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.
Roy McTarnaghan may be best remembered as Florida Gulf Coast University’s founding president, but his role in shaping the university started much earlier than the day the doors first opened for classes in 1997.
In fact, he almost didn’t even apply to be president.
“Everybody wanted Roy to be the president,” said his wife, Beverly McTarnaghan. “And I don’t think he was unsure about doing the job. But he didn’t want to appear too eager, maybe...I don’t know what his issue was, because he made everybody very nervous and he didn’t give the permission to put his name on the list.”
As vice chancellor for academic affairs for Florida’s state university system since 1975, Roy McTarnaghan was involved in developing the concept for the tenth university since it had first come up in the late 1980s.
“Local banker Tommy Howard was insistent…because I had been involved with all the planning,” said Roy McTarnaghan. “So, the day before the search closed, I submitted my name. I thought I would probably continue to be the vice chancellor for academic affairs for the system.”
Perhaps it’s because he had already spent 18 years shaping higher education in Florida before he was appointed president in April of 1993 that he insists FGCU is actually celebrating its 26th anniversary in 2017. He thinks the official day of its inception should be May 4, 1991, when Gov. Lawton Chiles came to Fort Myers to sign its authorizing legislation.
“And since then it’s been a wonderful dream and great opportunity, the legacy that we leave for the people,” said McTarnaghan. “Great opportunity for growth and service in the region.”
Early Planning Phase
When the board of regents was initially laying the groundwork for the state’s tenth university, McTarnaghan was working as Chancellor Charlie Reed’s second in command to ensure that it would best serve Florida’s needs.
“In my role as an academic vice chancellor of the system, we had a plan that every five years we would look at the entire state of Florida, look at the enrollment growth, what the needs were, what the curricular opportunities were for the state,” he said. “In that discovery process in the 1988 period, it was known that southwest Florida had the lowest college-going rate of any section of the state in 18- to 24-year-old people.”
Based on that assessment, it was McTarnaghan’s job to put a plan in place.
“It was my role as the vice chancellor to put a team of people together and draw up a plan, which eventually was submitted to the board of regents and later approved by them and the state legislature,” he said.
It had been 25 years since the board of regents had planned for a new state university. The last one was when New College of Florida was established in 1975. During his tenure as vice chancellor, McTarnaghan had dealt more with branch campus assessments.
“A few years after I was in Tallahassee, the question was raised - why is the University of South Florida’s branch campus not growing in Fort Myers? Maybe it should close down,” he said. “I was sent here by the board of regents to look and determine what the problems were.”
What he found was that many of needs of the local students weren’t being met at the USF branch campus.
“One of the thing I discovered, which I discovered in many other parts of the state, is that the students who lived in Fort Myers, Naples, frequently had to go to Tampa to take a lot of their classes because the courses that were planned locally were not planned for the need of the students,” he said.
Instead, he found the willingness of faculty to commute determined what courses were offered – a reality that would later factor into the need for a 4-year university in the region.
“In Tampa at the University of South Florida, faculty would ask who would like to go to Fort Myers and teach next semester? And that didn’t necessarily fit a plan of attack for the students who needed a degree,” he said.
The Perfect President
By the time the search was underway for a founding president, the plan for the tenth university had already included a tumultuous site selection process.
“The board of regents did not want to purchase land. They asked for donors to come forward. And there were eventually 23 sites that were offered in Lee, Charlotte, and Collier County. And a local planning commission in this region looked at all of those sites and finally came up with five final sites, one of which is the one we have today,” said McTarnaghan. “It was when that was coming to a close that a presidential search was started by the board.”
Former News-Press reporter Betty Parker remembers the search for a president as one of the more interesting stories she covered as the beat reporter on the development of the university.
“I learned if I had known then what I know now, I would not have been as surprised,” said Parker. “I would’ve been able to more quickly figure out who they were going to pick. But they did have a national search. And they had some people very impressive people, very strong personality people, people who could be a president with no problem.”
The board’s selection of Roy McTarnaghan came with advantages that she thinks factored in more strongly than just charisma.
“McTarnaghan was the ultimate administrator for Florida universities,” said Parker. “A new university needed somebody who knew the system, who knew the rules, who knew the regs, who knew the culture. It’s not like later - you need a flamboyant person who’s going to go out and raise money.”
The site selected for the university faced immediate environmental challenges.
“They were dealing with environmental laws that they had never dealt with before,” said Parker. “And that turned out to be a bigger surprise and a bigger challenge then they expected.” You needed somebody who is very in tune with what the state needed and required and how things worked in the state of Florida. And he was the perfect person for that.”