding of this world in which we live by experiencing first hand how people in other cultures form and live their lives.

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The mastery of a foreign language gives people insights of the same sort that mathematics does for the sciences. It, too, is a language, isn't it? Mathematics? It is. Indeed, the University of Florida has never reneged on its responsibility to confer foreign language training to graduates in the College of Arts and Sciences.

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Six years ago, now the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, where other institutions did let that requirement, uh, disappear. This university stood by it. That is right, and I would expect, over the next decade and increasing importance in foreign language study For all college graduates, it is a truism that the world grows smaller.

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It is also, unfortunately true that many people going out into the world don't understand it as well as they should. And I think foreign language study provides a key to unlock some of the mysteries about how people think in different parts of the world that is essential for any young person trying to make a good life and a successful career.

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The foreign language discussion leads us naturally, to international programs. What would you like to say about that? I don't I do not think at the moment that the University of Florida has as many of the international programs as should be supported by a major public, comprehensive institution.

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But there are more in place now than were there only a few years ago, and the ones that are in place have served the university exceedingly well. A new summer abroad program has been developed over the past two years at Cambridge University in England of the highest quality, and the students who went to study there again last year had a tremendous experience academically.

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I think it's a delightful environment in which to study. And of course it is. And the credit that they earned is applied towards their University of Florida degree. It is indeed it is. Indeed, it meets the summer requirement that all university students bear, and it is, of course, a marvelous way to earn credits.

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But there were nine credits awarded for the summer work in Cambridge this past summer, and there are other programs in London and Utrecht, with which the University of Florida has a special relationship. Florence Salamanca, and various places in Europe and Latin America. But I want to ask a little bit about the Spain Florida alliance, an alliance that's dear to my heart.

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Um, there the university and principally through this college has a special relationship, doesn't it? With the institutions of higher learning in Spain, One of the other kinds of initiatives that was taken by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences some five years ago concerned the establishment of a special relationship with a whole country in the case of Spain through the Instituto of the Interamerican of Ibero American Cooperation, which supervises all cultural, academic, scientific and business activities of Spanish institutions of higher education in the Western Hemisphere.

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And as you well know, since we made some trips together to Spain, it was possible through the contacts that were made because of these earlier trips, to formulate a program of cooperation with the Instituto and ultimately to sign an agreement with the Instituto that provides for a regular exchange of faculty members and students between Spain and the University of Florida, between institutions of higher learning in Spain and the University of Florida, and in which the University of Florida participates every other year in an international conference, one time at the University of Florida and then the next time somewhere in Spain.

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In the year 1985 we'll find scholars from the University of Florida going once again to Spain to the Canary Islands. We hope, uh, to the conference on the age of the discoveries. Yes, the Age of Discovery. Because we're just eight years away now from the 5/100 anniversary of the Ethical Voyage of Discovery of Christopher Columbus.

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And in that connection, we're receiving a visitor on the campus of the university in November. Louisiana is the president of the Instituto in Madrid will be here, and he is the chairman of the Royal Commission for the Queen Centennial, or the fifth Centenary, as it's called in Spain.

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That will be a notable occasion for us because we can talk about how our university and Spanish institutions can jointly work together for the academic observance of the Queen's centennial. Yes, and it is important to remember in this context that the president of the Instituto is ex officio, a member of the Spanish cabinet, so that he is an official at the highest political level in Spain and very, very influential in his own.

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Right. Before we break up this conversation, Chuck, I want to say a word or ask you to say just a word in the two minutes remaining about general education what it is, why we stand by it in your college. General education provides all of the students at the university with an opportunity to acquire certain basic knowledge that it is important for any educated young person to have knowledge in the humanities and the social sciences and in the sciences, as well as the fundamental skills in English composition and writing and mathematical computation.

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And so each student is required during his or her four years to take so many hours in each of those areas. Uh, the humanities, social scientist, physical sciences and biological sciences and mathematics. Yes, and the university affords all of the students rather substantial choice in what courses might be taken to satisfy the requirement.

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But the requirement bespeaks of a university recognition that there are certain basic underpinnings to any university education, and there is a tendency to become too narrow, isn't there? There is a strong desire, I think, on the part of most young people to specialize as soon as possible, a desire that is tempered over time once the students have become mature adults, when they realized that there is more to life than the mastery of a single subject.

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And I think that our graduates appreciate, especially in retrospect, the opportunity to have read some good literature or to have taken some courses in statistics or to have studied once at least in a chemistry laboratory, yes, and to have learned how to think critically and to be analytical in one's approach to life's problems.

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Some of that, too, must rub off the courses that they take in what we popularly call general education. It is for that reason, I think that I would always and join upon those people who would want to go by the popularity of particular courses, to give an undergraduate students that they that they wait and test the reaction of graduates of the university to the courses that they have taken at the university.

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Because it isn't always the courses you think you like the most. That proved to be most helpful in a lifetime, but rather those you've had an opportunity to reflect upon after you've left the university and tested life a good note to end on. And I thank you very much.

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Charles F. Sidman, dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. Thank you, Chuck, for being with me on conversation. Thank you. Mm. Thanks. No. Yeah, I think Mhm. Mhm.