The Florida Alligator: A Macroscopic View of Social Change at the University of Florida

Introduction

The Florida Alligator and The Independent Florida Alligator, newspapers traditionally run by students at the University of Florida, present a valuable opportunity for a digital humanities intervention into the study of social change in universities.

The Florida Alligator database contains 3,726 digitized newspapers from 1912 to 1973, and The Independent Florida Alligator database contains 11,714 newspapers from 1973 to the present. The vast quantity and time span of newspapers, written by students, provides unmediated insight into the perspectives of UF students. A macroscopic (Graham et. al 2022) analysis of word frequency in the newspaper over time allows for the quantitative interrogation of scholarly consensus, testing the literature against the data.

Literature Review

Social Change at Universities

In response to feedback from peers and the instructor of our digital humanities course, we expanded our project’s scope to the nature of social change at universities, focusing specifically on the shifting attitudes on gender and race at the University of Florida. The literature on social change at universities emphasize the complex negotiation between students, administration, and the government. During the 1960s, an era of dramatic social change, student activism led progressive struggles. Terry Anderson argues that students made the ideal protestors because they had little to lose, fewer responsibilities, and many, especially minorities, were already organized in communities that could stand up to the power structure (Anderson 1995, chap. 1). The varied response to student activism by administration defined the process of social change inside and outside universities (Clawson 2011, 349).

The University of Florida: Race and Gender

The scholarship on racial and sexual integration at UF agrees with the broader literature on university social change. Jessica Clawson characterizes UF’s racial integration process as “practical desegregation” (Clawson 2011, 348). She claims the university administration, specifically the university president, adopted a moderate segregationist position. Administration failed to include African-American students until student activism brought increased federal scrutiny to the university (Clawson 2011, 371). Derrick White similarly draws a distinction between desegregation and integration, claiming that UF’s efforts at desegregation did not produce efforts to integrate university students into the “collegiate ideal” (White 2009, 473-474). He examines the case of UF’s football team, noting that the controversy over playing “Dixie,” the anthem of the Confederacy, reflected the segregationism within UF’s student culture (White 2009, 489). Both authors conclude that the UF’s racial integration process was protracted, dragged by administration, and checked by student activism.

The literature on women’s integration at the UF reveals a similarly protracted process. The University of Florida became a co-educational institution in 1947, following a post-WWII G.I. Bill that brought large numbers of men and women into the university (Taylor 2002, 498). Throughout this increase in female attendance, student culture shifted to accommodate women. Betty Taylor cites female students’ political activism, inspired by the Equal Rights Amendment, as increasing efforts to recruit women into the UF law school following stagnation in the 1950s (Taylor 2002, 503).

Framing Questions

The literature on social change at UF, specifically racial and gender, supports the idea that the process was drawn out, progressed forward through student activism, and discourse on adjacent topics (such as the use of Dixie) reflected general student attitudes. The framing questions for our digital humanities intervention interrogate the claims of the literature:

Does quantitative analysis of The Alligator support that the social integration of minorities at UF was a protracted process?
What caused an increase in discourse on social change: administrative policy or student organizing?
How does the salience of controversies adjacent to social justice reflect broader social views on campus?

Methodology

We began by contacting George A. Smathers Library, which hosts UF Digital Collections and the databases for our study, for text files of every Alligator newspaper. The digital collections team sent thousands of text files, which we compiled into a python dictionary. The dictionary consisted of entries labeled with the date of the newspaper edition and the text of the newspaper processed through the natural language toolkit module.

The natural language toolkit tokenized, decapitalized, and lemmatized each word to ensure standardization when searching for word frequency. Then we programmed a python script in Google Colab to search through the database for an inputted word and display a line graph of word frequency in The Alligator over time. We also programmed the ability to modify the beginning year and ending year for the graph to allow our team to examine a smaller range of relevant years.

The initial graphs of word frequency over time revealed a consistent lack of frequency in the 1990s, and our investigation revealed that the text files sent by UF Digital Collections lacked many years between 1987-99 (Fig. 1). To overcome this limitation, we solely focused on the years outside 1987-99, which our dataset did not lack. These years were easier to avoid as many of the events and scholarly information surrounding the subjects that we studied were present in the decades leading up to this gap in information.

Figure 1: Bar Graph of Python Dictionary's Alligator Volumes Over Time

Findings

"Civil Rights"

Our team began by conducting word frequency searches of formal topics such as "civil rights." The carousel on the left contains the figures discussed on each section. As stated before, conspicuous gaps in 1987-1999 exist in our data. However, we noticed a sharp increase in frequency during the 1960s which we felt deserved deeper examination.

Leveraging our program’s flexibility, we modified the graph’s range to examine this period in time (Fig. 2b). UF desegregated its undergraduate college in 1962 (Fig. 2c). Despite this policy change, there was not a corresponding increase in the frequency of “civil rights” in 1962. The lack of change in 1962 reflects Clawson’s description of UF’s initial desegregation as a quiet decision (Clawson 2011, 354). Over time, however, student demographic changes and activism brought increased salience to the issues of civil rights.

In 1968, African-American enrollment started to significantly increase (Clawson 2011, 362). This demographic shift coincides with the largest spike in the graph, when “civil rights” was mentioned 387 times (Fig. 2d). As African-American students continued to struggle for full integration into UF, the salience of civil rights remained high. In 1971, the Black Thursday protests occurred, when dozens of Black students staged a sit-in at Tigert Hall demanding increased Black faculty and a Black Culture Center (Clawson 2011, 366). The frequency of civil rights in 1971 (Fig. 2e) remained high at 314 instances.

White claims 1973 was “the year that the University of Florida took its first major steps towards becoming an integrated institution” (White 2009, 495) As UF began to take concrete steps toward integration in response to student activism and federal pressure, the salience of civil rights decreased (Fig. 2f).

"Women's Rights"

When we conducted our search for “women’s rights,” we similarly did our initial analysis of civil rights with all of the years that The Alligator has been in operation. The graphs that our program has produced from the data is on the right. When first analyzing the data, we began with graphing the data from the entire lifespan of the newspaper. However, as with the data that we uncovered through our analysis of the phrase “civil rights”, we similarly had a lack of data throughout the 1980s. This caused us to focus our view on a smaller sample of data. After examining the years with the highest degree of positive word count fluctuation, focusing on the selected years from 1940 to 1980 proved to cover most of the relevant events to the protracted development of women’s rights as covered by The Alligator newspaper. This discovery led to our focus on this specific set of years for our analysis on women’s rights.

While this subject is explored more in depth in Thomas’ individual project, the scope of our group project examines how the rapid increases in quantities of the use of the phrase “women’s rights” in specific years following a protracted nature. After conducting the previously mentioned “zooming in”, specific events are shown as distinctly important to the sharp and rapid increase in word usage. The earliest peak in the 1940s can be attributed directly to the increase in coeducational enrollment at the University, which was present throughout other Florida universities. Following this, notable peaks can also be seen in 1963 with the passing of the Equal Pay Act, and the early 1970s due to the rescinding and passing of new abortion legislation. Lastly, a distinct peak can be seen in 1977 with the National Women’s Conference.

"Dixie"

White’s article, “From Desegregation to Integration,” claims that a substantive difference between desegregation and integration exists, exemplified by the collegiate ideal (White 2009, 473). The use of the song Dixie at football games represents an exclusion of black students from this ideal (White 2009, 495).

To interrogate his claim – that university culture issues adjacent to social justice reflect social changes within the university – we studied the word frequency of “dixie” from 1960 to 1980 (Fig. 4a). Similar to our findings on “civil rights” in the same period, there was not a significant increase in frequency of “dixie” in 1962, when UF desegregated its undergraduate colleges (Fig 4b) .

However, similar to civil rights, “dixie” peaks in 1968 – when black enrollment started to increase and UF desegregated its football team (Fig. 4c) (White 2009, 485). In 1971, the year of Black Thursday, another small peak occurs (Fig 4d). White identifies 1973 as the year UF took major steps to integration and Dixie became too controversial to play at football games (White 2009, 95). The data supports his assertion because the frequency of Dixie begins to level off after 1973 (Fig. 4e).

General Findings

Based on our quantitative analysis of word frequency in The Alligator, we have reached the following conclusions to our framing questions:

Quantitative analysis supports the assertion that social change (racial and gendered) were protracted processes at the University of Florida.
Student organizing, not administrative policy, primarily increased an issue’s salience.
Issues adjacent to social justice reflect student attitudes on social topics.

Each graph revealed that the salience of each word continued, and even increased, after the passing of administration policy. For example, despite desegregation officially occurring in 1962, the salience of “civil rights” and “dixie” only peaked after student activism pushed the issue to campus relevance. UF also became a coeducational institution in 1947, but “women’s rights” increased in salience as feminist organizations pushed the issue through the 1960s and 1970s. Issues adjacent to social justice, such as dixie, also reflected student attitudes on social topics, often corresponding to the salience of the topic itself. For example, many of the years “dixie” spiked in relevance corresponded to the trends of “civil rights.”

Limitations, Future Research, & Individual Projects

As stated previously, the dataset for The Alligator lacked issues from 1987 to 1999. In addition, the text files obtained from Smather were generated by programmatically reading from scanned pdf versions of each newspaper, which led to some errors in the raw text files. Although natural language toolkit incorporated stopwords to remove errors in the text files, future research can incorporate more stopwords to clean the data further.

Future attempts to research can overcome these obstacles by contacting Smathers and UF Digital Collections for the missing years. Future researchers can also employ close readings to explain the frequency of words in specific years, examining the importance of local, state, and national events in increasing salience. To increase accessibility for future researchers, our website provides the database and for visitors of our website to conduct their own word searches of The Alligator. The instructions on how to search the Alligator are available on this webpage.

Our individual projects highlight more specific aspects covered under the broad scope of social change at UF. These projects include a further analysis of the development of women’s rights, an examination of anti-communist and anti-integration rhetoric, and a study on word connotation. These projects are available as web pages on this website.

Bibliography

Anderson, Terry H. The Movement and the Sixties. Oxford University Press, 1995.

Clawson, Jessica. “Administrative Recalcitrance and Government Intervention: Desegregation at

the University of Florida, 1962-1972.” The Florida Historical Quarterly 89, no. 3 (2011): 347–74. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23035878.

Graham, Shaun, Ian Milligan, Scott Weingart, and Kimberley Martin. Exploring Big Historical

Data: The Historian's Macroscope. Singapore: World Scientific, 2022.

https://web.archive.org/web/20200618171130/http://www.themacroscope.org/?page_id=584.

Taylor, Betty W. “A History of Race and Gender at the University of Florida Levin College of

Law 1909-2001.” Fla. L. Rev. 54 no. 495 (2002): 495-520. http://scholarship.law.ufl.edu/

facultypub/365

University of Florida. The Florida Alligator. Distributed by The University of Florida Digital

Collections. https://ufdc.ufl.edu/title-sets/UF00028291.

University of Florida. The Independent Florida Alligator. Distributed by The University of

Florida Digital Collections. https://ufdc.ufl.edu/title-sets/UF00028290.

University of Florida.” The Florida Historical Quarterly 88, no. 4 (2009): 1–28.

https://stars.library.ucf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4541&context=fhq.

White, Derrick E. “From Desegregation to Integration: Race, Football, and “Dixie” at the

University of Florida.” The Florida Historical Quarterly 88, no. 4 (2009): 1–28.

https://stars.library.ucf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4541&context=fhq.

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