The University of Florida did not spring up overnight. Its roots reach back to 1853, when the East Florida Seminary opened in Ocala as the state's first publicly supported institution of higher learning. Separately, Florida Agricultural College was established in Lake City in 1884. In 1905, the Florida Legislature passed the Buckman Act, merging six scattered state schools into a single university. Gainesville won the campus in a fierce lobbying battle against Lake City, and by September 1906, two Collegiate Gothic buildings -- Buckman Hall and Thomas Hall -- stood ready on the western edge of town. The university opened with 102 students, all white men. It would take until 1925 for the first woman to enroll, 1958 for the first Black student, and decades more for the institution to reckon with the long shadows of segregation and the notorious Johns Committee investigations of the late 1950s.

The alligator became UF's mascot almost by accident. Around 1911, a local vendor began selling school pennants stamped with the reptile -- an obvious choice, given that alligators populated virtually every lake in and around Gainesville. Students embraced it immediately, and the Florida Gators were born. That same year, the school adopted orange and blue as its official colors, likely a blend of the East Florida Seminary's orange and black with Florida Agricultural College's blue and white. President Albert Murphree, who took the helm in 1909, expanded enrollment from fewer than 200 to more than 2,000 and helped establish the Florida Blue Key leadership society. His successor, John J. Tigert, disgusted by under-the-table payments to college athletes nationwide, invented the grant-in-aid athletic scholarship in the early 1930s -- the direct ancestor of every NCAA athletic scholarship awarded today.

Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, better known as The Swamp, seats 88,548 fans and has been the Gators' home field since 1930. Three Heisman Trophy winners -- Steve Spurrier, Danny Wuerffel, and Tim Tebow -- quarterbacked Florida to three consensus football national championships. The basketball program added its own titles in 2006, 2007, and 2025, making Florida the only Division I school to hold three or more championships in both football and basketball. Across all sports, UF has claimed forty-nine national team titles. Its athletes and alumni have won 143 Olympic medals, including 69 golds, representing 37 countries. The Gators have taken home twenty-three of the last twenty-six SEC All-Sports Trophies, an unmatched streak of overall athletic dominance.

Beyond athletics, UF is a research juggernaut. In fiscal year 2025, the university pulled in more than $1.33 billion in sponsored research expenditures. Its sixteen colleges and more than 150 research centers span medicine, law, engineering, and agriculture. The Florida Museum of Natural History, chartered in 1891, houses the McGuire Center's collection of more than six million butterfly and moth specimens -- one of the largest Lepidoptera collections on the planet. The Samuel P. Harn Museum of Art holds over 7,000 works. And the George A. Smathers Libraries system maintains more than six million print volumes. UF joined the elite Association of American Universities in 1985 and became the first Florida university to crack the top ten of U.S. News's public university rankings in 2017. Its alumni roster includes two Nobel laureates, nine NASA astronauts, and more than fifty federal judges.

From the air, the campus reveals itself as a dense canopy of hardwoods and live oaks broken by the glint of Lake Alice and the unmistakable bowl of The Swamp. Century Tower rises at the heart of campus, commemorating UF's centennial origins and memorializing students lost in the World Wars. The Collegiate Gothic architecture of its earliest buildings gives way to mid-century expansion and modern research complexes radiating outward. Gainesville Regional Airport lies northeast of campus with daily connections to Dallas, Atlanta, and Charlotte. For more than 170 years, this patch of north-central Florida has been transforming seminaries into satellites, lemon juice into Gatorade, and students into senators, astronauts, and Nobel Prize winners.