There are four things that government tends to be uncharacteristically good at- probably even better than the private sector:
1.) The post office.
2.) The military.
3.) National Parks.
4.) STEM programs at large public state schools.
I think a lot of engineers (myself included) are starting to rethink small government libertarianism.
The situation is not quite as simple as it appears on the surface.
There is in fact a huge overlap between the CS undergraduate program and the MIS undergraduate program in the Business School. The course material covered tends to be common. CS has a few more courses which are highly theoretical and Mathematics oriented than the MIS program in the Business School. The demand among the undergraduates and the recruiters heavily favored the undergraduate MIS program.
I don't know how things are at the University of Florida, but at UIUC and most schools, CS is a highly technical engineering degree which requires 20-30 credit hours of mathematics including Calc I,II,III, calculus-based statistics, linear algebra, numerical methods, and differential equations, 10 credit hours of physics, and another 40 credit hours of specifically required CS and ECE courses. MIS requires 3-4 imperative programming courses, Calc I, and a lot of accounting and finance. If CS is taught as an engineering degree at UF, the overlap is probably only for 30 credit hours at most.
As I mentioned in a previous post a few months ago, the enrollment in undergraduate CS programs in EVERY UNIVERSITY in the USA fell about 50% between 2000 and 2008. In the case of Florida the enrollment in the CS undergraduate program was less than 30% of 2000 enrollment. With such a low undergraduate enrollment, they probably could not sustain the fully funded graduate programs and research. This is probably the reason why they chose to eliminate the CS program.
A lot of that had to do with the dot-com crash. At the very least, do what MIT does and roll CS in with Comp. E, but don't eliminate the program.
Engineering and the technical sciences are the forte of large public research institutions. Yes, enrollment nationally in computer science is down, but it is still a top ten major as of last year.