The soul of a university — the faculty

When we think of universities, we tend to think of students. And students, of course, are their most visible manifestation. The C4 (College Consortium on the Creative Coast) four local colleges enrolled over 13,000 students this fall, a fact that is justly celebrated.
But if students are the heart of every university, its faculty members are the soul. What powers a great university is the interaction between students and faculty, the collision of energetic inexperience and hard won knowledge, painstakingly acquired over lifetimes.
The C4 institutions — New College of Florida, Ringling College of Art and Design, State College of Florida Manatee-Sarasota and the University of South Florida Sarasota-Manatee — are home to 522 full-time continuing faculty members with specialties in fields ranging across all of human experience. In an age when “knowledge” is easily available to all on the internet, it is easy to take for granted the extraordinary value of their collective expertise.