UF vs FSU

[Gator88NE]

@NuScholar @anihc First, the original poster’s daughter is interested in biology and not engineering.

Before talking about “breaking up” the FAMU-FSU engineering school, you have to understand some past history, starting with FAMU’s first Law School.

On December 21, 1949, a division of law was established at the then Florida A&M College and the first class was admitted in 1951. The legislature established the school because no “separate but equal” state-supported law school existed for African-Americans at that time.[1] The school’s enrollment was limited to African-American male students and was located in Tallahassee, Florida.[The FAMU law school was closed through a vote by the Florida legislature in 1965, with the funds transferred to a new law school at formerly all-white Florida State University; vindictiveness for FAMU activism in support of desegregation was a factor.

The state will only support one law school in a city, so when FSU wanted one, they ended up “getting” FAMU’s program. It’s only fairly recent (2005), that FAMU has been able to re-open up it’s own Law school, but it had to place it in Orlando and not co-located with the main campus in Tally.

Breaking up the FAMU-FSU program is a very emotional subject, as it reminds everyone of what happen to FAMU’s law school. It would be very difficult for FAMU to continue it’s own engineering program as a separate college, since the majority of the state funding (and almost 85+% of the students) would go to FSU’s program. It feels like a repeat of what happen to FAMU’s first Law School…

NuScholar did an excellent job describing how engineering programs are judged. FAMU test scores have no impact on any FSU rankings. FSU administration may have been thinking it needed 100% ownership of the engineering program, to help it become a AAU member university (a lot of which is based on the amount of research being done at an university), but that’s not happening now.