Robert Ingram, the new interim director for the UF Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education, wants to mark a new chapter of rapid expansion and academic ambition.
“Execution and growth: those are two things on which I’ll be particularly focused in the next year,” Ingram wrote in an email.
The focus comes amid dramatic development, he said. Founded in Summer 2022, the school hired more than 50 faculty members. It launched four undergraduate and two graduate degree programs in under three years, a scale Ingram called a “land speed record.”
The school remains committed to “researching and teaching the ideas, traditions and texts that form the foundations of Western and American civilization and the principles, ideals and institutions of the American political order,” Ingram wrote, which is now expected of the university after SB 266, the bill that eliminated state-funded DEI programs, went into effect.
Ingram said the school plans to physically expand. The school’s future home, the former UF infirmary, is undergoing a $55-million renovation designed to match the feel of an “Oxford-style college at the heart of the greatest SEC university,” he wrote.
The school has formed two summer partnerships with the University of Oxford’s Rothermere Institute, a center dedicated to the study of the United States, and Lady Margaret Hall, one of Oxford’s constituent colleges focused on international programs.
Programs like Society of Fellows, which concludes with a 10-day seminar across Oxford, Cambridge and London, student reading groups and cinema discussions help accomplish his mission, he said.
“We want Hamilton to be a collegiate community, to be a place where UF students feel like they belong and are not just taking classes and getting a degree,” he wrote. “It’s something all our faculty and staff embrace.”
With 20 new hires in July alone and 25 Hamilton School Quest classes offered this Fall, expansion is well underway.
Jeffery Collins, the Hamilton School’s interim associate director, said the school’s growth has been carefully cultivated. He said Ingram has a strong vision, understanding its mission and the legislative intent behind the school.
“We’ve been very deliberate about the hiring,” Jeffrey Collins said. “We've made a lot of very good hires, lots of people from places like Cambridge and Oxford and Harvard and so forth.”
Alongside the politics, philosophy, economics and law, and great books and ideas majors currently being taught, the school hopes to introduce a war, statecraft and strategy, and an American Government major.
Jeffrey Collins and Ingram said the majors are important for filling academic gaps.
“There’s a lot of great departments at UF, but there was a lack of interdisciplinary programs,” Collins said.
Katie Collins, a 20-year-old UF politics, philosophy, economics and law sophomore, said she was initially skeptical about the Hamilton School because it was so new.
“I ended up taking one class with the Hamilton Center just for fun, and I immediately fell in love with it,” Katie Collins said.
She enjoyed the program’s small class sizes, which allow for debate and discussion in the classroom.
New hirings eased her initial anxiety about the school’s newness, she added.
“I actually feel really relieved that they've got so many faculty on board so quickly,” she said. “It was also explained to me by one of the professors that their process for hiring was incredibly competitive.”
Beyond competitive coursework, Ingram said the school is building a community.
“The Hamilton School is a big, bold project offering UF students an elite education at an elite institution,” Ingram wrote. “I had two non-negotiables: We had to hire world-class faculty, and we had to offer intellectually rigorous degrees. We’ve done just that.”
Contact Swasthi Maharaj at smaharaj@alligator.org. Follow her on X @s_maharaj1611.
