Hub Brown Authors Opinion Column for Students Returning for the UF Spring 2025 Semester

Hub Brown, dean of the University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications (UFCJC), is the author of the opinion column “Welcome Back, You Ready?” published in The Independent Florida Alligator on Jan. 14.

Brown welcomes students back to Gainesville for the spring 2025 UF semester and offers suggestions for focusing and thriving in the new year.

“Things ahead can feel uncertain. 2024 might have left you with lasting exhaustion, something that a holiday break might not have fixed completely,” he wrote. “This might be your tough semester, the one you can no longer put off. That course that everyone warned you about looms ahead. Outside the friendly confines of Gator Nation, the headlines you read might frighten you more, What to do? Well, I’m not going to prescribe some one-size-fits-all solution to this kind of anxiety, but a few things might help. Gift-giving season does not have to be over for you — now’s the time for gifts you give yourself.”

Brown suggests that students give themselves gifts including space, freedom from noise, the ability to disconnect and connect and a focus on truth.

“And speaking of freedom, give yourself a gift that is essential to freedom. Resolve to seek and value truth. Just like the irony surrounding connection, never have we lived in an era where the truth is more available and yet harder to protect. I don’t think we as a nation are even remotely grasping the existential danger to us posed by the attacks on information integrity that we are awash in today,” he writes.

“When you have the information that you need, you can make better choices, and in doing so, you really are being good to yourself. Having reliable information means you have less to worry about.”

Posted: January 16, 2025
Category: College News, Student News
Tagged as: Hub Brown, The Independent Florida Alligator