Sasse touts UF-Jacksonville future at hospital groundbreaking (Courtesy of the Jacksonville Business Journal) — While he was in the area for a groundbreaking of the latest health care expansion in Northeast Florida, University of Florida President Ben Sasse (pictured above) took an opportunity to talk about Jacksonville’s place in the university’s plan for growth.
Speaking to an audience of community leaders as they celebrated the start of construction of UF Health Durbin Park — a 150-bed hospital and medical office complex in northern St. Johns County — Sasse said UF’s presence in Jacksonville is a major piece of the school’s plans in health care and beyond.
“UF has an ambitious vision to transform higher education,” Sasse said. “We want to do big and innovative things for the whole state, but that starts not in Jacksonville for Jacksonville but it starts in Jacksonville … as the most important experiment for how we can more radically serve more Floridians faster, better.”
About a year ago, UF announced its intention to add a satellite campus in Jacksonville offering graduate programs in medicine, business and engineering. That campus would augment what the university and city already have in the health care field.
Since then, not a lot had been announced prior to Wednesday. Six months ago, the university said it had raised $187.5 million for the project, including $62.5 million in donations, $75 million from the state and $50 million from the city — with tens of millions of dollars more needed.
On Wednesday, Sasse said the university has been actively working through the accreditation process, which will be wrapped up soon.
“Ultimately, we’re going to make a lot of announcements after March 26 about some of the specific programs we have envisioned there,” Sasse said. “Our hope is that we would have north of 1,500 students in Jacksonville by five years from right now, which is a very steep ramp.”
He added that there are about “eight or 10” approvals expected in the coming months.
“We expect a pretty serious ramp from 2026 through 2029 and get a healthy number of students in downtown Jacksonville,” Sasse said.
That would complement what’s going on with the health care side, said Dr. David Nelson, senior vice president for health affairs at UF and president at UF Health. He pointed to the success the university already has in Jacksonville through the colleges of medicine, nursing and pharmacy.
“We hope to bring in all the other colleges as well to make Jacksonville that dynamic health care destination site for training,” Nelson said.
As for where exactly the UF campus will be in Jacksonville, Sasse said not to expect an announcement too quickly.
“There are many moving parts on what the specific site location would be,” he said.
Jaguars owner Shad Khan has said that his Iguana Investments would donate the former Jacksonville Fairgrounds site, which it purchased last year, for the campus. However, it’s still undecided whether UF will use that location.
In his speech, Sasse talked about Florida being on the “cutting edge” of education and not simply doing things the way they were done 20 years ago.
The commitment to Jacksonville is part of that new way of learning.
“We know that we have cutting edge obligations in this state, and we’re excited that Jacksonville is the center of the new, the center of what we’re building going forward,” Sasse said. “We want to set the standard for both elite and practical education in America.”
One of the changes in general education that Sasse said he wants to implement is getting students out of the classroom more for better practical experience. It’s a balance that he said hasn’t been perfected.
“Nobody is doing this well, yet, in higher education,” Sasse said. “We believe we have an opportunity to pioneer that model in Jacksonville.”
Among the Jacksonville-specific ideas is having some senior specialty engineering majors spend their final year in Jacksonville getting experience with local firms in high-tech fields.
The city’s campus will also be linked to HiPerGator, UF’s supercomputer, Sasse said.
It’s all part of what Sasse and other university leaders are working on to change the traditional educational system.
“UF is going to do something big and special to disrupt the higher education model, and UF-Jacksonville is central to jumpstarting that engine,” he said.
As for the Durbin project, it actually had its initial groundbreaking in 2021 when it was planned as a collaboration between Flagler Health+ and UF Health. But there were various changes since then, most importantly UF Health’s acquisition of the St. Augustine-based health care system.
According to a release from UF Health, the new facilities on the 42.5-acre campus will start with a 395,000-square-foot hospital that is expected to be open by late 2025.
Photo courtesy of the University of Florida