If you’re looking for a tweed-jacketed, stodgy stereotype of a college dean, you won’t find it in Jeff Moore, dean of UCF’s College of Arts and Humanities. Moore is as comfortable behind a drum set as he is in the administrative suite. He also still teaches classes — unusual for a sitting dean — and is an author, composer, performer and, most recently, a philanthropist.

Moore and his wife have made a planned gift commitment to establish the Jeff and Mindy Moore Endowed Music Scholarship, which will provide scholarships to students studying percussion at UCF for generations to come. The Moores have generously supported other art-related UCF endeavors including the new UCF Band Practice Facility and the “UCF Celebrates the Arts” festival. 

“We all want to do good things, but as you get older you start to look at how the good things that you do will have longevity or legacy,” says Moore. “A planned gift was the logical way to ensure that the values my wife and I share — about access to higher education and having the ability to study music, percussion in particular — will carry on after we are gone.”

Moore himself received scholarships as a college student that helped make his career possible. “My family wasn’t wealthy and I was the first to go to college,” he says, “so I had to get academic scholarships. Because of them, I was able to get the kind of education I was looking for in percussion, and I wound up creating a network of friends from across the country.”

As he looks to the future of his college, Moore says he wants to see more interdisciplinary efforts incorporating arts and humanities into seemingly unrelated subjects. “Far from ‘soft skills,’ I think training in the humanities and the arts represent ‘core skills’ for being a well-rounded, happy human being,” says Moore. “Whatever your endeavor is — if you love computers, if you love engineering, if you love medicine — the humanities will help inform your perspective, allowing you to see how your activities and interactions may impact all of mankind.”