How a pennant seller gave the University of Florida its alligator
The University of Florida began with 102 students and two buildings in Gainesville in 1906, stitched together from four older schools. Its mascot came from a local vendor who printed alligators on pennants, and a president disgusted by secret payments to athletes invented the scholarship model that college sport still uses.
Its roots reach back to 1853 and the East Florida Seminary in Ocala, the state's first publicly funded college, which closed at the start of the Civil War and reopened in Gainesville in 1866. A second ancestor, Florida Agricultural College in Lake City, became the state's first land-grant college in 1884. In 1905 the Buckman Act merged four institutions into a university for white men, while creating separate colleges for white women and for Black students in Tallahassee. Gainesville, championed by mayor William Reuben Thomas, beat Lake City to host the new campus.
Classes opened on 26 September 1906 in two Collegiate Gothic halls designed by William A. Edwards and named after Thomas and after the law's author. The first president, Andrew Sledd, quit in 1909 after clashing with the governing board over strict admissions. His successor, Albert Murphree, shortened the name to University of Florida, set up colleges of law and engineering, and grew enrolment past 2,000. Orange and blue became official in 1911, probably blending the colours of the two biggest predecessor schools, the same year the Gators nickname was adopted.
Access widened slowly. Women over twenty-one with sixty credit hours could enrol from 1924, and Lassie Goodbread-Black became the first in 1925; after the Second World War flood of veterans, all colleges opened to women. Only in 1958 did a Black student, George H. Starke, gain admission, to the law school. In the same era the state's Johns Committee interrogated students and staff to expose homosexuality, driving out at least 15 faculty and 50 students with the president's cooperation, an episode now seen as an extension of the Lavender Scare.
President John J. Tigert, appalled by under-the-table payments, created grant-in-aid athletic scholarships in the early 1930s, the seed of the modern NCAA system. The university joined the Association of American Universities in 1985. With 54,814 students in fall 2023, it ranked as the fifth largest single-campus university in the country, and its students and alumni had collected 143 Olympic medals by 2021.
Source: University of Florida
