Five weeks into his presidency, Stuart Bell has spent his time getting to know the university he now leads — touring colleges, meeting with faculty, visiting labs and mapping the best route from his house to Publix.
On July 1, Bell arrived at the university seeking to maintain its status as one of the nation’s top public universities after a long period of leadership turnover. His answer to how UF gets there is simple, he said, even if achieving it is not.
“Excellence is going to be our North Star,” Bell said in an Aug. 13 interview with The Alligator.
For Bell, that excellence extends beyond university rankings. He described a university that prepares students for rapidly changing careers and conducts future-shaping research.
Reaching that standard will require filling vacant leadership positions, building trust with faculty and staff, developing strategic plans with students and faculty and seeking resources to support UF’s ambitions, he said.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q. You’ve been here for about five weeks now. What has surprised you most since arriving at UF?
Just the size of our campus and everything that we’re doing on campus. Not just physical size but all the activities that are going on.
One of the things I’m really enjoying is visiting with each of the schools. I get to go around and visit with the dean of the school, along with his leadership council, and just learn about all the breadth of the activities that we do.
Yesterday, I was at the medical school. You guys would be so proud. It’s really great with the things our faculty are involved in.
Walking into classrooms and laboratories and seeing some of the activities that are ongoing is really cool.
One of the areas I went into is where they are trying to develop new cures for diseases that are very difficult to control.
There’s so many of our students in the labs. We’re translating research that is timely and important in a very dynamic field, and we’re doing that involving our students.
Besides all the things that we’re getting involved in, it’s a beautiful campus. And it’s hot.
Q. You talked a lot during your confirmation about making UF a top public university. What does that mean to you? What constitutes a top public university?
I think I probably shared this at that time: Excellence. I probably said excellence is going to be our North Star. We’ll follow that in everything that we do. It will be excellence.
If you go back to our mission statement, what do we do? Then you think about excellence among that. That’s how I define a top public university.
Number one, you guys are undergraduate students. We are going to do an excellent job preparing you within your field.
Your areas are going to be very dynamic. And so, the second component that comes with that is research and scholarship.
We not only have to teach our political science students and our film and media students how to think about today, but we also have to tell you how you’re going to think about tomorrow.
The best universities, particularly public universities, are going to be those that also blend what we do with excellence in research and scholarship with whatever we do with those undergraduates.
When I see students in the labs doing that, I’m like, “These kids are not just ready for what’s happening today. These kids are ready for what’s going to be happening five, 10 years from now.”
And that’s what we want to turn out.
Then, our third piece of our mission is making sure that we’re serving the state. In everything we do, we want to make sure we’re serving our state, serving our nation.
If you do an excellent job in research, you’re going to be the best at the public institution.
Q. UF has gone through significant leadership turnover in recent years, including presidents, interim presidents, deans and provosts. How are you planning to build stability and trust among faculty and staff?
Stability is really important. Trust is all important. And trust takes time.
I think you have to be open. I’m a little bit humorous at times, but I think that helps as well. We don’t want to take all of ourselves too seriously in the world that we live in today, otherwise you won’t enjoy life.
But we’ve already started that process.
We’ve named a new dean for the College of Medicine, Brian Hoh. He was there yesterday kind of showing me around and bragging on all the great things that are happening, which are many.
Mark Tehranipoor is the new dean of engineering. I was very excited to talk with him and name him from among the candidates that have been interviewed.
Seriously, we have a lot underway now. Many dean searches are underway. I think by the end of this semester, maybe a little bit into the Spring semester, I’m hoping that we will fill most of those key positions that are open.
We’ve announced the provost search and the search committee. Dr. Glover — Joe — has done such an amazing job. Kudos. If you all see him, thank him, because he has been here for decades leading that academic mission.
It is really important to have those positions filled. We’re a big institution.
But I do think the leadership is helpful in making sure that we don’t just stay the course — because we’re in a very dynamic world today — but that we refine our course.
I’ll be spending the next several months, probably two to three months, listening, doing what I’ve been doing, but also engaging in strategic planning initiatives.
It’s one thing to have a strategic plan. But what I want is, at the end of the day, for you to be able to say, “This is my strategic plan,” because students have been involved in it, faculty have been involved in it.
Because if it’s your plan, it means more than if it’s just, “Oh, the university has a plan, and I wonder what will be in it.”
Q. UF has raised costs for out-of-state and international students several times in recent years. The university has also limited some out-of-state transfer enrollment. What role do you want international, transfer and out-of-state students to play at UF?
Certainly, it brings such great flavor into all of us.
I’ll just start off by saying, I think as an institution, we would love to have no tuition. And truly, we love our fields, and we love our students.
The thing that I’ve enjoyed the most, I think, is just the diversity of culture that you have.
Certainly, in the field that I’m in, in engineering, I’m with a lot of international students, a lot of different cultures.
I think as an institution, one of the values that we bring is that we have students from 70 countries here on our campus. We have students from all of our states who are on our campus. So, great value.
I’ll also touch on tuition. We are the lowest in-state tuition in the nation. And as much as out-of-state tuition is, we’re still low in the out-of-state rate.
For us to deliver our education, there are two buckets that you look at: It’s what we get support from the state and then what we get from tuition.
So what has to happen is those two pieces come together, and then you have excellence by using those resources to have great labs.
The faculty that are in your classes, I hope you like most of them. I had my favorites when I was in school. But those faculty, it is a very competitive field for having the best.
You guys are here at Florida because you want the best. You’re at one of the best public universities in the nation.
For out-of-state students, we don’t have state appropriation. So we charge a higher rate to be fair to our in-state families.
Excellence is our North Star, remember, and how we balance those two is really important to you. The value of your degree, the value of your education is going to be with you for the rest of your life.
Q. You’ve set a lot of ambitious goals for UF, and your contract outlines ambitious goals as well. What do you think is going to be the biggest obstacle to achieving all of them?
Whenever you’re at the very top and you’re trying to get that next level, the work is really hard.
I think our facilities are going to be important. Our students that we have here — engaging with them, that’s the thing I love. That’s the reason I came back to higher education: to see where all the young people are.
And our faculty, the people that we engage with, think about excellence.
So we have to have excellent faculty, excellent facilities, excellent students. To do that in a very competitive world that we have in higher education is going to be a lot of hard work.
There are going to be financial obstacles out there. We will work hard on those.
We also have very generous donors that we’re engaging with that make so much of what’s possible on our campus, whether it’s scholarships, facilities or support funds.
All of those will be part of making sure we have the resources.
As Bell’s presidency swings into full gear, several pieces of UF’s leadership structure are still taking shape. Searches for a provost and several deans are underway, and Bell said he expects to spend his first months listening to faculty, staff and students before setting the university’s next strategic direction.
Contact Swasthi Maharaj at smaharaj@alligator.org. Follow her on X @s_maharaj1611.
Swasthi Maharaj is a political science and politics, philosophy, economics and law (PPEL) junior at UF. This is Swasthi's fourth semester at The Alligator, and her third semester on the university desk. She's also reported on the enterprise desk. Swasthi loves coffee, reading, going to concerts, baking and taking long walks.
