The University of North Alabama (abbreviated UNA) is a coeducational university located in Florence, Alabama, and the state's oldest four-year public university.
Occupying a 130-acre (0.5 km2) campus in a residential section of Florence, UNA is located within a four-city area that also includes Tuscumbia, Sheffield and Muscle Shoals. The four cities comprise a metropolitan area with a combined population of 140,000 people.
The University of North Alabama, which celebrated its 175th anniversary in 2005, has undergone numerous sweeping changes in the course of its long history. Originally founded as LaGrange College in 1830, it was reestablished in 1872 as the first state-supported teachers college south of the Ohio River. A year later, it became one of the nation's first coeducational colleges.
Within the last half century, the University of North Alabama has developed into a comprehensive regional university exerting a major influence over the cultural, social and economic life of Northwest Alabama and providing educational opportunities for students pursuing undergraduate and graduate majors offered through the colleges of Arts and Sciences, Business, Education and Nursing and Health.
UNA administrators also have expressed a strong commitment to improving academic quality, an effort perhaps reflected in the 2008 edition of U.S. News and World Report’s America’s Best Colleges, which ranked the university as a top tier public university.
UNA also underwent continued growth in 2009, with 7,243 undergraduate and graduate students enrolled for the fall semester.
Read more about University Of North Alabama: History, Campus, Academic Programs, Media, Athletics, Greek Life, Traditions, UNA Gallery, UNA People
Famous quotes containing the words university of, university, north and/or alabama:
“The information links are like nerves that pervade and help to animate the human organism. The sensors and monitors are analogous to the human senses that put us in touch with the world. Data bases correspond to memory; the information processors perform the function of human reasoning and comprehension. Once the postmodern infrastructure is reasonably integrated, it will greatly exceed human intelligence in reach, acuity, capacity, and precision.”
—Albert Borgman, U.S. educator, author. Crossing the Postmodern Divide, ch. 4, University of Chicago Press (1992)
“If not us, who? If not now, when?”
—Slogan by Czech university students in Prague, November 1989. quoted in Observer (London, Nov. 26, 1989)
“I know no East or West, North or South, when it comes to my class fighting the battle for justice. If it is my fortune to live to see the industrial chain broken from every workingman’s child in America, and if then there is one black child in Africa in bondage, there shall I go.”
—Mother Jones (1830–1930)
“While over Alabama earth
These words are gently spoken:
Serve—and hate will die unborn.
Love—and chains are broken.”
—Langston Hughes (20th century)