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This is Florida State

Florida State University, a graduate research institution, stands among the nation's elite in both academics and athletics, as it celebrates its sesquicentennial anniversary in 2001.

Located on the oldest continuous site of higher education in Florida, the university is situated in the heart of the state's capital city. The university's main campus blends Jacobean Revival and modern styles of architecture with the oaks, pines, dogwoods and azaleas of North Florida.

As the university has progressed and grown - from its pre-Civil War beginnings as the Seminary West of the Suwannee, to the Florida State College for Women and, finally, returning to coeducational status as a university in 1947 - it has developed into an acclaimed research institution, a top-ranked competitor in intercollegiate athletics and as a standard-setter in the basic sciences and the performing arts.

The university has entered the 21st century with excellence in all areas of its mission - teaching, research and public service, including such milestones as:

• In June 2001, NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw donated more than 5,000 collections of World War II memorabilia that had been sent to him as the result of his three-book series on "The Greatest Generation" to the FSU Institute on World War II and the Human Experience. FSU created the institute in 1998 to "save the memories of those who saved the world" by collecting letters, diaries, memoirs and photos from participants in the war effort, in order to preserve the materials for classroom teaching, scholarly research and public viewing.
• In May 2001, FSU welcomed the charter class of its College of Medicine. The allopathic medical school, the first to be established in the nation in more than 20 years, will focus on treating the elderly and people in underserved areas such as rural communities and inner cities.
• In March 2001, FSU opened the Center for the Advancement of Human Rights that will train undergraduate students from nine FSU colleges and schools to be human rights advocates and be placed with international human rights organizations.
• In the blackenterprise.com 2001 "Top Fifty Colleges for African Americans" rankings, FSU was rated 23rd in the nation, up from 26th in 1999.
• In the March-April 2001 issue of National Jurist that rated the nation's "most wired" law schools, the FSU College of Law was ranked 13th.
• The FSU School of Motion Picture, Television and Recording Arts was named among the nation's top 12 film schools in the fall 2000 "special showbiz issue" of Entertainment Weekly magazine.
• During the fall of 2000, FSU had 243 National Merit Scholars, 77 National Achievement Scholars and 28 Hispanic Scholars enrolled.
• In 2000, the Florida Legislature placed under FSU's control the Ringling Center for the Cultural Arts in Sarasota, which includes the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, the state art museum of Florida.
• In 2000, FSU bought the most powerful university-owned supercomputer in the world. The IBM RS/6000 Supercomputer can perform 2.5 trillion calculations per second. Located in the School of Computational Science and Information Technology, the supercomputer will be used by FSU researchers to predict hurricanes and compare DNA sequences as complex as those of the human genome.
• The Challenger Learning Center of Tallahassee, a project of the FAMU-FSU College of Engineering, is scheduled to open in March 2002. The center, to be built on Kleman Plaza in downtown Tallahassee, will feature a space mission simulator common to all of the centers, and a 300-seat IMAX theater and a domed planetarium laser theater. It will serve middle schools in a 66-county area of North Florida, Southeast Alabama and South Georgia.
• In 2000, the doctoral program in the College of Business had the highest minority enrollment of any Ph.D. business program in the United States. In recent years, it has graduated more minority doctoral students than any other Ph.D. granting institution.
• In 2000, the National Geographic Society and FSU started the Florida Geographic Alliance to bolster geographic education among Florida school children by preparing and equipping Florida's K-12 teachers with better information and tools.
• In 1999, FSU was selected by the U.S. Department of Energy to become one of the research institutions to operate the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), a multiprogram science and technology laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tenn., headed by the University of Tennessee-Battelle. The five-year management and operations contract is valued at about $2.5 billion. FSU was invited to join ORNL because of its strong faculty research activities in material sciences, structural biology, computational sciences and magnet technologies.
• At more than $287.4 million, FSU's endowment has been ranked 150th in the nation by the National Association of College and University Business Officers, the benchmark of higher education fundraising success, in 2000. Since 1994, FSU's endowment ranking has surpassed 156 other institutions.
• In December 1999, researchers at the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory used a hybrid magnet to conduct the lab's first research in continuous magnetic fields of 45 tesla, or one million times Earth's magnetic field. The $100 million magnet lab, which was established in 1990 by the National Science Foundation, is run by FSU in partnership with the University of Florida and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
• In 1994, Florida State was classified a "Research University I" by the Carnagie Foundation, placing it among the nation's top research universities. In 2000, the distinction was renamed "Doctoral/Research University-Extensive."

Under the leadership of the university's 12th president, Talbot "Sandy" D'Alemberte, who took office in January 1994, FSU continues to build on the foundation of its history of excellence in scholarship, research and service.

A senior member of the State University System, FSU was founded as an institution of higher learning in 1851 by legislative act. It began in Tallahassee with its first class of male students in 1857 and added women in 1858.

FSU's operating budget is $656 million. Faculty and administrators generate more than $116 million annually in external funding to supplement state-sponsored research. Three direct-support organizations serve to bolster the university: the FSU Foundation, which raised $301 million in private gifts during the university's first capital campaign, Seminole Boosters and the FSU Alumni Association. The main campus is spread over 463.4 acres in Tallahassee; FSU, which has one of the smallest campuses in the SUS, has been actively acquiring land in the 1990s. FSU encompasses 1,422.7 acres in Leon, Bay, Franklin, Gadsden and Sarasota counties.

Within the state, the university maintains facilities at its 25-acre campus in Panama City, its Marine Laboratory at Turkey Point on the Gulf of Mexico, the Appleton Museum in Ocala and the Asolo Performing Arts Center in Sarasota. The Center for Professional Development and Public Service, housed in the Augustus B. Turnbull III Florida Conference Center on the edge of the campus, provides extensive credit and non-credit continuing education programs statewide.

For years, FSU has reached far beyond Florida through international programs in Switzerland, France, Panama, Costa Rica, Spain, Russia, Vietnam and the Caribbean. FSU's student centers in Florence, Italy, and London, England, are considered by many to be the nation's best in Europe. Florida State offers 294 graduate and undergraduate degree programs through its nine colleges - Arts and Sciences; Business; Communication; Education; Engineering (operated jointly with Florida A&M University); Human Sciences; Law; Medicine; and Social Sciences (which also incorporates the Reubin O'D Askew School of Public Administration and Policy) - and eight schools - Criminology and Criminal Justice; Information Studies; Motion Picture, Television and Recording Arts; Music; Nursing; Social Work; Theatre; and Visual Arts and Dance.

With 1,897 members, the FSU faculty has included nine National Academy of Sciences elected members, 10 American Academy of Arts and Sciences fellows and five Nobel laureates. It is backed by 3,136 administrative/professional and support staff.

Library holdings at Florida State include 2.3 million book titles and 6.6 million microforms. The main library facility, the Robert M. Strozier Library, is linked by computer to other state university and national research libraries. The Paul A.M. Dirac Science Library is located at the heart of the university's science research complex.

FSU also maintains music, library science and law libraries, and the Mildred and Claude Pepper Library. FSU's 6,367 graduate students pursue advanced degrees in fields as diverse as business administration and theoretical particle physics. A majority of research done at FSU is the direct result of student effort, culminating in numerous books, monographs and journal articles relating to the whole spectrum of intellectual interests and the practical needs of society.

Of FSU's 34,477-student population, 43.8 percent are male; 56.2 percent are female; 22.3 percent are minorities; and 3.7 percent are foreign students.

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