Florida International University: The Airport University

When Florida International University opened its doors in September of nineteen seventy-two, it had one of the largest opening-day enrollments of any American university at the time, with five thousand six hundred sixty-seven students enrolling on the very first day. They were arriving at a campus built inside a former military airport, Tamiami Airport, where the founding president had set up his first office inside the old air traffic control tower, a building with no working phones, no drinkable water, and no furniture.

The university had been authorized by the Florida Legislature in nineteen sixty-five, responding to a simple and urgent reality: Miami, one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, had no public research university. The nearest state school was in Gainesville, three hundred miles north. The region's working adults, its immigrant communities, its veterans, had nowhere close to go. A state senator named Ernest Graham had actually been pushing for a Miami public university since nineteen forty-three. It took more than twenty years for the legislature to act.

The founding president, Charles Perry, was thirty-two years old when he took the job, making him the youngest university president in the country at the time. He assembled his team in that cramped control tower and built a university essentially from scratch on the six-hundred-acre airport campus, which had served as a military training airfield during World War Two.

The name, Florida International University, reflected the city it was built to serve. Miami was, even in nineteen seventy-two, a city with deep ties to Latin America, to Cuba in particular. The university would over time develop one of the largest enrollments of Hispanic students of any university in the United States. Today it enrolls more than fifty-five thousand students, making it one of the twenty largest universities in the country. It got there in about fifty years, starting in a control tower with no phones.