SOUTHERN HORIZONS 



station WRUF. But coax him off bounds, say to the 

 comfortable rocking chairs on the verandah of the 

 Hotel Thomas, and you discover a philosopher with a 

 rare ability to generalize the principles of both educa- 

 tion and engineering and to pin down his thinking to 

 pragmatic conclusions. 



In both fields Joe Weil and his colleagues in the En- 

 gineering Department are furnishing bold, constructive 

 leadership. Individually and collectively they serve as 

 a panel of expert consultants to Florida industries. This, 

 of course, is "old stuff/' Their ideals and methods, as 

 summed up by Weil himself, are quite in the modern 

 vein. 



"A subsidized industry," he told me, "is by definition 

 unsound. It is just as risky to transplant a Northern 

 factory as to try to grow Northern crops or flowers in 

 Florida. Some will flourish luxuriantly; others simply 

 refuse to grow. In the case of the transplanted industry, 

 the risks and the costs are such that we must be sure we 

 are right before we go ahead. 



"Florida among all the states has a truly tropical zone, 

 and we want to capitalize this unique asset. For exam- 

 ple, in the tropics the problems of water purification 

 and sewage disposal are distinctive. We have brought 

 to Florida one of the country's great sanitary engineers, 

 retired from the faculty of a Northern university, and 

 his ripe experience is helping us devise a water-sewage 

 system particularly applicable to a tropical city. Because 



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