By J. Scott Angle | [email protected] | @IFAS_VP
Your land-grant university has a new land-grant president, Dr. Stuart Bell.
Bell describes the place where he grew up as one with not a lot of people but a lot of cows and a lot of oil. While his family didn’t farm, his dad worked a garden large enough that he used a small tractor. When Bell turned 18, he went off to his land-grant university, Texas A&M, and earned three engineering degrees.
He went from learning to leading in the land-grant tradition as provost at Louisiana State University before becoming the president of the University of Alabama. When he got to Gainesville this summer, Bell recognized right away that being a land-grant president means developing a strong relationship with the Farm Bureau.
Just a month into the job, he came to you. Bell visited the Florida Farm Bureau Federation headquarters to meet the board and reinforce his commitment to the land-grant mission.
Bell acknowledged the longstanding partnership between the Farm Bureau and UF/IFAS, and told the board he considered agriculture essential to Florida; that the University of Florida is proud to support agriculture; that Extension works with every county; that ALL should benefit from UF.
And President Bell and I have already hosted President Jeb Smith and COO Cody Lyon on campus for a three-hour discussion on agriculture and the UF partnership with the state’s major commodity associations.
During that discussion, President Smith demonstrated his servant leadership by asking Bell, “What can we do for you?”
Continue to support your land-grant university, Bell responded.
Next for Bell is a series of listening sessions aimed at gathering input for UF’s next strategic plan. UF/IFAS is one of only three units – the others are UF Health and athletics – for which Bell established a subcommittee to inform the larger university plan.
Bell’s goal is to make UF even better than it is right now. The only way for that to happen, Bell told Smith and leaders from the forestry, ornamentals, fruit and vegetable, citrus, 4-H, strawberry, cattle and fertilizer sectors, is for Florida agriculture to get better, too.
That sounds like a land-grant president.
J. Scott Angle is the University of Florida’s Senior Vice President for Agriculture and Natural Resources and leader of the UF Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences (UF/IFAS).
