List of Presidents of The University of Florida

List Of Presidents Of The University Of Florida

This List of University of Florida presidents includes all sixteen of the men who have served as the president of the University of Florida since the modern university was created from the consolidation of four predecessor institutions in 1905.

The University of Florida is a public university, created and supported by the State of Florida, and it is a designated "Flagship University" within the State University System of Florida. The primary campus of the university is located in Gainesville, and it has facilities in Jacksonville, Orlando, throughout Florida, and even in Europe. The university traces its origins to 1853, the founding date of the East Florida Seminary in Ocala, Florida, the oldest of the university's four predecessor institutions. Following the 1905 merger of its predecessor institutions, the newly consolidated men's university and land-grant college was first known as the "University of the State of Florida." The name was officially shortened to the "University of Florida" in 1909.

To date, the youngest president of the University of Florida has been Andrew Sledd, who facilitated the organization of the new university from the consolidation of its predecessor institutions in 1905. When the Florida Board of Control appointed Sledd as the first president of the new state university on June 7, 1905, he was five months shy of his thirty-fifth birthday. The longest-serving president of the university was John J. Tigert, who held the office for nineteen years from 1928 to 1947. The first university faculty member to become its permanent president was J. Wayne Reitz in 1955, and the first university alumnus to become its president was Stephen C. O'Connell in 1967.

The current president of the University of Florida is J. Bernard "Bernie" Machen. Using the university's counting method (acting or "interim" presidents are not numbered), Machen is the eleventh president of the university and has served since 2003. Ten men have previously served as the university's permanent president, and five have served as its interim, or acting, president pending the appointment of a new permanent president.