Fred Grimm of the Miami Herald wonders: What is the University of Florida thinking?

Ever wonder how we’re perceived, out there in the techie universe?

“Amazed, shocked and angered,” said Zvi Galil, dean of the college of computing at Georgia Tech, reacting to the news that Florida’s flagship university intends to gut its computer science department.

The University of Florida, contemplating a 30 percent budget cut, intends to jettison the department’s teaching assistants, cut more than half the faculty and abandon research. Galil fired off a letter last week to UF President Bernard Machen, “to express, in the strongest possible terms, my concerns about the reckless proposal to dismantle the Department of Computing and Information Science and Engineering.”

Galil then wrote something slightly at odds with our politicians’ pretty talk about Florida’s high-tech future. “And I am by no means alone — the entire computer science/computing community is dumbfounded by the news coming out of Florida. It is unbelievable that a major AAU university would even contemplate such an action in the information age we live in today — an age fueled in great part by computer science!”

The University is cutting $1.7 million from the CISE/IT budget while adding $2 million to the athletics [football] budget. That shows their priorities.

I guess they assume that companies will just use H-1B visas to bring in any tech people that they want, so no need to ‘waste money’ on teaching Americans, so may as well use the money to recruit football players for the real business of Florida universities.