Nearly 50 years ago, Jerry Keuper, a rocket scientist working on America’s fledgling space program, founded what would become Florida Institute of Technology with a first donation of 37 cents and a dream. Florida Tech has grown tremendously in the intervening decades, and today is poised for greatness beyond even that of Keuper’s original vision.
As we prepare to celebrate the university’s 50th anniversary, we’ve embarked on the Golden Anniversary Campaign for Florida Tech, with the highest campaign goal in our history, $50 million. During the past two years, just under 9,000 people have donated $29.8 million to Florida Institute of Technology.
Florida Tech already has an annual economic impact on the Space Coast of almost $400 million. The success of the campaign will increase this impact in the short and long term.
In the short term, construction will boom on campus, with new residence halls, dining facilities, classroom buildings, research buildings and a new natatorium and diving well in the offing. These construction projects, with price tags reaching into the tens of millions, will be a boon to local construction and associated industries.
The completion of these projects will end a building renaissance that began with the construction of the F.W. Olin buildings a decade ago.
In 10 short years, we will have completely transformed the physical landscape of the university. Gone forever will be the sleepy, small-town campus of an earlier generation. In its place will stand a bright, modern technological university, poised to be a 21st century world leader in engineering and the sciences.
The Golden Anniversary Campaign will also have a long-term economic impact on the Space Coast. By the completion of our successful campaign, in September of 2009, we will have grown our endowment to well over $50 million. This growth, from less than $1 million a decade ago, does more than ensure the long-term prosperity of the university. It will enable us to hire the best and brightest faculty through the establishment of endowed faculty chairs.
One such example is the Harris Corporation Chair in the College of Engineering, held by Dr. Fredric Ham, a world renown leader in the field of infrasound, a technology that can monitor nuclear and seismic events anywhere in the world. As we add faculty chairs, we will attract many more top scholars in a variety of fields. In so doing, these eminent faculty members will lend distributive prestige to the entire university.
A strong endowment will also mean more scholarship money for top undergraduate students and more fellowships available for excellent graduate students. As the university continues to grow its student population, it will continue to recruit top freshmen from the Space Coast, the state of Florida and the entire United States. About a third of our student body is from the state of Florida, and this percentage increases every year.
Our goal remains very high: to make Florida Tech one of the 10 best technological universities in the world. As we are successful in doing so, Brevard County and the Space Coast will have one the world’s great technological universities as its centerpiece.
Anthony James Catanese
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