GAINESVILLE, Fla.—This week’s football game between the University of Florida and Florida Agricultural and Mechanical University may be a first, but for FAMU president Fred Gainous, it will also be a homecoming.
Gainous will be among 23 African-American UF graduates to be honored at a banquet on the UF campus the night before the game.
Gainous and the other honorees attended UF through a special program supported by the Rockefeller Foundation begun in the late 1960s to attract African-American graduate students to UF’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences.
“Agriculture just wasn’t considered a good field by African-Americans at the time,” said Chancellor Emeritus E.T. York, who helped start the program during his tenure as head of UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences. “They thought of life in agriculture as representing difficult labor on farms. However this is not the life which educated professionals in agriculture could expect – as program graduates later demonstrated.”
Several Rockefeller scholars went on to important positions in the nation’s agricultural colleges. Gainous is a good example. After completing a master’s degree in agricultural education and a doctoral degree in education at UF, he went on to become vice president for student services at St. Petersburg Junior College, assistant commissioner for community colleges for the Kansas State Board of Education, and director of the educational information center at the Florida Department of Education before becoming chancellor of the Alabama community college system. During his 14-year tenure in the Alabama system, Gainous oversaw reorganization of that state’s community colleges, which saved the state more than $23.5 million.
Gainous returned to Florida last year to become the president of FAMU.
The banquet for the Rockefeller scholars will begin at 7 p.m. Friday in the Arredondo Room of the J.Wayne Reitz Student Union.
Contacts:
Writer: Tim Lockette 352-392-1773 ext. 277
Source: Dale McPherson 352-392-1761 ext. 226
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