Chomping At Bits: Florida Women's Tennis Wins SEC Title Again

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Women's tennis takes third straight SEC title: They had to fight for it with Georgia, but the Gators earned their third consecutive and 18th total SEC Tournament championship. (GatorZone)

Golf teams third and fourth in SEC Tournament play: Despite T.J. Vogel and Tyler McCumber finishing at 4-under and tying for third, Florida's men's golf team had to settle for third overall at the SEC Tournament, 13 shots back of Alabama. And Florida's women's team took fourth after matching the low team score of the day on Sunday. (GatorZone | GatorZone)

No Gators on top college football players list: Meaning no Gators among the nation's best 25 players. (Matt Hayes, Sporting News

UF considering restructuring computer science department: The campus has been abuzz with the news that UF, in an attempt to slash its budget because of further cuts by a state legislature that has repeatedly made education bear the brunt of its belt-tightening, is gutting the Department of Computer and Information Science and Engineering (CISE), but the Internet caught fire over the weekend with this Forbes post, which makes the patently incorrect assumption that UF's academic and athletic budgets are connected, and that UF is choosing football over academics.

That's just not true: Florida athletics are run by the private, non-profit UAA (PDF), which is not funded by UF and has, indeed, donated more than $60 million to UF (PDF) since 1990.

Without getting too political, the fault for CISE's potential demise lies with a legislature (and an electorate) that does not provide the proper funding for public education as is, and a school administration that has struggled to secure that funding for Florida's flagship university. If you want to blame football for that, or "imagine the outcry, though, if UF cut a major sport instead of a major science department," you're gravely mistaken, and likely working with facts that simply don't pertain to your writing. And if you're writing that Florida is eliminating CISE — the current plan calls for the elimination of a slew of faculty positions and the merger of CISE with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, which is not quite "dropping its computer science department" — you're also wrong.

Alas, no amount of scary, fact error-riddled media coverage is likely to reveal the error of the Florida legislature's ways: This is the path for public education that was paved when Jeb Bush took office in 1999. But the least reporters could do is get the facts right.

(Steven Salzberg, Forbes | Cammy R. Abernathy, UF College of Engineering | CISE Budget Cut Plan)

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