EDITOR'S NOTE: To commemorate the 20th anniversary of Florida Gulf Coast University, WGCU Public Media presents "FGCU: The Beginning." The series chronicles the key founders and events that led up to Aug. 25, 1997, when the campus first opened. As the finale for the series, a half-hour television documentary will air on Aug. 24 at 8pm. Learn more about the series here.
Growing up in south Fort Myers in the late 1960s-1970s, Keith Arnold recalls a very different scene than the one that surrounds Florida Gulf Coast University today.
“I actually grew up on Alico Road, not far from where this university is right now; it was a two-lane dirt road at the time. My family had a little farm, a 20-acre farm. We were the only farm and the only house on the road,” he recalled. “It looked a whole lot different back then. And it’s just amazing to see what this area of town looks like now.”
From his farm, he would explore the remote wilderness area.
“I would hop on my horse and ride for hours in the woods. It was a totally isolated area; we would ride for hours in the woods -- just my sister and I or my mother and father with us and take trail rides and go on day-long excursions but this was very, very remote. It was very inaccessible, and it was very wild,” said Arnold.
Coming from a long line of Floridians, the Arnolds were no strangers to living like pioneers.
“I’m a fifth generation Floridian. Most of my family has lived in southwest Florida for the last 150 years,” he said. “They settled in the Everglades believe it or not, on a little island called Chokoloskee and ended up back up in Fort Myers around the turn of the century.”
Blazing New Trails
As he grew up, Arnold excelled in school and headed off to Florida State University to become the first in five generations of his family to attend college.
From there, he went on to establish more firsts. At the age of 23, he was elected to represent Fort Myers in the Florida House of Representatives, becoming the youngest member of the legislature. By the time he was 28, he was appointed as Majority Leader of the Florida House, another first for his age.
It was shortly after that when he had his first serious discussion about bringing a state university to his hometown. It happened during a chance encounter with Fort Myers native Charlie Edwards, who had been appointed to the Board of Regents, which served as the governing body for the State University System of Florida from 1965 to 2001.
Planting The Seeds For FGCU
“I was walking down the street in downtown Fort Myers, and Charlie Edwards stopped me and wanted to talk about higher education,” Arnold remembered.
“There had been talk of building the university before. A gentleman by the name of Tommy Howard who was president and CEO of First Federal in downtown Fort Myers was always a champion of expanding our opportunities for higher education here in southwest Florida.”
From that moment on, the seed had been planted that southwest Florida needed its own state university. At the time, what was then known as Edison Community College (now Florida SouthWestern State College) offered associate degrees and a branch campus of the University of South Florida offered some classes, but many students had to travel to Tampa to actually complete a college degree.
“The Board of Regents had contracted with a consultant to study whether or not the university system ought to be expanded and if so, where,”said Arnold. “And Charlie and I were downtown on First Street, speculating what the study might suggest. And we both I think intuitively knew that it would suggest southwest Florida as the place one ought to be.We were the most geographically remote and isolated area from higher education of the state of Florida,” he said.
The study did pinpoint southwest Florida having the most need and Rep. Keith Arnold (D-Fort Myers) sponsored the bill that would result in Florida’s "Tenth University."
“I can remember very candidly the conversation I had with Bo Johnson who was getting ready to become Speaker of the House,” he recalled. “And, he said, ‘Keith, I know you are pushing hard for a new university in southwest Florida. And this is what I would like to do when I become speaker.’ He said, ‘I’d like to appoint you chairman of the higher education committee.’ And, at that point, I was in a pretty influential role as majority leader. But to go and chair the higher ed committee gave me the very specific platform in which to ultimately create a bill which would create a new university. And, that’s what we did.”
The Legislative Challenge
The process to get the bill approved took about six years.
“The biggest difficulty we had early on was fighting the east coast of Florida and specifically Broward County. If you look at where the universities, state universities are, you have Florida International University in Miami -- Miami-Dade County. And you have Florida Atlantic University in Palm Beach County. But Broward in between the two -- Fort Lauderdale did not have its own state university.
The actual location of the 'Tenth University' and the name of it were very purposefully not included in the language of the bill.
“I felt that in order to have buy-in from the southwest Florida delegation -- the representatives of those five counties -- that I should not just unilaterally decide as chairman of that committee, as the one who's writing that bill, unilaterally decide where it should go,” he said.
“In that legislation all we said was that a ‘Tenth University’ would be created. It would be created in southwest Florida in the geographic region which we generally think of as southwest Florida -- the five counties of Collier, Lee. Charlotte, Henry, and Glades. And anywhere in that area, it would be fine.”
Gov. Lawton Chiles signed that bill into law on May 4, 1991, on the steps of the Lee County Courthouse.