The fight against the potential cut of UF's undergraduate education program got off to a dark, cold and slightly windy start last night outside of Norman Hall.
About 150 people huddled together, some holding battery-operated candles, to listen to local education leaders protest UF's decision to consider cutting the two undergraduate majors in the College of Education.
"When I heard the news, I couldn't believe it," Leanetta McNeally, principal of Duval Elementary School and a UF alumna, said of UF's proposal.
"I thought, 'Ludicrous,'" McNeally said. "We cannot sit down and do nothing."
Jim Brandenburg, principal of Alachua Elementary School, said cutting the undergraduate programs would not only affect the students at UF but students all across Alachua County, because many local schools use interns from UF's programs to help teach their children.
At one point during his speech, the blown-up pictures of children that flanked the lectern were toppled by the wind, at which point Brandenburg quipped, "I guess it's symbolic the pictures of children are falling down because they're particularly vulnerable to the changes being proposed."
In between speakers, students from the College of Education performed a skit to poke fun at UF's priorities during budget cuts.
Kali Davis, a UF education graduate student who organized the event, also read an oversized letter from first and second graders from Williams Elementary that asked UF President Bernie Machen not to take away their student interns.
"Dear President Machen, please do not close the College of Education," Davis read.
"If we didn't have interns next year we would be scared and unhappy," she said.
Katie Milton a doctoral student in the College of Education at UF who started the Facebook Group "Save Undergraduate Education at UF," said after the event that she thinks UF's decision to consider cutting undergraduate education and nursing programs at UF smacks of sexism.
"I think it's not a mistake that nursing and education were both specifically targeted when those are the two highest populations of women we have on our campus," she said.
"If UF wants to go back to being an all-male college then they should come right out and say that," she said. "They shouldn't kick off their two dominant populations of women."
